[FFML] Re: A Moment of Reflection

I just want to say I hear you.

I'm here in New York, in the far north of Manhattan, and I didn't see any of what went on today.

And I'm very, very glad I didn't.

But I suspect that when I go to church on Sunday, there will be people who are not there any more.

Lately I've been reading a lot of fanfiction (having only recently subscribed). When I heard the news this morning I was in fact in the middle of reading the Ranma/SM crossover "Vengeance and a Half." People dying is something that we get used to in fiction...something like this shouldn't happen in real life.

But...fiction helps us deal better with the real world. It's part of what Dave Wolverton calls the "stress induction-reduction" theory of why people read. Most people don't read to escape stress. We read to experience safe stress. When plot developments keep our heartbeat up and keep us turning the pages (or scrolling down) to find out how they heck they're going to get out of this one, or when we get frustrated at how the characters can be so blind and why can't they just sit down and talk it out and realize how they really feel for each other�at these moments we're experiencing stress almost as real as if we were going through the experiences ourselves, but still stress which is safe because we can stop experiencing it at any time simply by putting the book down. And this artificially stimulated stress conditions us and allows us to better handle the stress of the real world.

I'm not ashamed to admit that many times a book or story has brought me to tears. Do I like crying? I like to say I don't. But did I put the book down and go on to something else instead? No! I kept on reading because I knew that in the end I would be satisfied. (Errrr and if I'm not, then I get ticked.)

What am I trying to say here? I guess I'm trying to say that an important part of why we read is to be more aware of the world outside what we're reading. There are a lot of things we can experience, important lessons we can learn, from simply reading and understanding the motivations in what we read. Lessons that people who don't read would need painful experiences to live through in order to learn. Not that we don't all have our own painful experiences, but reading puts us that much further along.

Peter

On Wednesday, September 12, 2001, at 01:07 AM, Steve Thesken wrote:

I don't consider myself to be a particularly eloquent man, but the events today have compelled me to step forward and express my feelings briefly, even if only through the medium of email to the recipients on this list.

I have spent the last several hours after getting home from work, doing as I'm sure many of you have been doing, watching the coverage of this act of terrorism and the response by America and the people of New York. It still feels unreal to me, that such a tragic event of this magnitude has taken place anywhere in the world, let alone here in the United States. That human beings could perpetrate such an act of cold-blooded and cowardly mass murder, using innocents as both the weapons and the targets in an act of terrorism, leaves me stunned. I cannot believe what has just happened to this country.

This is one of those defining moments in human events when history turns an unexpected corner, affecting the world for decades to come. The rules have now changed.

I am afraid, and I am angry.

I also realize that sending this email through the list could get me tempbanned, but at the moment I really don't care. Writing and reading fanfiction seems like such a small thing now. I guess, in a way, this was a wake-up call for me to be more aware of the world outside anime fandom.

Thank you for reading. I just needed to vent.
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