Enlighten The Gentiles #12-- Sheer Mishegoss

Mishegoss (pronounced mish-eh-goss) comes from the more familiar Yiddish word meshugge  (crazy) and means "  nonsense", or "crazy talk".

Here in the blogosphere there are some people who write pure mishegoss.

 Pia, who writes the excellent blog Courting Destiny, and is a featured writer on Bring It On!, is emphatically NOT one of them. She writes well. Not only that, she writes intelligently. And she tries to listen to opposing points of view courteously, though sadly, courtesy is seldom the order of the day.

Recently Pia, a New York resident, had a guy commenting on one of her posts involving 9/11 . Pia has often blogged about the effects of 9/11 on herself and on her fellow New Yorkers.

This is his quote:

"Pia.... There you go. So what you live in New York. Like being closer to the incident is better than what I see 3000 miles away.....

Pia wrote again about this on Courting Destiny, and got more of the same mishegoss.  All about how those of us who were on the scene for 9/11 feel like we're better than other people. That it affected him too, watching it on TV at home in ways that were equal to ours.

 And I was so incensed, that I wrote the following comment:

Oh yes, those of us of NY and DC (and I’m from NY, born and raised and now live a mile or two from the Pentagon) feel morally smug and superior because we were there in person and you weren’t! Aren’t we lucky!

Well, you can have it, baby. You can have the fun of watching the Twin Towers fall and knowing that your brother and several in-laws all work in or near the towers.It’s just loads of fun frantically trying to call and see if everyone’s okay–especially if the phone lines are out.

And the sheer bliss of having to smell the smoke from the Pentagon near your house for a week–and cringing every time you hear a plane overhead! Oh mercy me yes,now, nearly 4 years later, I still feel smugger than smug when I drive by the Pentagon where the reconstruction work still goes on and I have to remember having to drive other routes for months so my 6 year old wouldn’t have to see the destruction first hand!

And it’s even more fun to celebrate Christmas hearing your sister-in-law recall standing on the Promenade in Brooklyn with her baby in her arms watching it happen–and having to have her house's windows closed for days afterwards because of the smoke coming across the East River. Oh, it’s FUN having to make sure your little girl is out of earshot when your brother-in-law recounts seeing people jumping out of the Towers. It really just makes it a merry, merry Christmas. Ho-ho-ho..............................

Oh, yes, it’s all so much fun and we feel so morally superior for having experienced it!

It ought to be obvious that we HAVE to feel different about it. You can sympathize, you can feel patriotic, you can feel whatever you want. But it wasn’t YOUR home that was violated, your childrens’ safety that was DIRECTLY compromised.

It was ours………………..

 Today is the 4th of July. We used to cook up a big meal and then head up to the Pentagon parking lot to watch the fireworks. The hills around the lots would be covered with picnicing families--people even brought their RVs and camped in the lot for the day!

We haven't been there since 2001. I don't know even if we're ALLOWED to go there. That lot is on the road right near where the plane hit.

It's utter mishegosse to think that experiencing September 11 on TV gave you a full experience of the event. It's like a man claiming to have gone through labor if he's in the delivery room. Yeah, he was there, but did he GIVE BIRTH?

And it's even greater mishegoss to think that those of us in NY and DC are smug about having experienced it!

Abei gezunt. Enjoy your 4th of July holiday........................................

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