I follow writers on other platforms and I always see them post memes like
“Don’t piss me off because I’ll base a character on you and violently murder you 🤣🤣🤣”
Like WTF
Are other writers this fucking shallow and immature? Do they seriously vent their specific frustrations in life this way?
I don’t even find it funny as a joke because I take writing seriously, not as a fkn hobby.
…
Maybe I’ll write a story about shallow writers and kill THEM. That’ll teach ‘em!
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Thinking about the ways in which tragedies pass into memory.
Within a decade, 9/11 became an edgy joke. Within two decades, its impact is erased entirely.
9 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tragedy is given a monstrous face. Four decades after the tragedy, the famed monster has become a mascot, a charming beast - but the horror is still so fresh, and the movie Akira begins with Tokyo flattened. To this day, we look back with silence and horror, sometimes anger at the senselessness of those responsible.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki may well remain a moment of solemnity forever.
Some part of it must surely be the magnitude. Five thousand dead in a building collapse in a major city, on the one hand. On the other, so many gone in an instant that we will likely never truly know the proper number.
But there’s another difference, and I wonder how much of a factor it has been:
The United States’ retaliation after 9/11 was immediate, misdirected, excessive.
Japan, by contrast, surrendered, and their vengeance never came. There could be no retaliation for the Bomb. Only picking up the pieces of the shattered cities and counting the dead.
I remember the question “where were you when the twin towers fell?” My mother can answer that question, but I cannot. I was 4. And it’s so hard to muster an ounce of sadness for the senseless loss of life, knowing the rabid jingoism, the hatred and senseless violence done in the name of those dead.
I have more respect for a tragedy committed by my country decades ago, than one that my own mother remembers clearly.
And I think there’s perhaps a lesson there. That the way to honor the dead, to ensure their legacy remains forever pure, is not to slaughter in their name. Do not retaliate, but instead wait. mourn. Let their memories linger. Let it pass into record, untainted by bloodlust.
And I think about all this… when I look at October 7.
Hundreds dead in a senseless attack. In response, a genocide is amplified. In the name of retaliation, thousands are slaughtered. Children killed and starved, and across the airwaves there is little mourning, only hatred and fury.
Already, there is no respect for those who died, not out of callousness, but because their memories are tainted by the bloodlust and atrocity committed, supposedly, to avenge them. It has only been 3 months. Who is mourning them? Who should mourn them, even? We need space in our hearts for the thousands slaughtered since.
It is nothing less than a desecration to spill so much blood upon their graves.
I’m thinking about all this. It is all so very sad.
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