Liar
now with 17% more class
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2003
- Posts
- 43,715
There was a strange congregation of people in the Sergel square outside central station in Stockholm today. I just happened to walk by, but had to stop for the moment and reflect on the in time and space so concentrated weight of the situation.
Three heartfelt manifestations were drawing so much attention and participants that the separate occations blended and merged into one giant wish for a better world.
* September 11, 1973. General Augusto Pinochet siezes the power in Chile, murdering the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, and numerous others that day. And thousands more in the years to follow.
Widows and widowers, orphaned sons and daughters, political refugees from the two dark decades of the violent oppression that followed were now gathered, like every year since that day, silent, dignified. To mourn, and to persistently demand their nemesis brought to justice.
* September 11, 2001 will be burnt into our eyes forever in images so surreal that it takes a few seconds of reflection for the chills to arrive. Clouds of fire and clouds of dust against a clear blue sky.
A diverse crowd were gathered nearby paying their respect. Earlier attempts at a manifestaion of this kind had been disturbed by too much politicking, tossing blame in either direction. The crowd gathering today had come with consideration and only the victims of the attacks were on their mind.
* September 11, 2003. Swedens foreign minister Anna Lindh is stabbed to death on a regular afternoon in the middle of a crowded department store, only two hundred meters from where I stand now.
I glance down the street, and see this third crowd gathered, sharing a minute in silence on the street outside the store.
Then that crowd, some 200 people begin to approach the two groups already side by side on the square. Within a couple of minutes, it is no longer three manifestations, but one, making a common silent statement against a world where hatred feeds hatred and hurt and confusion seems to get a stronger grip every day.
I stay, watch, talk, listen. I meet two Chileans, a brother and a sister in their late 30's, who fled here when their father was killed during the -73 coup. And whose mother got buried 28 years later under a collapsing Manhattan skyscraper.
I walked away tonight, not with a heavy heart, but with the reassuring insght that whatever petty problems I may have, they are just that - petty. And if there is too little goodness in this world... Well, I'll just have to get my lazy ass moving, and make some.
#L
Three heartfelt manifestations were drawing so much attention and participants that the separate occations blended and merged into one giant wish for a better world.
* September 11, 1973. General Augusto Pinochet siezes the power in Chile, murdering the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, and numerous others that day. And thousands more in the years to follow.
Widows and widowers, orphaned sons and daughters, political refugees from the two dark decades of the violent oppression that followed were now gathered, like every year since that day, silent, dignified. To mourn, and to persistently demand their nemesis brought to justice.
* September 11, 2001 will be burnt into our eyes forever in images so surreal that it takes a few seconds of reflection for the chills to arrive. Clouds of fire and clouds of dust against a clear blue sky.
A diverse crowd were gathered nearby paying their respect. Earlier attempts at a manifestaion of this kind had been disturbed by too much politicking, tossing blame in either direction. The crowd gathering today had come with consideration and only the victims of the attacks were on their mind.
* September 11, 2003. Swedens foreign minister Anna Lindh is stabbed to death on a regular afternoon in the middle of a crowded department store, only two hundred meters from where I stand now.
I glance down the street, and see this third crowd gathered, sharing a minute in silence on the street outside the store.
Then that crowd, some 200 people begin to approach the two groups already side by side on the square. Within a couple of minutes, it is no longer three manifestations, but one, making a common silent statement against a world where hatred feeds hatred and hurt and confusion seems to get a stronger grip every day.
I stay, watch, talk, listen. I meet two Chileans, a brother and a sister in their late 30's, who fled here when their father was killed during the -73 coup. And whose mother got buried 28 years later under a collapsing Manhattan skyscraper.
I walked away tonight, not with a heavy heart, but with the reassuring insght that whatever petty problems I may have, they are just that - petty. And if there is too little goodness in this world... Well, I'll just have to get my lazy ass moving, and make some.
#L
