h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

To add to the thousands of articles about the World Trade Center bombing this morning...I'm sure I'm not the only teen writing about this. I know my friend Kit has already blogged about it, and I'm sure I'll see more entries popping up in my other friends' blogs.

I am not a particularly eloquent writer. I am not poetic; words do not come easily to me. And I am sure that no words can console those directly affected by the devastation.

But I must say that I am ashamed at my own shallowness and narrow world-view. On one hand, it is to be expected -- after all, I am still a teenager. I have a couple more years to grow out of my inherent immaturity and selfishness. But today's events have brought me back to the greater reality, one that is NOT simply composed of school, colleges, and boys.

I am also a little scared of my own detachment. I've spent most of the day as I normally would, except with news and reports blaring at me in the hallways at school, on the bus, and at home. It scares me that I can hear about the staggering number of people killed without feeling a great sense of grief, that the presence of war is thick in the air, that the impact on the economy is going to be colossal. It scares me that I can hear all this and not be lying on the ground twitching in fear. Okay, that's an exaggeration…but I'm expecting some sort of greater emotional response here. I suppose that if I was more directly affected, the shock would be greater, but at the same time, I am not sure what to feel.

This is not the first time ground-shaking events like this have happened without eliciting a response from me greater than a, "That's horrible," which, while certainly sincere, sounds pathetically empty in the face of the tragedy before me. Two years prior, two seniors at my old school were killed in a car crash. That took quite awhile to sink in. I cried at the memorial service, but I think it was mainly the overwhelming feeling of grief at my school. I felt sorry, certainly, but the sense of death was almost surreal. The distress was there, of course, but again, I just didn't know how to react. And just this past school year, yet another senior at my old school died in a car crash...I did not know him directly, so my grief was a little less.

And I still don't know how to react to events such as this.

It's nothing to do with desensitization due to the media, mind you. A simulated plane explosion is still a far cry from a real one; it's that intangible feeling of reality that sticks in your mind that distinguishes it from fantasy. I guess it's just that the whole event is so far removed from my normal sphere of existence.

For those of you who are U.S. citizens seventeen and older, who have not lived in foreign countries considered "dangerous," please, please give blood. I would, but not only am I sixteen (happily, soon to be seventeen), I'm also, sadly, one pound under the weight requirement of 105 pounds. How sad is that?

That's my two bits. Move along now, citizen.