meme for 9/11
a global peace day
I write this on the first anniversary of the 9/11. It has been a very long year between the personal difficulties of my father's Alzheimers disease, and finally his passing away in August as well as the greater struggles in the world.
However, I choose to write not out of despair, but rather out of hope.
I would like pass along the following meme in hopes it will be spread through your minds and to the minds of others. I hope this meme will displace our thoughts of fear, war, and retribution. I hope this meme may provide a vision of happier future.
* * * * *
Monday, Sep 10, 2001 was my birthday. I had taken the week off as a late summer vacation and was staying at my sister's house in San Diego. After a family celebration over the prior weekend (several of us have birthdays around the end of August and beginning of September), I had a personal celebration Monday night with small group of friends with dinner and a late, late movie. I did not return to my sister's house until 2 or 3 in the morning.
That night I had a dream.
In my dream, the Earth is at peace. I dreamt of a party, a fete, a celebration around the world. It is like Mardi Gras, Carnivale, and New Year's Eve all rolled into one. I am on a street, a town square surrounded by people dancing around me. I see Cirque de Soleil like dancers performing in small tableaus. Confetti falls like snow and streamers arc across the sky like benign, multihued lightning. Musicians stroll by with playing flutes and clarinets accompanied by voices lifted in harmony.
Most amazing to me are the sculpters waving their fingers through the air and form art from their fingertips: they are using nanotechnology to shape the very air into delicate loops and whirls like strands of DNA.
It is a life-long fantasy coming true: the melding of art and technology, two long-time tensions in my life, into a fantastic synthesis. I am laughing in joy and sheer exhilaration of the wonders around me, of this glimpse of the future.
We are at peace and it is time to celebrate creation.
* * * * *
Just after 5:48am PDT, my brother-in-law shakes me away. We are under attack, he tells me. The World Trade Center has been hit an airplane. I get up to watch TV just in time to catch the second plane hitting the World Trade Center.
Forgive me if I choose to believe in the dream, and not in this terrible reality. So I share this this alternate vision of 9/11 with you. From my mind to yours, let this meme spread and perhaps one day it will be the reality of September 11th and all other days.
Originally Sept 2002.
Reposted with edits Sept 2008.