Ten years after the second Tuesday in September
Well, that's embarrassing - tomorrow is 9/11 in American terms. I guess I am just so unused to thinking in American dates that I looked at the date on 750 words this morning and thought oh, yesterday was That Day... oh well. What follows is still real, it's just a day early instead of a day late.
--
Hello. On 750 words, it's still 9/11. Or, in the more civilised parts of the world, 9th September. Ten years ago, I woke up on a Wednesday morning and thought about what had happened yesterday and the ghastly implications for the world, and knew I couldn't go into work. I called in sick. I went out to buy papers and looked at the flashy horror movie pics on the front pages and I couldn't go into work. I couldn't write. Fiction, I mean. For months afterward, I was lost in a worried whirl of depression and fear, seeing bad futures ahead of us everywhere.
The worst part was: I was right.
Within a month, missiles were falling on Kabul. On Yahoogroups, where fandom was at the time, American fans I'd known for years were relishing this in a bloodthirsty, vengeance-is-ours, stupidity which was, if I'd had the detachment to think about it at the time, own twin to my own sad and stupified misery. (I went back to work. I was still depressed. Reading the news did not help.)
Ten years later: Osama bin Laden has been assassinated by a team of American military hitmen, which is what I initially figured would probably happen to him once I knew the US wasn't serious about wanting him on trial. The illegal prison camp at Guantanamo Bay still exists. The US and the UK are still at war in Afghanistan, with uncounted dead every day: at least a million people are dead in Iraq: millions of refugees have fled their homes: MI6 took part in joint operations with CIA to kidnap and torture British citizens: the US made torture legal, repealed the right of habeas corpus, put extrajudicial prisoners on show trial using evidence gained by torture, approved the right of warrantless wiretapping on its own citizens, and elected two Presidents in a row who saw nothing particularly wrong with any of that: the UK passed a law making it legal to hand over prisoners to the US on nothing more but evidence of identity: outraged British citizens reacted to UK complicity with torture and extrajudicial imprisonment by blowing themselves up in the London Underground and killing dozens of people: and in response to a flowering of democratic rebellion against the tyrants supported by the Western powers against their own people, the US and UK attacked Libya, so there's now a brand new war in the Middle East for people to die in under Western missiles.
It's been a bad ten years.
In the course of those ten years the Internet bloomed and I found out more about US internal politics than I'd ever thought I would. I went on broadband. I joined livejournal. (Also greatestjournal, insanejournal, and journalfen.) I left yahoogroups. I found new fandoms M*A*S*H and House MD, and learned to write drabbles for M*A*S*H on an lj community devoted to nothing but. I wrote mad stories that were published on my journal as WiP without even being sure when they would be finished. I joined Twitter. Couchsurfing. Redbubble, after I was given a digital camera. I threw a huge party for my 40th and may throw an even bigger one for my 50th. I'm on so many social/information gathering sites that when I was asked to list them in a recent group I found I was having to think which I would mention. After 9th September and for years afterward I had a nervous twitch of checking the news every so often - sometimes several times an hour - in case new bad stuff had happened - that wore off, but I am thoroughly hooked on knowing stuff as soon as possible, and in as much detail as possible - I wrote a report to my boss on Huge LGBT Organisation's Leader stupidly proclaiming himself against same-sex marriage at the LibDem conference, barely hours after it had happened. Couldn't have happened if not for Twitter, but also couldn't have happened except that I was watching Twitter that night. I made friends online. I've been to two Worldcons.
Three of my cats died.
I met K. We've been together for just over a year. We found each other on the Internet. I would never have met her otherwise, and given how shy we both are in new social situations, even if we had met I would probably not have got to know her. In ten years time I want to still be with her, to have got our living-together situation sorted out, for my post twenty years after 9/11 to be written with K at my elbow, whether she's asleep, playing World of Warcraft, or watching me with that lovely appreciative glint in her eye and waiting for me to say "Okay, done writing now..."
--
Hello. On 750 words, it's still 9/11. Or, in the more civilised parts of the world, 9th September. Ten years ago, I woke up on a Wednesday morning and thought about what had happened yesterday and the ghastly implications for the world, and knew I couldn't go into work. I called in sick. I went out to buy papers and looked at the flashy horror movie pics on the front pages and I couldn't go into work. I couldn't write. Fiction, I mean. For months afterward, I was lost in a worried whirl of depression and fear, seeing bad futures ahead of us everywhere.
The worst part was: I was right.
Within a month, missiles were falling on Kabul. On Yahoogroups, where fandom was at the time, American fans I'd known for years were relishing this in a bloodthirsty, vengeance-is-ours, stupidity which was, if I'd had the detachment to think about it at the time, own twin to my own sad and stupified misery. (I went back to work. I was still depressed. Reading the news did not help.)
Ten years later: Osama bin Laden has been assassinated by a team of American military hitmen, which is what I initially figured would probably happen to him once I knew the US wasn't serious about wanting him on trial. The illegal prison camp at Guantanamo Bay still exists. The US and the UK are still at war in Afghanistan, with uncounted dead every day: at least a million people are dead in Iraq: millions of refugees have fled their homes: MI6 took part in joint operations with CIA to kidnap and torture British citizens: the US made torture legal, repealed the right of habeas corpus, put extrajudicial prisoners on show trial using evidence gained by torture, approved the right of warrantless wiretapping on its own citizens, and elected two Presidents in a row who saw nothing particularly wrong with any of that: the UK passed a law making it legal to hand over prisoners to the US on nothing more but evidence of identity: outraged British citizens reacted to UK complicity with torture and extrajudicial imprisonment by blowing themselves up in the London Underground and killing dozens of people: and in response to a flowering of democratic rebellion against the tyrants supported by the Western powers against their own people, the US and UK attacked Libya, so there's now a brand new war in the Middle East for people to die in under Western missiles.
It's been a bad ten years.
In the course of those ten years the Internet bloomed and I found out more about US internal politics than I'd ever thought I would. I went on broadband. I joined livejournal. (Also greatestjournal, insanejournal, and journalfen.) I left yahoogroups. I found new fandoms M*A*S*H and House MD, and learned to write drabbles for M*A*S*H on an lj community devoted to nothing but. I wrote mad stories that were published on my journal as WiP without even being sure when they would be finished. I joined Twitter. Couchsurfing. Redbubble, after I was given a digital camera. I threw a huge party for my 40th and may throw an even bigger one for my 50th. I'm on so many social/information gathering sites that when I was asked to list them in a recent group I found I was having to think which I would mention. After 9th September and for years afterward I had a nervous twitch of checking the news every so often - sometimes several times an hour - in case new bad stuff had happened - that wore off, but I am thoroughly hooked on knowing stuff as soon as possible, and in as much detail as possible - I wrote a report to my boss on Huge LGBT Organisation's Leader stupidly proclaiming himself against same-sex marriage at the LibDem conference, barely hours after it had happened. Couldn't have happened if not for Twitter, but also couldn't have happened except that I was watching Twitter that night. I made friends online. I've been to two Worldcons.
Three of my cats died.
I met K. We've been together for just over a year. We found each other on the Internet. I would never have met her otherwise, and given how shy we both are in new social situations, even if we had met I would probably not have got to know her. In ten years time I want to still be with her, to have got our living-together situation sorted out, for my post twenty years after 9/11 to be written with K at my elbow, whether she's asleep, playing World of Warcraft, or watching me with that lovely appreciative glint in her eye and waiting for me to say "Okay, done writing now..."















