Space shuttles and other unnatural disasters
When the space shuttle Challenger blew up, I was in eighth grade. I remember it distinctly - every day we had five 50 minute classes and one class that was two hours long. The long class was the lunch period - you had a half hour of that time scheduled for lunch, and which half hour it was depended on what grade you were in. Eighth graders had second lunch - which was a half hour of class, then off to lunch, then an hour of class after lunch. On the day of the Challenger disaster, we had our half-hour of class, went to lunch, and when we came back there was a TV in the front of the classroom. My teacher, Mrs. Langlois, was a woman who wore makeup along the lines of Tammy Faye Bakker, and I can still see her crying - the makeup melting on her face.
At our school, things were heightened a bit because our science teacher had been part of the applicant pool for the NASA Teacher in Space program. She'd met Christa McAuliffe during the application process and we were all very attuned to the shuttle launch - I think most schools at the time were, because it was such an unusual thing. But that moment will live with me forever.
It's funny what you do and don't remember. I don't remember where I was when Reagan was shot or when I heard about Columbine - and those are big deals for a lot of people. I remember the OJ verdict - I was in a car riding to work as they were reading the verdict out and it was taking forever. The guy who drove me to work stayed in the car for twenty minutes waiting for the final answer and I just went inside. I had no patience to wait for something like that. I remember where I was when the David Koresh ranch burned in Waco. I was in college and I had no classes that afternoon. I was in my dorm watching the soap opera Another World when they interrupted to show footage of the place burning down. It was over so incredibly quickly - I think they even went back to the soap opera when it was done.
And now, there's this weekend. I got up up Saturday morning and was messing around on the computer - playing Clue at games.com - and I decided to switch over and play Mille Bornes. When I got into the game room, nobody was even playing; there were just a bunch of people loitering in the lobby, and one of them wrote 'debris on the ground in Nacogdoches Texas.' I thought the worst - that there had been a terrorist attack of some sort (after all, a regular airplane crash wasn't likely to attract that much attention) and so on some level I was relieved to find out that it was "just" a space shuttle explosion. That sounds so incredibly awful but in today's sociopolitical climate, it's not altogether surprising.
When the World Trade Center collapsed, I was at work. I work at the Federal Building in downtown Boston. My cube with a view overlooks Boston Harbor, and in my direct line of sight out the window is Logan Airport. My mom called me at work and told me to go home... and at about that time, our company decided that people could go home if they felt unsafe. I didn't feel unsafe - I just didn't know how to feel. So I didn't go home. I went to Barnes & Noble. I didn't figure that the bookstore was going to be a target any more than my house would be, and I just didn't want to leave the busy-ness of people and downtown and the city yet to venture out to the suburbs. There's a strange sense of community that descends upon you in disaster - but somehow of late there has been so much tension and foreboding in the world that this most recent addition - the space shuttle disaster - pales. And on a lot of levels, that's sad.
I know where I was when I heard about the Oklahoma City bombing. I know who was with me when I heard that Princess Diana had died. I remember the Exxon Valdez disaster. And it's important, on some level within me, that I remember this too - in its own context, outside the world touched by al-Qaeda and Saddam and random threats from wherever. It's important.
