I tried typing this up on Tuesday, but Zero crashed and burned one paragraph into the entry. I’ve been meaning to type this up for almost a month now, but because it seems a bit too much like real work I’ve been putting it off.
It’s Saturday morning, 7th of September 2002 and since the cable’s out and the house is still half-asleep it’s a good time to get some of my pent-up feelings and opinions about The Anniversary out of my system. The programs and pundits and papers have been ramping up over the last couple of weeks. In a few short days we won’t be able to see or hear anything but 9-11 Anniversary programming.
As an aside, I’d like to point out that Entercom’s official stance on 9-11 is that it will be mentioned respectfully when necessary but it will not be dwelled upon and most stations will be programmed much like on any other day. Paying respect is one thing, dwelling on the past is maudlin and depressing, especially for non-talk-formatted radio stations. For some reason that makes me feel a lot better about the company I work for. Your opinion may differ, but that’s okay, because you’re not me.
Early on the morning of 11 September 2001, something awful happened. You know all about it. You can’t help it. On the morning of 11 September 2001, something else awful happened. Unless your last name is Kerezman, you probably don’t know about it.
Picture me in my office. (Some of you have seen the webcam, so it’s not much of a mental exercise for you.) I have the news up on the TV inside Zero while I surf various news websites. I’m watching large buildings billow smoke. And the phone rings. My father is on the phone. He sounds terrible, and I assume at first it’s because of the events on the screen. My father was a die-hard New Yorker for most of his adult life, so that day couldn’t have been easy on him no matter what else happened. Sadly, he has called to tell me that his mother, my dear grandma Hjordis, passed away that same morning. Granted that she had been gravely ill for some time, and in fact was pretty much comatose during her last days, but I’m still devastated.
September 11th went from being a source of horrified fascination not unlike the world’s biggest car pile-up to being a painfully personal day of tragedy.
I got through the day as many other people who don’t live in New York got through the day… dazed and hurt and questioning life, the universe and everything.
Then the fun began. Some thoughtless numbskull in our company thought it would be a great idea to send out a Powerpoint slide show to every email address in the company. (It’s easy. There’s a one-stop distribution address. No muss, no fuss, no accountability except to the people who respond to the mass-mailing with unpleasantness.) This lovely 800-kilobyte document was disturbing in a couple of ways. As a systems administrator, I take very poorly to some damned idiot clogging my email server to the tune of 160 megabytes. As a person who has just learned of the death of an adored close relative, what I do NOT need to see is slides of people leaping to their death from very tall buildings. More than just a few slides, mind you, were devoted to showing desperate and terrified people taking that last long step out of a burning building. I cannot imagine the kind of tasteless mind that would consider this suitable to distribute to every soul in a nationwide company.
In my role as email-server administrator, I replied to the person in question… and to the aforementioned distribution list. My statement was, pretty much, “It is highly inappropriate for file attachments to be distributed to the all-Entercom mailing address.” I blame my emotional turmoil for the fact that some of my phrasing was not as politic as it could have been.
Oh boy, did the fur start flying! I learned several painful things that day. One is that “Reply To All”, for many people, is a perfectly natural email tactic. I suspect it has something to do with being given an excuse to show the company “how damned clever I am.” Another is that I really, really need to learn to go through proper channels when something like this happens. Consider that lesson learned the hard way. Most disturbingly, I learned that some people really get off on watching scenes of people dying. I was accused of being an insensitive prick for objecting to the mailing of this disgusting waste of resources. I was accused of all sorts of other random human failings as well. In many cases, Reply To All was employed, so everybody in the company knew exactly how many people felt about me. I was forced to post another company-wide email restating my position but in a far more appeasing and moderate tone, and apologizing for the mess. At that point I felt it was appropriate to mention that there was another reason I objected to the mailing of the Powerpoint file, that being the death of my grandmother. Note that my original message said nothing about the CONTENT of the slideshow! I hadn’t even WATCHED the thing when I sent my original “please don’t do this” message.
