Saying Goodbye and Booking Through Thursday

Sage with Richard on his last day at Wendy's.

A bunch of us in town are losing a friend. On Tuesday (providing there’s not a glitch due to Hurricane Ike), Richard will be moved to Texas to be near his sister. He’s going to be missed. Richard is a special man. He’s my age and intellectually challenged (some may say that about me). For the past four or five years, he’s lived in an adult foster care home that is being closed down by the state. While there are serious reasons forcing the closure of the home, it’s sad that Richard and “his family” are all going to have to be moved into other homes. Richard is one of the positive persons I know. He works at Wendy’s during the lunch shift, cleaning tables and mopping up spilled drinks. He’s always glad to see me when I go in for my Santa Fe Salad, but once he says hi, he’s back to work. At church, when the congregation shares joys and concerns, Richard always starts out “I just want to thank the Lord…” and he starts rolling out a list. Much of it is lost in his slurring of words, but no one misses in his litany his thanks for “my job.” He’s more proud of his minimum wage job than most people whose hourly rates would be 10, 20 or 30 times as high. About a year ago, I saw him on the street and he came up to me, saying “Sage, I got a raise.” Thanks to his raise, he was making a little over $7 an hour and was so excited. I didn’t tell him that the minimum wage had just gone up. Then he invited me to come down to Wendy’s saying, “I’ll buy you you’re dinner.” I hope I didn’t hurt his feelings when I assured him that I could buy my own dinner as I (and others) had on occasion picked up his bill in the local diner and at the coffee shop). Richard, I know you won’t see this and that even if you did, you couldn’t read it, but I’m going to miss you and the sunshine you’ve brought to our community!
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Gautami asked me to comment on this week’s “Booking Through Thursday” topic. This is the prompt which concerns our reading since 911:

Terrorists aren’t just movie villains any more. Do real-world catastrophes such as 9/11 (and the bombs in Madrid, and the ones in London, and the war in Darfur, and … really, all the human-driven, mass loss-of-life events) affect what you choose to read? Personally, I used to enjoy reading Tom Clancy, but haven’t been able to stomach his fight-terrorist kinds of books since.

And, does the reality of that kind of heartless, vicious attack–which happen on smaller scales ALL the time–change the way you feel about villains in the books you read? Are they scarier? Or more two-dimensional and cookie-cutter in the face of the things you see on the news?

I don’t think my reading has been affected by 911. I’ve never been much of one to read the terrorist/villain mysteries. I did read a bit more about Islam following 911, but I had been reading about the faith since the First Gulf War in 1990, when it hit me that I should know something about those whom we were fighting. If anything, the events of 911 have affirmed some of my Calvinistic thoughts on human depravity. It seems that the human race has potential for great good and great evil. The same goes for religion; one’s faith can be a source of great goodness or horrific deeds. But then, those without a faith in a Supreme Being have also been able to commit just as great or perhaps even greater atrocities (consider Stalin or Pol Pot).

Since 911, I’m perhaps more aware of how easy it is to be sucked into evil actions while believing you’re doing what is good or that you’re on the “right side” (letting the end justify the means). I was drawn back to the conclusions drawn by Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Browning shows that how a group of mostly middle age men from Hamburg, serving in the equivalent of our National Guard. These men with no real political affiliation to Nazism or a history of anti-Jewish sentiment, followed orders and became killers in Poland. The haunting question is, “if it was so easy for them to make the transition into a villain, would it be easy for us?”

Terrorists need to be stopped; yet, we have to be careful how we “hunt them down.” If we see terrorist as animals to be hunted, we risk losing our humanity and become, like them, a beast.

I know I’m not really answering the prompt concerning how my reading has been affected by 911. Like I said, my reading hasn’t much changed, but my world view has changed slightly.
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By the way, if you've not seen this video clip from The Daily Show, I recommend watching it? The state of our political discourse may be sad, but we should at least laugh about it.

Postscript (3 hours later): There were a few other books I read due to 911. I'm not really into science fiction, but living where I did at the time, I got to know the author L. E. Modesitt, Jr. In talking about the events, I read several of his works that discuss religion and war. I recommend them. See especially The Parafaith War and The Ethos Effect. In The Parafaith War, Modesitt explores the strength and weakeness of religion in creating a better world and the danger of fanaticism. In The Ethos Effect, nhe does the same for the secular world. Another book that I read after 911, recommended by Lee, is Walter Miller's, A Canticle for Leibowitz. It's a classic look on religion in a post-nuclear world.