(no subject)

I don't think I approve of the cultural tendancy to celebrate tragedies over and over in the name of memorial. Perhaps it's just that I don't care for the way americans tend to do it; somehow an awful lot of the sort of pagentry that one sees in the media seems either irreverant or overdone. Not to mention the sudden and excessive ill-informed patriotism movement of the last five years... How many americans know that it's disrespectful to wear your flag? And I mean, I'm not overly patriotic... I think there are good things about this country and bad ones, and I wouldn't really want to trade it in for somewhere else, but twelve years of public schools failed to instill me with anything but a dislike for american politics and government. And I'm not really into celebrating that sort of thing one way or the other. But that really wasn't what I was going to talk about...

You know the phenomenon about how just about everyone who was old enough to know what was going on can tell you where they were when they heard about kennedy's assassination? I grew up thinking that the version of that for my generation was when the Challenger exploded. I have a very clear early memory of my mother coming in while my cousin and I were having breakfast at the kitchen table and telling us that the space shuttle had exploded; I think it must have been a teacher work day, hence why we would still have been at home, but there was also footage of the shuttle going up that we saw at school afterwards. I was all of six at the time, and didn't really sort out until later that the engineer on that flight (and I think one or two others as well) was picked for the job from the same selection group my father got weeded out of several years before. Hence why my mother is glad he didn't become an astronaut after all...

But anyway, my first thought five years ago, seeing the news coverage of the second tower collapsing, was that the challenger had been eclipsed.