9/11 Attack, 2001, by Louise Porter-Cleaves (pen/stage name:Lisa Forestier))
From MemoryArchive
Who:Louise Porter-Cleaves (pen/stage name:Lisa Forestier) What:9/11 Attack When:September 11, 2001 Where:Washington, DC
It all came so fast. It was all so frightening. The feel on the ground in Washington, DC and the images on television, words in print rushing out on the internet, words in hard copy the day afterwords, sounds on the radio struggling to make sense. It may have been a common horror sound and light and feel experience, such a shock to the senses, that the first impressions may have been pretty much the same. New York, Washington, DC, Philadelphia. An Inferno.
How it became personal for me was through my disallusionment with the Red Cross. I was at first assured by Red Cross officails that my displacement would easily fall into one of their categories for disaster relief. But nothing materialized. Nothing. It's like in business, when you're waiting for a deal to be consummated, the word, the hadshake, the money changes hands, we're quits. Nothing like that happened. Nothing.
It was mega-eerie, waiting for that kind of pleasurable consummation that never came. Instead silence, run-around, a stuck record effect.
It was a sadness like internal bleeding. The story of the Red Cross had been one of my secular deifications. The Red Cross Knight. The knight in shining armor.
My earliest memories were of the symbol, its association with Christianity. Chivalry. The Lifesaving and First Aid courses with the local Red Cross. The cute lifesaving teacher. The first Catholic I knew outside my aunt and neighbors was the local Red Cross branch head. Then the bloodgiving, the plans for other volunteer activity. The "Story of the Idea" -- Henri Dunant's dream of the face of humanity in the mist of the horrors of war. The materials at the Red Cross Visitors Center in Washington, DC near the Corcoran Gallery and Art School. The gardens full of southern flowers -- magnolia and friends. Then reading part of Michel Veuthey's GRERILLA ET DROIT HUMANITAIRE written for the International Humanitarian Law community in Geneva and elsewhere. A web page entitled RED CROSS IN CODE ECLIPSE to keep readers updated with my thoughts on the subject. My idea of a LEXICON OF DISASTER TERMINOLOGY originated in Swiss French and then translated into other languages.
THE RED CROSS KNIGHT WAS NOT THERE!
SHAME!
The heart is not a reasonable part of the human body. I am still in an uphill myth of sisyphus battle, busting a bias against the Swiss. A reasonable bias against the Swiss. Unreasonably, I'm taking it out against Charles Dutoit, Swiss-born long-time head of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal. I don't love him anymore. He's not my favorite Orchestra Conductor anymore. I don't think it would be neat to meet him anymore. I stopped dreaming that he would conduct me singing the solo role in Francis Poulenc's LA VOIX HUMAINE. I'm actively looking for a new favorite Orchestra Conductor to replace him. And I don't care how unreasonable that sounds for the duration of the BIAS BUSTING time. So there.....
"Tossed on a sea of emotion", my heart surviving the riptide that followed 9/11 feeling my way towards how to go on, including sympathy with the people who want to do a radical takeover of the Red Cross, pitch out the dead wood and return it to "The Story of the Idea". "Lost in a riptide, what can I do?" Meanwhile.....
