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A year ago today America changed, for the better and for worse. It's a day
that I know I won't be forgetting anytime soon, and that continues to affect us
with laws and wars today. As I noted on this date last year I found out about it
around 9:50 AM after checking Slashdot and seeing the headline "World
Trade Towers and Pentagon Attacked". CNN.com was my next stop, but it was down
because of the huge spike of net traffic, so I turned on the TV to see both
towers on fire. It's still shocking to see. A site full of 9/11 newspaper
headlines from across the world is an interesting way to see the world's
response.
And speaking of responses, many people reacted differently. Some people can't
joke about 9/11 at all, in any form. So for those people, don't read on. For
everyone else, I personally find humor to be a great way to deal with a
difficult subject. As I've said before, I want jokes told at my funeral. And so
with this in mind, I think the best coverage of September 11th goes to The
Onion for their series of articles that they published 2 weeks after the
tradegy. In usual Onion fashion, they lampooned everything, from religion to
Bush's war to how America responded. It was some of their best work ever. And in
a related story, Salon did a piece about the "dark side" of 9/11 responses, the
things that people keep deep inside the recesses of their brains, because it's
not socially acceptable to actually say what you're thinking. Or stuff that you
may find funny, but that you would get roasted, toasted, and burned to a crisp
saying publicly. But as the article points out, everything you hear about 9/11
is the sugar coated stuff. So in an effort to bring some reality and balance
back into the memories of 9/11, they asked
some people about what they were really thinking on that tragic day a year
ago. Some of the results are suprsing, but I can relate somewhat. From being
happy that the twin towers are no longer an eyesore (to a particular person), to
hoping that their credit card company lost their records in the rubble so that
they wouldnt' have to pay their bills, people had some very dark ideas. They
also asked readers to write in and
share their "forbidden thoughts" that they felt on 9/11, and which go from
extremelly politically incorrect jokes, to charges of racism, to hoping that
maybe the events would get even bigger, that the perverbial "other shoe" would
drop, and America really would never be the same again. It's a facinating read
into the human psyche.
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