simplerich

It was 2008 that I wrote a post entitled Mourning Has To End At Some Point regarding the attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001. I think it still stands up 3 years later.

That title brings the imagery of a funeral to the date that has come to be one thing only, the day we were attacked.

My Facebook stream is filled with posts that end with, “We Will Never Forget.” A week a year we remember it publicly, putting ashes in our hair and memorializing the things that happened today 10 years ago. This post isn’t about today. There is an awful lot of stuff out there about today. We all mourn, memorialize, and remember in our own way. I get that and I don’t make any judgement on any of that. The attacks we as a country suffered were something that everybody experienced in their own way.

But.

The weeks after the attacks the country was shocked, stunned, and came together in a catharsis of grief, shock, and anger expressed as a brief period of ultra-patriotism, pride, and outrage.

After the funereal meats were put away, the dishes cleared, and the flowers wilted we, as a country, not specifically you and me, but all of us, began to do what so often happens after a funeral. The death here was the death of a period of growth, optimism, wide-eyed innocence about our own invulnerability… after the immediacy of the funeral was over we split up… we fractured like a family after a funeral of a wealthy patriarch who had no will.

People on the left and right of the political spectrum took the eagle as their totem and began to beat everybody else with how they were the real Americans, the real inheritors of the standard erected by those three emergency responders on ground zero in what is now an iconic image of that day. I choose that image as the image for the post, not the image of the towers burning as DrudgeReport.com did. The optimism of those men raising our flag, all of our flag, on that day, in the clouds of dust and smoke… that image is one of hope, of fighting on, of us saying “NO!” to everything the terrorists were trying to say. That’s the image I hold in my mind 10 years later.

Sadly, the eagles, the American Eagle that each side claims as their own has turned into a vulture picking on the bones of who we were before.  They no longer think of us collectively, but in an US vs THEM way that is akin to one side of a family insisting on the dining room set because Uncle Sam promised it to them, or so they say while the other side insists they’d been told the same thing. The family that is our country is tearing itself apart in a way the terrorists couldn’t by tearing down buildings and killing people. The family that is our country is allowing those who represent us, to scrabble for the scraps of the legacy of the world before we were attacked at the expense of the other side of the aisle. There can be no victory, we are told, unless the other side loses. There can be no progress in any direction if the direction isn’t to the left or to the right, depending on who is doing the talking.

Enough of the sides. If we don’t exist as a family, together, even when we disagree with each other, we don’t exist, period. Benjamin Franklin said it years ago when he said, “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” We’re facing that choice today as a country. As we tear apart our country ourselves, 10 years after the terrorists tried to do it TO us we have to make up our minds to exist as a country, and sometimes we will have to not win at the expense of everyone else on the playing field. There are times, in a family when we have to let someone else have the dining room set because the family is worth more than the dining room self is to us.

So, today, 10 years later, I’d like to remind people not that the buildings fell, but that the other iconic image of that was of our flag being raised… of 3 men saying the buildings fell but we’re still here, one nation, one country, one huge group of people with disparate ideas but one flag and one hope, that tomorrow is better than today, and we’re willing to do what we can to make it that way… even if it means, sometimes, letting someone else having the dining room set.

I went to High School in Germany because my parents were teachers for DoDDS and us kids got to go with so we were uprooted from Southern Alabama and flew to West Germany to go to school in schools on the Army bases there. This week the school I went to High School in closed for good as the base is closed. I didn’t think it would matter. It was just a place right? I hadn’t been back since I left in ’86. Mannheim American High School (GO BISON!) closed for good this past week.

It does mean a lot to me though. I guess I’d just always thought it would be there. It’s a time of my life that’s so different from how it would have been. It was a transformative time, not in just the way High School is transformative but like I said, I’d gone from small town, Southern Alabama to West Germany. We travelled. I saw the Berlin wall when it was still there. We drove through East Germany. Our senior trip was a week an Spain, they would serve us alcohol lol. I hadn’t thought about a lot of High School for years. I don’t know why. I just sort of moved on. When I would think of it I would remember it fondly.  When I spoke of it I always smiled.

