The Stranger

I was listening to the “Dead Flag Blues” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor earlier in the evening. It is one of my favorite songs—dark, brooding narrative delivered over echoic tunes in the background. Bored, I googled the name of the song, and some videos—fan-made music videos, as the band did not seem to have made any music videos at all—were on YouTube.

One of the videos likened the song to that of the recollection of 9/11. While the album was initially released back in 1997, the words do resonate as such:

The video by itself was insightful (as using the song for purposes unintended by the original artists sometimes is), if a little lacking in finesse. It also reminded me of the time back in high school when it happened.

The class started at eight, and I never fared well in the first period, so I could have dozed off... Not very interesting. I cannot even remember the second period. By third period, though, things got… unusual. Students in my class turned on the TV to catch the ever-elusive airwaves, which were never meant to be received on the school ground, and teacher did nothing to stop them. The class went by and we did not learn a thing.

The trend continued in all the classes I went to afterward. I did see the glimpse of the building, and while I did ask people around, I did not notice the significance of the event. Some kind of building fell… as an accident... was the extent of the info I got.

When I went home, I watched the television—again, same stuff, but things becoming much clearer—beginning with the reception. CNN was playing in place of TBS (we do not have cable at home), replaying the footage of the incident over and over again. The tower on fire, another being struck by a jetliner… it was so surreal, I found it to be almost comical. Did that just happen? Did the airplane just bring down the huge, brutalist structure? I realized that it was a big deal, though, only after realizing that the World Trade Center was an iconic part of the New York skyline. The smoke fuming from the what is later known as Ground Zero for days on end helped with this.

But I could not help but feel apathy out of this. Even after Taliban’s claim of deed and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, it felt like someone else’s problem, with me uninvolved--

--and that would be right. I am, in fact, uninvolved. I have no family in New York. While I stopped by the City earlier that year (or maybe a year before), I could not feel much connection with the city. I have not ridden their subway, nor stopped by to eat a hot dog from a stand. All I remember from the ascent to the Empire State Building is the Chrysler Building that stood right before it. I do not even have much connection with the city in which I live and grew up in, so caring for the Big Apple, the ever-imposing city portrayed as Gotham and just about as distant, was—and still is—hard to do.

Call it an apathy of the stranger, much like the protagonist in the novel by Albert Camus.

That gets me thinking. Would I have to make myself care for the things happening around me, if I were to feel something out of it at all? Did I have to decide, for one, whether or not to care for a monumental event like 9/11? I am having trouble even to give a damn about much of the things around me, and to some extent, myself. It is a surprise that I care enough to write here, right now.

So what could make me care about what is around me? My thoughts—or lack thereof—must have led me to this road, the road with failures in school, lack of friends, and general dissatisfaction of life. I should be caring more, but it is not happening…

Do you get me?

What should I care, how should I care, why should I care?

It is probably among the many things that I need the answer for to keep me going forward.