encoded notions

What was I doing five years ago today?

It was my first month of college life, and I was between classes on a typical Tuesday. I had just walked back to my dorm room and I had about an hour to kill before my class in Multivariable Calculus. Since it was my third week on campus, I had only cursorily met a bunch of the people on my dorm floor. One of those people was the guy who lived across the hall from me: Dan.

As RIT shared a campus with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, there were always a great deal of deaf & hard-of-hearing students on campus. Dan was one of them.

I didn’t have a television of my own, but my roommate had a small one sitting on top of his cube fridge. I wasn’t quite the kind of person who would watch the news, read newspapers, or follow a diverse set of websites to catch up with the world. Slashdot and various Google searches were my primary source of current information.

On this Tuesday afternoon, I had planned to do putter around on the internet until my next class. On that day I presume a great many people had similar, everyday plans. Plans to go out to a restaurant. Plans to have birthday parties. Plans to watch some Wheel of Fortune. Plans to have a glass of wine.

But plans are made on the assumption that the future is predictable.

Shortly after propping my door open, Dan came across the hall and approached me. Since I did not know sign language he simply tuned my roommate’s television to some channel—any channel would do. Then, he motioned for me to come out into the hall and he scribbled some brief words on my room’s exterior whiteboard: “2 planes flew into the World Trade Center & 1 into the Pentagon.”

I looked at him with an expression of doubt mixed with surprise. Really? Was he joking?

I went to watch the looped video recycle on the television. Sure enough, he wasn’t making it up. I sat there until it came time for my calculus class.

It was obvious that there was nothing that I could do about what had happened. The epicenters were hundreds of miles away from me. Watching the television further would’ve only made me feel depressed and helpless. It was only going to be a matter of time before the numbing shock wore off on a national scale and then rationality would be replaced by knee-jerk reactionists—crazies with their own agendas to promote (like the people who “interpret” the works of Nostradamus in the context of today and predict that the world will end in N number of years).

All this was going to happen, and here I am just a freshman college student who wants to learn about cool stuff.

For me the only logical thing to do was to go to class. Business as usual. Learning about vectors, scalar fields, and partial-derivatives would at least get me thinking about something a bit more manageable. I think my professor said something similar at the start of that class.

I really haven’t tried to keep up with the news on the “War on Terror” since that horribly manipulative marketing phrase was coined. Anytime I’d catch a few minutes of a news broadcast or a State of the Union address it would make me feel sad, depressed, or unnecessarily scared. It wasn’t until I started watching The Daily Show on a regular basis that I could bear to process the news.

Now that five years have gone by, we have to live with some of the poorer decisions made during emotional times.

I hope that in the next five years we halt our approach to the Orwellian world of 1984 and backpedal to a point where privacy and personal freedoms are more important than safety and security again.