Then came Facebook and say what you like about the dreadful privacy issues with Facebook it’s allowed me to reconnect with people from High School and see what they’re up to. We were all in Germany, and now we’re all over the US and the World. It’s hard to just bump into a fellow Bison at the grocery store or in the mall. We’re too far-flung. But now I’ve seen what cool people so many of them are. Some that I barely knew then I know better now. We’ve turned out pretty good I think. When I listen to people talk about their High School experiences with metal detectors, or guns, or violence I remember that MAHS wasn’t like that when we were there. There were some bomb threats, but I don’t think they were real. I think they were people trying to get out of tests… and at least one where someone bumped the alarm with his elbow outside of Herr Valerius’ class… that was a fire alarm, not a bomb threat, but fights? Violence? Any of that? Not really. There were cliques, but they weren’t hard or firm… maybe? I don’t know. There were some, sure. It was high school after all. But nobody was ever really an ass about it. Overall, it was the perfect high school full of perfect kids who were all perfect all the time. *grin* Nope, not romanticizing it at all.

For graduation, my sister, whom I’ve talked about before, got me a scrapbook. At the time I thought it was kind of cool. It was a leather-bound picture album and she’d taken pictures of LOTS of people I knew in high school, and had them write something in it. This was in the 80s… she’d had to use film and get the pictures developed, put in the book, and brought to school over and over again without me noticing. We rode the same bus. We lived in the same house. She was mixing with SENIORS when she was a Sophomore. I said there were no cliques, and there weren’t but STILL! Some things aren’t done! She did them.

It’s only now, when I look back at the scrapbook, and it’s the only thing I got from graduation except for my tassel, that I still have, when I look back at the scrapbook I’m struck by how amazing a gift that was. Not just how thoughtful it was… but to approach complete strangers and ask them to do that. That’s pretty brave and pretty cool.  Not just to get their pictures, but then to approach them later and show them the picture, many of which were taken “on the sly” and say, “Hey… could you write something here to Rich it’s for a Graduation gift?” I suspect there was help. I suspect it passed from hand to hand and classmates talked to each other… but I don’t know that.

Now that my High School is closed I’ve got my tassel. I’ve got my yearbooks. I’ve got the greatest graduation gift ever from my sister, and I’ve got my High School friends I’ve reconnected with through Facebook. So, to my High School, closed now, you’ll be missed.

I’m not dead. I’m just meh.

I can’t put my finger on when it started but it’s been a while now, and it appears to be chronic and not acute. 

I need to shake off the malaise and get some sort of direction. I’m tired and not sleeping well and feel like I’m failing in too many areas/ways. 

I’ve got to-do lists that have had the same items on them forever and the GTD guy, can’t remember his name, is right… as long as those items are hanging over my head they’re creating low-level stress and a constant feeling of failure. That’s been chronic for a while now too.

Work’s going OK. I’ve got a good crew and while my numbers aren’t where I’d love them to be they’re not terrible either. Personally things are as good as they’re going to be, not as good as they’ve ever been, but they are where they are for now.

I need to realign my actions with my goals. I need to get some successes under my belt. I need to quit feeling like a failure and like I’m just marking time until I die and get busy with getting busy. When asked “What did you do Tuesday?” It would be nice if I had an answer.

I suspect it’s a depression of a sort. I don’t need medicine for it. It’s chronic, but it’s not terminal. 

If someone were telling all this to me my response would be to get off your ass and do something, one thing that you can do to change things. Not a huge thing, but something small, some small victory that you can build on. Do one positive thing, even if it’s not the big thing hanging over your head on the to do list of shame. Hell, throw away the thing and start over. Don’t just throw it away and re-build it either. Throw it away and start over, from a fresh start and intentionally don’t put anything on the new one that was on the old one unless it’s required by law. Instead of running, go walking again. Take one step, just one today, in the right direction.

Today I think I’ll go for a walk. It’s not running, but it’s easier to do, doesn’t require me to change clothes, and may be a start at getting me out of my rut. Who was it that said “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions?” I don’t know either. But today I’m going for a walk. It’s a start.

I drove to Eastern Iowa today and just past Webster City I set the cruise control. It slipped up to 72 and it was a little frosty out for that so I touched the brakes to turn off the cruise… 

Want to know what happens next? It involves me on the side of the road! Stop by my newly re-launched (re-imagined?) personal blog over on simplerich.blogspot.com and check it out. Leave a comment. Follow the blog over there too if you’re interested.

I’ll be using simplerich.blogspot.com for my personal stuff and try not to dilute this one too much. Part of that is an attempt to use the blogger platform more as a way of seeing if I’ll wind up moving this one to that platform (same URL as this one. Don’t sweat it. I think it’s workable, and I won’t do it if it’d kill all my links.)

Anyway. 

Go check out the hair-raising story and stay-tuned for me!