Yeah… that’s one problem I have with PTSD being a medical/pathological entity like that. If everyone’s running around trying to delude themselves that they’re (physically) safe when they’re not, why is lacking that urge pathological?

The world is not a particularly (physically) safe place. Panicking over this fact is not all that worthwhile or useful. Neither is all the BS that goes on in the name of trying to get the pretence of safety again.

One example of that pretence: Someone I’m close to told me that for years he refused to believe what happened to me in institutions, because, basically, it would shatter his view of the world as a fundamentally safe place where “things like that don’t happen”.

When that pretence happens over thousands or millions of people rather than just individually, it becomes a real problem. It’s the reason that many citizens of given countries rarely believe that their fine upstanding officials and such condone or engage in torture — but everyone else’s country does. It’s always something that happens somewhere else. And all kinds of other little things people do to pretend they’re safe, end up having wide ramifications in just plain ignoring everything that goes wrong. Their pretend safety prevents some kinds of safety.

It’s odd.

Admitting that I’m not /in/ the U.S. (but we get the same talk anyway – as if the IRA/ETA/terrorist group of choice had never been); *exactly*. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a benefit of ptsd (I want a succinct, non-medical way to allude to that): one doesn’t believe in safety as a fundamental, doesn’t have the illusion horribly shattered just because one gets around to noticing that horrible things do happen, and doesn’t see the point in running around in circles, in an effort to make the illusion ‘real’ again.

I have other memories of that September 11th, and the days after, but they belong to people who matter to me, not to an Event Unlike Any Other.

Anyway my friend stayed on the phone as we watched together, and she shouted at me for caring more about the buildings than the people in them, indeed it was not until I saw people jumping out of the windows that the full horror in human terms struck, then it became apparant I was watching a particularly nasty snuff movie. I still think about those doomed people on the top floors. That is as I say what precipitated my video “Abbadon” which was basically scenes of people in London (where I was shortly after) goingabout there dayly business overlaid with scenes of destruction from art and from 9/11 set to the music of “Riders on the Storm”. The theme being that we all go about our daily business not knowing what may befall that make it our last day. Amongst the things I filmed was a number 30 bus that day.

What bothered me too, was that I had in the year before 9/11 included in my digital art work and videos scenes of towers in Coventry exploding or collapsing.

Anyway to watch the towers collapse was bizarre because I said at the time that when the South Tower fell it looked like there was a demolition charge on each floor because it fell with the same certainty that I have seen on demolition jobs. The North Tower collapsed in a slightly different way with the whole top section in tact but inclined., naturally the engineer in me wanted to know whys and wherefores, what angles the planes struck, what structural damage was caused in the first instance, how the structure of the WTC differed from the Sears Tower that sort of stuff.

Was I scared after that, I went down to London very shortly after and viewed my favourite Euston Tower in a different light.

I stood there, watching the news programme (everything was news that day), and was absolutely horrified at what I saw.

I was also scared at the time: I was far away from my wife and child (I was married then), and was not entirely certain of being able to get back to them if this incident should start a third world war.

I’m still trying to process some of the thoughts and feelings I had at that time. Mostly, these days, it manifests as an almost total lack of faith in politicians to do that which is enshrined in the definition of the word ‘politics’. It means ‘the resolution of conflict’.