To: Joan x x x x x x <jxxxx@juno.com>

Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 04:10:05 -0500

Subject: RE:hello

From: burgwinkle@msn.com

Hi Joan,

Hell has come to America.  It really was only a matter of time -- it has been brewing for decades.  It may be disingenuous to frame the World Trade Center tragedy as anything but what it is; a shaking, screaming, ripping agony of epic human suffering.  Nonetheless, it represents the beginning of a painful process during which monumental social, religious and philosophical stresses will resolve themselves with often explosive and deadly force.  When it is over, I hope the seething anger and the livid hatred will be thoroughly spent. 

I hope you are well, and not too depressed by it all.  Everyone I know has been crying and distraught, myself especially.  But I feel more aware now of the world, as though awakened and released from an unrealistic innocence.  So much so that I bought stock for the first time in my life today. 

Yup.  I can't pay my phone bill, I can't pay any of my credit card bills (except one), but I'm buying stock.  You see, I'm not going to be marching in any desert sand in this lifetime, nor working for the military in any other capacity; I will not ever be a fire fighter again, nor an EMT; and admitting people to a detox...  well, it just doesn't give the same sense of power and potency that I might have if I were helping to lift a slab of cement off of a survivor.  And the image of an economic collapse springs to mind far too easily since watching those towers fall.  The economic collapse of the United States is probably no more likely than the end of the world -- but to be honest, even that seems possible lately. 

So I bought fifty bucks worth of PriceLine.com.  It was one of the biggest losers on Wall Street today, with one of the highest volumes of shares traded.  It costs 50% less today than it did before the attack, and with airline ticket prices certain to increase dramatically, 'bargain brokers' like PriceLine will see tons of business -- if they stay in business. 

And all of this has made me realize that paying off my credit is as much if not more of a contribution to this economy than is the purchase of stock on a day when everybody seems to be selling. 

These terrorists seem to have awakened the survivor in me.  I used to pay the minimum due on high interest rate credit cards with balances maxxed -- and often over-maxxed -- even though I knew I was treating myself like dirt, throwing value away, and wasting money I needed to buy food for myself.  (I fled from everything that could be considered competent self-caring..  I used to ignore the poor innocent plant that was given to me by my friends at the hospital with their condolences when my mother died in 1998.  (At times I hated my mother almost as much as I hated myself..  And I was getting increasingly hopeless about life, accepting social and emotional isolation as an acceptable method for coping with that hopelessness.  (I told myself I did not deserve for my life to be any different.)

...until I turned 43, on September 11, 2001.  I have never grown up so much, in so few days, under the weight of so many tragedies.  It is no longer acceptable for me to isolate when New Yorkers weep openly in the streets, sharing their many griefs with other New Yorkers they have never before met.  It is no longer acceptable to devalue myself by misusing one of the symbols of my value, money.  And it is no longer acceptable -- been practicing plant care for a couple weeks now -- to shun the responsibility of caring for the dead-mother plant, which is utterly dependant on me for everything. 

Maybe none of this makes sense, but one of the things I learned this week is that the World Trade Center towers, (and other places occupying the rarefied air space above lower Manhattan) -- places where I thought only the vaunted powerful and rich dwelled and worked -- were in reality filled with people just like you and me.  They were men and women, some terribly young, who got up early to fight traffic or subway crowds.  They took the time each day to dress sharply and to present themselves enthusiastically to the often mundane and tedious tasks of administering the financial capital of the world.  And they each did these things day-in and day-out in a 110 storey building with the precious hope of improving the little Jersey Shore futures of their little two-storey lives.  They were optimistic.  They wanted to make some progress in this world, which must have seemed to them, before they died, to be a world brimming with hope and endless opportunity; for them the world was not so little as it is for us today -- today we measure distance in minutes by missile. 

And that is the other reason I bought stock today.  The world is -- indeed, because of the missiles it must be -- a world still brimming with hope and endless opportunity; that's the way the world was before the attack, the only difference now is that we can't see quite as far as those who were above the 89th floor.  We built our way of life upon the courage of millions of people who were willing to come to this country and start from scratch.  How dare I lose hope for the condition of the world today when, only a few miles from the tragedy of the twin towers is the place where hundreds of thousands arrived in this country and began new lives in which they overcame far greater obstacles than I face today -- and they did it with far less fanfare, and far more cheer. 

I will never forget the image of a man leaping to his death, who appeared tiny, almost negligible, against the massive backdrop of the burning North Tower. 

And so, I will keep their optimism and their hopeful, far-ranging view.  I will keep alive some fragment of their humanity by cultivating my own humanness and breaking down my own walls of isolation as best I can.  I will keep their tenacity and enthusiasm; they have become mythic.  And I will pay my annoying, overdue bills, even as I keep on investing (in my tiny way) in the stock market. 

Most of all, I will try to remember; it is not the one causing the most damage who wins, the winner is the one who causes the most healing. 

luv

joe