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In the days after September 11th, after you got past the whole thing with the smell and the smoke, if you lived here the first thing you noticed was the sound. And it wasn't just the lack of it from grounded planes and banned cars, but the new sounds too. I wrote about wailing down on the street outside my window (I lived near the family center). I didn't write about the fighter jets.
If you don't live in a city or near a base, you might not know the roar of them or the way they come on like a yawn. The Doppler effect and also speed; they're already going by the time you've registered that they're coming on. They're loud as hell too. I sleep like the dead, and they always woke me. It was every 45 minutes through that first night.
You got used to it though, like anything. For a few days people cringed or cheered when they heard them, and then no one really cared anymore. When the passenger jets started flying again a couple of friends called me up, freaked out, wondering why they were going right up the city. They'd changed the approach to LaGuardia as far as I could tell, and also, we had grown used to not seeing planes.
I saw planes this morning. Quite a few really. Something on an approach to LaGuardia. Something I'm pretty sure was just leaving Newark. I like it when you can see more than one in the sky at a time. That's why I started taking flying lessons back when, actually. I'd been on a flight to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention for the Associated Press and looking out the window I saw another plane go by a few thousand feet below us.
The sky, suddenly, was real, and flying wasn't like getting on a bus in one city, feeling some meaningless buzz and hum for a few hours and getting off it in another. It mattered and was all the marvels of the world and not just the breathlessness of when you're pushed back in your seat as the plane takes off.
Watching the Republican National Convention last night, I had a lot of things to be annoyed by, and I'll write about more than a few of them later from the scolding oratory to the frightening jingoism and from the exploitation of my city to the hijacking of 'family' to mean theirs not yours.
But mostly what I thought of were the planes.
When I see the planes, I thank god we ever took to the skies. And I thank god we only ever stopped for two days, and then not even really, just the cattle cars to Europe and across our continent. When I see the planes go, I'm all full of hope. Always have been, always will be.
And when the folks at that convention see them? All they do is get scared.
And that's the divide; that's the rancor. It's reproductive rights and taxes, a woman's worth, healthcare, your pension. It's what they teach in your schools and what you've got to do to keep your job.
I just want to ask, Didn't anyone ever hold your hand when the plane took off? Didn't they ever drive down to the airport with their grandfather and watch the planes go up in the heat and the dust of a place they didn't even like? Didn't they want to be astronauts?
The answer is yeah. They probably did. And one day, like all of us do at one time or another, they got told No. And like us, like me, like you, they got angry. But you can either use anger to fight through, fight past, fight on, or you can just use it to smash some shit up and say no one can be happy, no one can have hope, no one can be any different from you.
So when McCain got up there and did his call to arms last night? Made this election a battle? Used every oratorical trick and metaphor my vicious little heart is pretty much designed to respond to? I was so sad.
War's ugly of course. But it doesn't have to be in service of ugly ideals.
Or fear.
Or not understanding that the planes are there to give you hope.
If you don't live in a city or near a base, you might not know the roar of them or the way they come on like a yawn. The Doppler effect and also speed; they're already going by the time you've registered that they're coming on. They're loud as hell too. I sleep like the dead, and they always woke me. It was every 45 minutes through that first night.
You got used to it though, like anything. For a few days people cringed or cheered when they heard them, and then no one really cared anymore. When the passenger jets started flying again a couple of friends called me up, freaked out, wondering why they were going right up the city. They'd changed the approach to LaGuardia as far as I could tell, and also, we had grown used to not seeing planes.
I saw planes this morning. Quite a few really. Something on an approach to LaGuardia. Something I'm pretty sure was just leaving Newark. I like it when you can see more than one in the sky at a time. That's why I started taking flying lessons back when, actually. I'd been on a flight to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention for the Associated Press and looking out the window I saw another plane go by a few thousand feet below us.
The sky, suddenly, was real, and flying wasn't like getting on a bus in one city, feeling some meaningless buzz and hum for a few hours and getting off it in another. It mattered and was all the marvels of the world and not just the breathlessness of when you're pushed back in your seat as the plane takes off.
Watching the Republican National Convention last night, I had a lot of things to be annoyed by, and I'll write about more than a few of them later from the scolding oratory to the frightening jingoism and from the exploitation of my city to the hijacking of 'family' to mean theirs not yours.
But mostly what I thought of were the planes.
When I see the planes, I thank god we ever took to the skies. And I thank god we only ever stopped for two days, and then not even really, just the cattle cars to Europe and across our continent. When I see the planes go, I'm all full of hope. Always have been, always will be.
And when the folks at that convention see them? All they do is get scared.
And that's the divide; that's the rancor. It's reproductive rights and taxes, a woman's worth, healthcare, your pension. It's what they teach in your schools and what you've got to do to keep your job.
I just want to ask, Didn't anyone ever hold your hand when the plane took off? Didn't they ever drive down to the airport with their grandfather and watch the planes go up in the heat and the dust of a place they didn't even like? Didn't they want to be astronauts?
The answer is yeah. They probably did. And one day, like all of us do at one time or another, they got told No. And like us, like me, like you, they got angry. But you can either use anger to fight through, fight past, fight on, or you can just use it to smash some shit up and say no one can be happy, no one can have hope, no one can be any different from you.
So when McCain got up there and did his call to arms last night? Made this election a battle? Used every oratorical trick and metaphor my vicious little heart is pretty much designed to respond to? I was so sad.
War's ugly of course. But it doesn't have to be in service of ugly ideals.
Or fear.
Or not understanding that the planes are there to give you hope.
