I can find a video clip online of Pearl Harbor, the detonation of the first atomic bomb, anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails in Athens, tanks in Tiananmen Square, oil wells burning in Iraq, and people beating up strangers and posting it online as "art."

Your flipbook is a physical reminder that September 11, 2001 is, truly, no different than any other historical event, regardless of my own presence in New York on that day. Hopefully, owning a tiny corporeal "video" that I can play for myself with or without an Internet connection, no matter where I am in the world, will remind me of my place, or lack thereof, in history.

I wrote to Alexis "I am asking for a short essay, around 500 words. I promise to send you my art in exchange for more of your words. Please continue on with what you where saying. Where you in New York city on 9-11-2001?"

I don't have any more words concerning September 11. More than enough have already been spoken about it, when in truth the day was no more important or significant than any other. Nor, of course, was it less so. Should it matter to me only because I was there? Does that make the Vietnam war less meaningful as an event - the fact that I wasn't alive yet and thus could not experience it? Or should I consider all events that happened in/to my country be important...thus giving Vietnam its due, but leaving out, say, Rwandan genocides? If I lived in Washington DC when the sniper shootings were happening, and, yes, even laughed at the worry of my family or the presence of the Guardian Angels, does that event deserve more reflection than November 17, 1973? April 26? Should I force the world to listen to *me* because *I* was briefly touched by a tragedy, and damn them their own?

Alexis Turner
http://www.redheadedstepchild.org

June 20, 2006