That, of course, sparked off dozens more messages, Replied To All naturally. More of these were good than bad, but I still managed to singlehandedly clog the Inbox of every Entercom employee that day. And thanks to my personal website being in the “signature” of my emails, everyone in the company knew that I had a personal site hosted at a company domain. Whoops. This personal site contained an account of the events I’ve just related to you, which means I was badmouthing some of my coworkers. Extra whoops. And so Zero was shut down.
Okay. I really didn’t mean to rehash that entire episode at such length. I think I feel better having done so, though. It’s a painful catharsis or some-such gibberish. The only other personal event of note during that horrible week was the receipt of an anonymously-sent (I have hated Hotmail ever since then) message of considerable vitriol, clearly sent by someone I worked with in the Portland office. To this day I don’t know who it was or if I still have the displeasure of working with them. I still have the journal database from Zero, where the letter was reprinted. I may put it into THIS journal some day, for some absurd notion of posterity. Or maybe not. That email was the last straw for the events started on September 11. I was in tears when I left the building the day I read it.
I keep telling myself and my children that it’s all about perspective. This is just my story. There are hundreds of thousands of other stories out there, many of far worse experiences than what I endured. Okay, so there was a death in the family and a lot of bad ju-ju at the office. It hurt then, and it still aches now when I think about it, but in the Grand Scheme of Things ™ it doesn’t affect the world in any meaningful way. I have to remind myself of that every so often, you know.
So. Now that I’ve burned through all of this stuff about me, what about the world we live in? We’ve been told for a year now that America was “changed forever” by 9-11. Would it be heresy to suggest that it has not? I knew we were in trouble the instant our government urged us to get back to “business as usual.” Ah yes, business as usual. That’s a euphemism for “exploiting every single aspect of any given event to make the rich richer and the powerful even more so.” Here, little sheep. Wave a flag, it’ll make you feel better. If you do it long enough you won’t notice the fact that we’re not only manipulating you, but that we really don’t care about what happened that day except as a means to a number of ends.
Now we have airport insecurity and the memory of anthrax, dirty bombs scares, warmongering, ethnic backlash and above all we have metric buttloads of useless rhetoric. Business as usual means people (and I use the term advisedly) like Ann Coulter hawk their books on television and George W. Bush takes a vacation every month. Yes, that’s the kind of leadership I want in a Time of National Crisis ™. Don’t work too hard chasing down Osama, Gee-Dubyah.
As another aside, you’ll kindly note that I don’t get into political discourse on this website very often. The reason for it can be summed up something like this: I don’t trust any of them, not the right wing and not the left, and not half of what I see on the nightly news. Powerful people do things for their own reasons and only care about the needs of the little people in the abstract, if at all. To hell with all of them.
You may have noticed that I have strong opinions. Would you be surprised to learn that I believe in having strong opinions, even in this “changed forever” world? I don’t believe in attacking other people on account of their beliefs, but I believe in agreeing to disagree. I hate herd mentalities. I’m not exactly a textbook iconoclast, but I do choose my own peer groups and followings. I don’t take anybody’s word as gospel. Anybody whose words are taken as gospel I immediately question. I don’t believe anything I can’t wrap my brain around or that I haven’t experienced in person, and sometimes not even then.
Belief is not necessary. There’s no rule or law that says You Must Believe In Something. I choose to believe in nothing at all.
Well, I do believe I’ll have some more of that ice cream. I also believe I won’t be watching one minute of the self-obsessed syrupy trite overdone 9-11 anniversary television programming. We’re back to business as usual: corporate malfeasance and FUD and political maneuvering and media circuses and the herding of flocks of human sheep. Honor the dead, but don’t cheapen their memory by presenting this mass-market televised eulogy sponsored by Corporate America. Don’t pretend that the deceased matter to the people who control the world.