Mad World

Years ago, when I was in high school, I took a few math classes. Most of them I can't remember much about, unfortunately. My nephew called the other day and wanted to know the standard form of a line, I think, and was curious how to find the parallel of a line. I told him what I knew which wasn't much.

I have always been terrible with math. Probably why it took me five tries to pass college algebra. Out of all my math classes there's really only one day that I can remember halfway decently.

It was one mornin' in the fall, I was most likely asleep since that's generally the way I took my math classes. Probably why it took me five tries to pass college algebra. I would try to stay awake but as soon as someone started ramblin' off about numbers and letters in a way that didn't make up a sentence I couldn't really think of any reason to stay awake.

In this sleepy daze, I remember an announcement coming on over the school's P. A. system. It said the teachers were to turn on the T.V.'s we had in the classroom. The were rarely used. On occasion we watched a movie that pertained to whatever class we had or we'd watch Channel One News where Lisa Ling and Maria Menounous were starting out. Never before had an announcement been made across the school for us to stop any lesson and watch the news.

Never in my lifetime had an event of such magnitude occurred. The closest I could think of was the Oklahoma city bombing. I was a bit too young to remember or care much about that when it happened. I'm sure some of your parents or grand parents remember Pearl Harbor. That's the only comparison to me that seems to make much sense. 9/11 was probably this generation's Pearl Harbor.

The teacher hit the power button and there we sat and watched as they replayed video of the second plane goin' into the second tower. We watched as these pillars crumbled down like a child's building blocks. The smoke and the fire and dust that become of the towers.

There was discussion and fears all around the classroom. The Japanese did it. They did that kamikaze stuff in World War Two. No, it was the Chinese they have five people to every one American and they're Communists.

What's a Taliban? Who's Osama Bin Laden? What do you mean terrorist? All of a sudden the world has become something like a comic book. There's a face of real villainy that doesn't belong to Dr. Doom or Lex Luthor. There are real groups that would cause harm to civilians to make a point and they aren't S.P.E.C.T.R.E. or Cobra. The world has just slipped a lil further into the world of the surreal.

This is a strange world we live in. Only a shadow of what it once was. A world that one hundred years ago would not have guessed that there could ever really be an end in store for it. But ever since that damned atom bomb there is a real way for the world, or at least massive chunks of it at a time, to be destroyed.

Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, has said that the missiles are havin' an effect on us even if they aren't fired. That this generation and the ones that will grow up in a world after us but still including these weapons will always be able to see the end of existence, however long that always may be.

It's sad that people anyway of any culture have become so desperate, so unable to communicate with each other that some groups find this massive cartoonish destruction to be acceptable. We did not just lose lives of innocent people that day, we also became less innocent as people. We live in a world where we have knives at our throats at every minute, we ignore it for the most part but at any minute someone's hand could slip.

So, as always it's important to take a step back and treat each other with love and kindness. We must understand each other now more than ever. Maybe one day future generations could laugh at the idea of us causing the end of our own world. It really is ridiculous anyway, you know.