I was in Job Corps at the time. I awoke in my 4-man dorm, talk radio on my little radio as usual, and the.. white boy who listens to music he'll never understand.. put on his Dr. Dre crap as usual. I yelled at him to turn it off, because something was happening. He gave me some crap and I threw his CD out the window, turned on the dorm TV and commanded him to shut the hell up. That was, and still is, very out of character for me. Probably because I had never been like that before, he instantly did so.
We spent the next 3 hours watching the TV, the four of us. None of us left the room, not even to go to the bathroom. The only things we could say were statements of awe, and four letter words. I'm not even sure if they rang the class bell that morning; none of us paid the slightest attention to anything but the television. Finally the rap-listening white boy suggested we all go out to the public area and have a smoke.
What you usually see out there is a lot of posturing, a lot of mockery, and sometimes outright fights. Job Corps is like high school, except these are the dredges of society, the lost souls who had no other choice except maybe the military. I include myself in that, I was a complete scumbag.
That day, it was like watching the world as directed by Kubrick or something. Everything was surreal. Some people were trying to go about their regular day, but they were like zombies. A few people were openly drunk, having lost family members. One guy was just sitting there, not talking, smoking cigg after cigg. There was a prayer group off to the side, and I KNOW that not everyone in that group was the same religion, one of the guys was a Muslim. Even the COLOURS seemed a bit off. I saw people making out furiously. There were some people ranting angrily about what we had to do next. I saw a large range of human emotion, but the one thing I didn't see was any bullshit. Nobody was preening. Nobody was posturing and lying. Everyone was displaying raw emotions, naked, unashamed.
There's a strong undercurrent that people forget all the time. Democrat, Republican. Redneck or Homeboy. Rich and Poor. Black and White. Patriotic or Rebellious. We have the luxury of forgetting, because of the freedoms we have, that we are all Americans. But when it comes right down to it, when all the bullshit is stripped away, there lies that one bare fact. We all love what we have, and we stand shoulder to shoulder in times of crisis. We are one. We are Americans. And we will never forget.
The song that always makes me think of that day, is an older one. I quote a verse from it here, you may take or leave whatever meaning I imbue it for yourselves.
"Our shoreline was never invaded, our country was never in flames.
This is the calm we breathe, this is a feeling too strong to contain.
Still it aches like tetanus, it reeks of politics.
Signatures stained with tears, who can remember?
Weve got to remember."
