Today I watched my fellow Americans celebrate the deaths of thousands of our own. I watched as they screamed and paraded for more bloodshed.

Nathan wanted to go to a party. I didn’t want to sit at home on the computer all night, as I had been doing all day, and Orgasmic locked himself in his room today, so I don’t think he wanted to hang out with me. So I went. Nathan was looking for a party so he could watch and laugh at drunk people. I was just walking to get out of the house, knowing we wouldn’t actually find any place we’d be willing to go into, and being thankful for that. A crowd of drunken fools is not my idea of inspiring company.

We walked around Highland and around WPI. I had noticed a couple of cars loaded with frat guys, boasting large American flags out of their windows. Just another thing shoved out by Bush to give the prolls something to do aside from think of the attacks.

We ended up targeting ourselves for Assumption, because it was the closest college, and Nathan and I have developed this joke about catching sluts at other colleges. On our way down Highland, we met Nathan’s friend Jeff and Jeff’s girlfriend, Anne. They came with us. We walked to some place I’ve never been, and ended up taking a turn and heading towards Clark instead. We walked around that campus, looking for something to do, finding nothing.

We walked north on Main street, heading to no place in particular. The streets were quiet, a few people and police cars meandered around. We passed sleazy bars that smelled of spilt alcohol, and cigarettes. On a side street, a large man in a black leather jacket and a white car pulled up to us and asked us if we wanted a smoke. Earlier, we had joked about screaming and running, all four of us in separate directions, if anyone pulled over and spoke to us, even to ask for directions. So I screamed, and ran, beside me I could see Nathan’s yellow shirt. From behind, I could hear Jeff and Anne follow suit.

We were having an ok time. Nothing horrible had happened, nothing terribly exciting, just walking. Along Main street, it seemed as if every other car that passed us had an American flag of some size sticking out of it’s window. As we walked on, I started seeing cars with flags taped into the trunks and hoods of cars.

We walked on. Farther North on Main street, cars started passing us with the large American flags raised high, their horns barking at passing cars and pedestrians. Ahead, the traffic grew thicker, and then came to a standstill. Thick gray smoke embedded the air above intersections. We walked past the stopped cars, all honking and blaring, people shouting and leaning out of their windows. Where the smoke started, I had to hold my sleeve over my mouth to breathe, the smell of burnt rubber was so heavy and acrid. I watched as pickup trucks passed, their beds filled with college and high school-aged students waving flags and screaming into the smoke.

It was funny at first. I watched the girls in the pickups, one in a zebra print tube top that matched her tight, ill-fitting pants, pass an SUV of frat guys. The frat guys glared predatorily upon the screeching girls. Once I saw more than a couple of cars honking and blaring, it ceased to be funny. This wasn’t just a couple of groups of kids passing each other in an intersection and blaring their horns to show a mutual interest. This was an organized celebration.

All along Main street, the lanes were packed with pickup trucks and SUVs and compact cars, full of 20-something year old children, all screaming and waving flags, cigarettes dangling from their mouths or the hands that gripped so firmly to the staffs of our nation’s flag. They screamed, and held grainy photocopies of Bin Ladin in their sweaty palms.

“A Celebration.” I thought. They are celebrating the fact that thousands of innocent people died. What good does this do? How does this teach “our enemies” anything? How does this help the families of the deceased?

We walked on, up Main street, me with my sleeve cupped over my mouth, working my lungs to pull oxygen through a thick layer of cotton. Where was all this smoke coming from? Are they setting off smoke bombs? Why aren’t the police stopping them? Firecrackers? Why does it smell so heavily of burning rubber? I turned to ask Nathan several times, and had to shout over the noise of horns and yelling flag-wavers.

My eyes scanned the crowd of cars to try to find the source of all the smoke. In sections, it was too thick to see through, and we had to walk blindly until we escaped the cloud. Whenever I thought I spotted the spot that was thickest, it would disappear by the time I got close to it. Was this a car overheating? More than one car? Is this the cause of the traffic jam?

