Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [1]
Embarrassed and humiliated—but feeling much better!—he flagged down a gypsy cab and offered him a hundred dollars to take him home ($9 for the ride, and $91 toward the price of a new car).
When the man got home, he ran inside to take a shower and to put on a new set of clothes so he could get back to Manhattan. Coming out of the shower he flipped on the TV and, as he stood there, he watched the plane slam right into the floor where he worked, where he would have been right now had his loving wife not made him that wonderful—that absolutely perfectly incredible amazing . . . He broke down and began to cry.
My own 9/11 story wasn’t so close a call. I was asleep in Santa Monica. The phone rang around 6:30 a.m. and it was my mother-in-law. “New York is under attack!” is what I heard her say through my half-awake ear. I wanted to say, “Yeah so what’s new—and it’s 6:30 in the morning!”
“New York is at war,” she continued. This made no sense other than, again, it always feels like war in New York. “Turn on the TV,” she said. And so I did. I woke up my wife and as the television faded on there were the towers, on fire. We tried to call our daughter back home in New York, no luck, then tried to call our friend Joanne (who works near the World Trade Center), no luck, and then we just sat there stunned. We didn’t leave the bed or the TV until five that afternoon when we finally found out that our daughter and Joanne were okay.
But a line producer we had just worked with, Bill Weems, was not okay. As the networks started to run a scroll along the bottom of the TV with the names of those who were on the planes, along came Bill’s name on that screen. My last memory of him was the two of us horsing around at a funeral home where we were shooting a piece about the tobacco industry. Put two guys with a dark sense of humor around a bunch of undertakers and you’ve got what we would call nirvana. Three months later he was dead and—how do they say it?—“life as we knew it changed forever.”
Really? Did it? How has it changed? Is there enough distance from that tragic day to ask that question and find an intelligent answer? Things certainly changed for Bill’s wife and his seven-year-old daughter. There’s the crime, right there, to have her daddy taken from her at such a young age. And life changed for the loved ones of the other 3,000 who were murdered. They will never lose the sorrow they feel. They are told that they “must move on.” Move on to where? Those of us who have lost someone (and I guess that’s eventually everyone) know that while life does “move on,” the sock in the gut, the sorrow in the heart, will never leave, so ways must be found to embrace it and make it work for you and the living.
Somehow we all work our way through our own personal losses and we get up the next morning and the morning after that and fix the kids’ breakfast and do another load of laundry and pay the bills and . . .
Meanwhile, in faraway Washington, D.C., life is changing, too. Taking advantage of our grief, and our fear that “it” may happen again, an appointed president uses the dead of 9/11 as a convenient cover, a justification, for permanently altering our American way of life. Is that why they died, so that George W. Bush can turn the country into Texas? We’ve already conducted two wars since 9/11, and an upcoming third or a fourth is not all that unlikely. If this is allowed to continue, then all we will have accomplished is to dishonor those 3,000-plus dead. I know Bill Weems didn’t die so he could be used as an excuse to bomb innocents overseas. If his death, his life, is to have a greater meaning from this moment forward, it is to make sure that no one else like him will have to lose his or her life in this