Comments on: I’m an ass

by: Editrix

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 01:06:58 +0000

Aw — you’re nice people you are. Thanks. Group hug!

by: Paula

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 19:05:51 +0000

A big, “yeah what he said,” to all the above.

by: Joe

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 17:22:25 +0000

We read your blog to find out what you think and feel. CNN is available for news updates. Ease up on yourself.

by: Flasshe

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 16:11:48 +0000

I was pretty much going to say what summervillain said, but he beat me to it. I thought it was prefectly reasonable/appropriate for you to discuss your own connections to the disaster, even if it’s just about wine bottles or whatever. It puts a personal face on things, and brings the scale of tragedy into a little more focus. Don’t beat yourself up!

Also, cold as this may be: There are how many bloggers out there in the world? Millions? I certainly don’t expect every single one of them to provide some new cogent insight or whatever on the tragedy. I don’t necessarily read blogs to see how other people are reacting to current events anyway. There’s going to be a lot said about this disaster over the next several weeks, and I really doubt that I (for example) am going to say anything about it in my blog that others have not said before or better. So I’m just going to do what I’ve always done and write about what I know. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize or care.

by: summervillain

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 13:48:48 +0000

I don’t mean to be overly analytical, but I think that’s just part of the human process of coping with tragedy. I don’t think our brains are capable of thinking of something that affects thousands of lives directly; I think we have to treat numbers that big as abstractions. (Since I’ve just read Gladwell’s The Tipping Point I wonder if the cut-off number for what we can grasp intuititvely might not be around 150.) Anyway, I think we need to process these events by focusing on comparatively small but emblematic incidents in the larger context: the plight of one family, the destruction wreaked on a single building.

And if you need to apologize for it, so does every news reporter, ever.

by: 2fs

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 03:51:06 +0000

I don’t think you need to apologize. Destruction on such a scale is almost literally incomprehensible to us; our empathy circuits would simply sputter and fry to a crisp if we could actually get a sense of it. But we can’t just withdraw - so we find the things we can relate to. It’s always strange which things move someone, and which don’t. For example: in the late eighties I met a guy, friend of a friend of a friend, whom I saw a total of about three or four times. He seemed like an intelligent, reasonably friendly guy - but really, all I knew about him were a handful of mostly trivial biographical data: my friend Julie had a crush on him (even though she knew he was gay), he was into tattoos, and he had a cool leather jacket. So why, when I heard a little time after I’d met him that he’d died of AIDS, was I so unreasonably affected, considering I’d hardly knew him? I don’t know - I suppose the large numbers of people AIDS had already killed were people I didn’t know, hadn’t even met, and so it was a sort of abstract sorrow, frustration, and anger (depending on which aspect of the situation I was confronted with). But the simple fact of an extremely basic connection somehow emotionally brought the situation home to me. We make what connections we make, even if we can know that other things are much much more important.