A blue Trans-Am to my right started squealing its tires and spinning out. Smoke and fumes borne from the friction showed me that the horrible smoke suffocating us was good old fashioned white-trash flaunting. This, I remembered, was the way all the creeps in my high school used to celebrate the end of the school day, by revving their engines and spinning their tires until they screamed, then shooting off up the driveway only to brake within the next 4 yards, leaving a thick, greasy mark of tar on the road. However, I had never seen so much smoke come out of spinning tires before. I watched as the back wheels of the blue Trans-Am spun furiously enough to create a cloud to render them invisible. As the smoke grew clearer, I saw the wheels actually growing thinner, as if the rubber was running off of them at such an intense rate. I realized, of course, that it was only the weight of the car pressing harder and harder onto the spinning wheels, but the image and the idea stay with me anyway.

Farther up, we saw police officers, in cars and standing on the sidewalk. By now, the expression of pure disgust and sadness was obvious on my face, and I wouldn’t have taken it off even if I had control over it. I looked many of the young men and women in the face, searching for the reasons they would be hooting and running through the streets, celebrating only days after thousands of people died and even more families were crushed with tragedy.

Everyone, with the exception of a few police officers and one fireman, was white. Everyone was young, in their teens or twenties, the girls wearing bare mid-drifts and tight pants in 52 degree weather, the guys clad in Abercrombie and Fitch or t-shirts with ripped off sleeves and jeans ripped off below the knee. The only non-working adults I saw was a group of middle-aged bikers parked on the other side of the street. They stood there, beaming, waving flags and cheering along with the people in the cars. One of the men had a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off.

On it, in large gray letters, were the words “NUKE AFGHANISTAN.” I imagined trying to ask that man why he was celebrating such an inhumane tragedy. I imagined asking him how bombing a country would make up for, or fix the problems that the US now had, and will have to deal with for decades to come. I asked him how killing innocent citizens of Afghanistan, children and babies and working people with real lives, who had nothing to do with Bin Ladin (if he is the one who organized the terrorist attacks) would make him feel any better about Meghan Cochran’s dad dying on a hijacked plane.

I knew he wouldn’t listen. I knew if I walked over to one of those cars, or to the people I was passing on the street, and asked them in fury why they were celebrating, it would all just end up in a fight, miscommunication. I would just become another outlet for fear and rage created on Tuesday.

In the beginning, when I had only seen a few flags on a few cars, it had been Nathan who was disgusted by our fellow citizens’ behavior. I had asked him “who are they hurting, by waving around their flags and trying to establish a sense of something other than saddness?” But in this mess, I felt like I was smack in the middle of a KKK rally. I’ll never be able to go to a 4th of July parade again, for fear that it will bring back this twisted and sick image of red white and blue flags prancing about, hoots and hollers of “patriotic” young men and women, using a tragedy such as this as an excuse to have a giant party.

This kind of passion, this kind of mass frenzy, this is the type of blind energy that leads us right into war. The big rich white guys upstairs had targeted this audience because this was the easiest to rile. Also, if we are to go into a battle field, these would be the people they’d send. This is the kind of behavior that led so many mislead young men and women into the hands of whoever organized the terrorist attacks. Into riots, stampedes, holocausts.

This isn’t hurting anyone, I thought to myself. But it has the potential to. Already, I don’t like where this is going. What’s next? All Americans of Middle Eastern decent ripped from their homes and shoved into camps lined with barbed wire? Are we doomed to repeat history all over again?

As we neared the end of Main street, where people were turning around and racing over to rejoin the fray, a shaven-head teenager leaned out of his window and screamed something inaudible to me, an American flag clumped into a sweaty ball in his hand, Korn or kid rock or some other trash-rock booming from behind him. I looked in his eyes for a second, and felt nothing but disgust, heartbreaking, and fear for what is to come.

09.15.01