Posted by Ryan on September 6, 2005, 9:34 am, in reply to "Part 15: Terror in the skies and trouble for charities" When the plane touched down on the runway back in the USA and we headed home, it was a shock to me. Honestly, it was more culture shock to me coming back than it was going. My family met me, and when we went home from the airport, we got on the Interstate, going across sections of elevated expressways. The huge, massive concrete structures, the likes of which I hadn’t seen the whole time I was away, struck me with an impact I wasn’t used to. I had lived here all my life, and I had only been away for less than a year, but now it was all hitting me in a way it never had before. Everything all around me, so industrialized, so developed; so metropolitan, sophisticated. Sleek. Shiny. Wealthy. Esthetic. Beautiful. Landscaped. Manicured. Maintained. Watered. Clean. Walking all around me were the people of an affluent population. Tall, white-skinned persons going about their busy schedules, dressed in their new, perfectly fitting clothing. Industrious. Occupied. On time, punctual. A fast-paced society. Complex people. Educated. Knowledgeable. Cosmopolitan. A huge, powerful country. Everywhere you looked, you were overwhelmed from seeing it all around you. The next day I called Elaine, my supervisor at work. She asked me how it felt being back. I told her how it was hitting me. She told me if I wanted to take an unpaid week off to rest and re-adjust, I could. She said it was normal for people to want to, when they got back from a term overseas for the first time. I did. I called Lynnette. She was glad to hear from me, but I was a little disappointed; I just didn’t sense a lot of vitality in her voice. She said she wouldn’t be able to meet with me until the next day, and then we could get together and talk. When we did, she said she had something to tell me. She told me she was sorry, but it was just going to have to end between us. Shocked, I asked her why. She said during the time when I was away, she got to thinking about how we really weren’t entirely compatible to each other. She said she thought it would be better for me and better for her if, from then on, we would just be friends. I felt a sick feeling in my stomach. She caressed my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. I asked her if there was another guy involved. She said yes, but that she had already been deciding that even before she met him. “Why didn’t you say anything to me about this when I was over there?” I asked her. “When you sent me your e-mails?” “I thought it would be better to wait till you got home and tell you in person.” Sighing, I asked her, “Does it have anything to do with—you remember that time when we were out walking by the beach, and I told you about....” She thought for a moment. “Oh.... No, no, it’s not that.” “Then what is it?” “Oh, Ryan,” she sighed. She hugged me. “I’m sorry. It’s just—we just wouldn’t—you know, I could just tell... we just weren’t... this—it just wasn’t going to work out, you know, between us. I’m sorry.” I hugged her. Tears came to my eyes. She had made up her mind. That was the end of it. I said good-bye to her, went home and lay down, devastated. No happy reunion like the one I had imagined with the girl I loved—and who I had always thought loved me. The next time I was having dinner with my mom and dad, they told me that my dad’s company had transferred him, so they were going to move to another city in another state. She said the financial stress involved in making the change meant they weren’t going to be able to help me with college tuition at the moment, and with what was going to come up next with my job, I wasn’t going to be able to handle it by myself, either. I was going to have to wait till later for my schooling to continue. My brother and sister had moved to other places with their spouses, though my brother and his wife were going to come back after a few more months. My parents told me some friends of theirs had a room available, and they said they would be willing to rent it out to me. I worked for a few weeks, and then Elaine called all of us employees in to a meeting, and told us she had some bad news for us. We already knew the company was having trouble. We knew people’s contributions to charity organizations had been dropping sharply ever since the news media had begun to publicize that money donated to Muslim charities had been used to finance the 9/11 attacks. “Our organization isn’t affiliated with any religion,” she reiterated to us, “least of all Muslim terrorism. We just feed hungry people overseas. But do the news media care about that? No. They just care about having some information to spew out to the public, even if it causes the public to stop giving to ALL charities, even the legitimate ones... including ours. “As you all know, federal law permits a small percentage of the donations people make to charity to be used to pay the salaries of the employees at charitable organizations—otherwise how is the food going to be administered to the needy?” We already knew all that. She just had to word things in a public-friendly way, just in case her words, or those of any of the higher-up members of the organization, were ever to find their way out into any news story and be published. She had to word things carefully; we have found that reckless news reporters sometimes cause catastrophes of genocide to hit parts of the world—of innocent, hungry people who are kept from getting fed because of their carelessness in how they word things in the news. “You know that that is where your salaries come from, and that if there is a substantial drop in donations, and if it stays that way for a long enough time, the company will no longer be able to keep paying its employees’ salaries. “At this point we don’t even know if the company is going to collapse or not. Your salaries are already being paid on borrowed money, and that can’t go on.” She went on, and then finally broke it to us that they were going to have to start laying people off. Bin Laden didn’t just kill the 3,000 or so people in the buildings, aboard the airplanes and at the Pentagon. He caused millions of hungry people around the world, who otherwise would have been fed, to slip off into starvation and die painful deaths because of the credibility of charity organizations being so damaged from his misuse of charity money to finance his terrorism. (The news media were also partly to blame for their deaths because of the careless way they told the public about al-Qaida and Muslim charities.) And Diaper-Face also caused me to lose my job. (I wasn’t the only person who lost his job because of 9/11.) So, at the end of the week we received our final paychecks, then I left the center and headed home, as most of us did, unemployed. I could imagine some news reporters responding to her discourse, asserting their First Amendment rights to write and publish whatever they felt like. But my response is: What does the first paragraph of America’s Bill of Rights (guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion) mean to someone in some destitute country overseas lying on the ground on the brink of death, who would have been given some food and nourishment, and would have been able to stay alive another day—or week, or month and then get back on his feet again with a living situation—but couldn’t, because some American reporter cared more about having a sensational story that day than about his life? And the First Amendment guarantees the reporter’s right! I say there should have been a law prohibiting it. That wasn’t what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the First Amendment. Call me un-American if you want, but I would agree to there being an amendment added to the First Amendment, saying something to the effect that if it is found that a corrupt Muslim charity organization has used its money to finance an act of terrorism that has left the entire country in a state of shock, and if publishing stories telling about that fact is going to endanger the lives of multitudes of destitute people around the world whose lives depend on donations being made to legitimate charity organizations, then the information may not be disclosed to the public. After that, Neil and Tom, my two best friends, told me they were going to go stay at a friend’s house in another city on the other side of the country, and they were going to start working at a job that was being made available to them over there. I could no longer find any of my friends from school. Some whom I tried to call had joined the service, some had found jobs in other places and had moved, some I just couldn’t find. I took up the offer my parents’ friends had made about renting the room at their place, and moved in. Then my parents moved across the country. First Lynnette. Then my job. Then my friends and my whole social life. Then my family. Everything. Depression began to set in.
Link: Post a response
Board Administrator
(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 7:01 pm) 
