Release of tension

[firecat]

I'm amazed at the human resilience to disaster. By yesterday evening,
most people had decided Not To Think About It. Today my body seems to
have decided that, too. I woke up happy, feeling normal, feeling like
making jokes about it, etc.

Then I got on the net and got all angry again. I was mostly angry at
people's attempts to oversimplify things -- find some single reason for
what happened, make it all fit neatly into their existing political
viewpoints and bolster their pet interests. I am angry at this because I
hoped that a tragedy of a kind that has never happened before would get
people to look at the world differently, including parts of it that they
had written off before. Only if people look at the world and its
inhabitants differently will we be able to change how we relate to each
other. This has been an opportunity for change. But there is a
tremendous urge on everybody's part to get back to "normal," and that
includes all the normal prejudices, all the normal factions, and so
forth.

And that's all part of the resilience to disaster, too.

And in other non-news

The dog I worked with yesterday was a King Spaniel / Pekingese cross.
Extremely excitable, full of kisses, willing to take on any other dog. I
did OK at getting her to calm down, which was the lesson for the day. I
didn't think about the disaster for a whole hour, which was a good
thing.

Dropped by my parents'. On the way there, I was listening to NPR and
they said that some European leader had said, in response to the attack,
"We are all Americans." It made me cry.