Power
: I just watched most of Seven Days in September on A&E, the film about filmmakers who captured the days after 9.11.
I’m overtaken by a surprising feeling of powerlessness.
We see New Yorkers jamming the streets to give things: food, flashlights, batteries, anything. God bless them, they had to do something and this was something they could do. But there was, tragically, so little use for so much of that stuff (I do wonder what happened to it all).
We see New Yorkers in a park getting into an argument en masse over politics: a preview of the maddening fights to follow with a couple of imported twits taking the Euroweenie party line. It ends in hugs. I wish it hadn’t.
We see children unable to understand what just happened. But then, none of us could.
And we see the scenes we haven’t seen in awhile now: the building’s skeleton sticking up out of the ground like a steel ghost and the dust.
The dust is gone but the emotions aren’t.
I think we make progress but then I see this and wonder, especially hearing that stupid argument in the park iwth the same lines we hear these days on Iraq.
Of course, we’re not powerless. Just sometimes, it feels that way.
