9/11/11

Where were you when that first solar 1 was a 0? (Appropriate, given how rigidly binary have become our ideologies since).

I was on the verge of my freshman year of college, rolling over in bed, sure that Mom was yet again concocting wild stories to wake me up before 10.

Post that bench-mark, my peers began to consume the news far more voraciously, as one should hope they would. I, however, who had trained so dutifully as a responsible-citizen-in-training growing up, cutting my teeth on news-columns, Newsweeks, and CNN (I may in fact remember the Clinton administration better than Bush 2.0), actually receded in my news consumption.

Not that I retreated, mind you--far from it; in fact, I dare say my interest in current-event-commentary decreased precisely because my total view increased. I almost say it became eschatological, a ten-dollar word signifying the study of how it all ends.

For it is one thing, you see, to read of Joseph Smith describing "destruction writ large on everything we behold," but quite another to actually see it collapse before your very eyes, and that on nationally-broadcast TV. One begins to realize that such is not an aberration--that even among the best of circumstances (a phantom if there ever was one), we should be beholding all we hold as most immutable and eternal crumbling before our very eyes. 9/11 was but the most obvious display of what we should be noticing all around.

Becoming increasingly eschatological, I took up the moniker of the Latter-day Saints, and served as a Mormon missionary in Puerto Rico barely a year later. One swiftly became aware of how much more correct, how much more real, is this broader view than whatever passes for news-coverage, when the older missionaries became perplexed and confused at the announcement of the invasion of Iraq--"I thought we were hunting Osama bin Laden," they expressed cogently--while those brand-new (at least the American ones) confirmed their love of America and hatred of France.

So I missed the whole of the Democratic primaries, the euphemistic Patriot Act, and the "Mission Accomplished" PR debacle whilst on that eschatological mind-set, and good thing I did, for I beheld far more clearly the "destruction writ large"--for though we watched no news, the newspaper-stands declared quite loudly to all passers-by the number of killed Puerto Rican soldiers of each passing week. The disgraceful Abu Ghraib torture photos, buried in State-side publications, were not similarly hidden in Latin-America.

It wasn't just sound physical structures we beheld collapsing.