The shooting of Reagan

 I think I was in fifth grade when Reagan was shot. No, that can't be right. It must have been sixth grade, since that was the year we got a TV. And I remember the news playing the video footage, that 5 second clip played over and over, the middle few seconds the camera oscillating wildly and then settling on the group of suited men piling atop someone -- the gunman, hidden -- against a wall, one agent gun held at the ready. There was a glimpse of Reagan himself being pushed into his car and it racing away. 

In 1986 the space shuttle Challenger exploded after takeoff. I think we were watching it in our classroom! That was even more shocking. Reagan had survived, after all, even joking about it from his hospital bed. These 5 or 6 astronauts who just an hour before had been smiling and waving -- gone. Or rather, spiraled up into the sky in plumes of smoke.

In 2001, I was just getting out of the shower in the first floor of Karen's house on 111th Street when I heard a loud television or radio voice upstairs, and went up to see what was happening. But did they have a TV then? I kind of feel like Karen was listening to the radio, and then we went to look at a TV to see a tower, smoking. And then I slung my backpack over my shoulder and walked or biked to Korean class. I didn't realize both towers had been hit until someone told me. 

Such disasters are much more terrifying from a great distance. Being in New York I knew very well it was 5 miles away or so; the smoke was just visible, a little smudge of it, on the skyline that afternoon. It was terrible but distant, locatable. But when I finally called Mom and Dad on a payphone in Schermerhorn Hall, they were so worried. That was when I felt scared. Was there another plane in the air? Or more than one? Television brings everything much closer, and makes the danger more pervasive, the terror fills up all spaces in the imagination. Even though Mom and Dad knew how big New York was, they were still worried for me, Karen, and Rob. 

I had had no inkling of an assault on the Capitol last Wednesday until I clicked on a news site with 3 minutes to go before one of my back to back afternoon classes, seated at our round kitchen table, and saw: "Rioters Breach Capitol" or something like that. What?? As with 9/11, I hardly had time to process it before I had to get on with the task at hand. Unlike those previous disasters, this one had a plethora of images and videos, sometimes from the attackers themselves. I just saw a video of a camera crew being chased away by the mob. It was scary: Americans attacking Americans.

1/6 is different from the other disasters I've mentioned. It derived from a division within the society. I think Reagan had something to do with that schism, all those years ago. While those other disasters brought people into heated, animated conversation, 1/6 -- at least for me -- has not. I wondered: who is on which side? And remained silent.  

For each such disaster, strange words or names stick in the memory, details like wreckage from a downed plane: John Hinckley (enamored of Jodi Foster); Morton Thiokol and their "o rings" (believed to have frozen overnight and led to the fatal leakage of fuel); box cutters and the phrase "Let's roll." 

I didn't even think of the Pandemic because the other disasters are so sudden, so shocking: this wave of sickness is an ongoing, mammoth wave that has not even crested yet, let alone ebbed. It washes high above our heads. We gurgle far beneath. And to think that the Flu Epidemic was just over 100 years ago! I barely heard mention of it in high school. It felt so distant, so antique. I never worried such a thing would happen again. Surely our more advanced medicine and technology would prevent such a thing! 

Could I have imagined I would live through one just as big -- or even bigger? And that I would be forced to teach online (a possibility that didn't exist technologically until recently), and the kids forced to learn online? And go a year scarcely seeing any family? I am so glad Mom and Dad could visit before it got so much worse this winter! At the time it seemed bad enough. . . 

How will it feel to be free of the virus? Free to talk again, and laugh, without thinking what is coming out of one's mouth, invisible, or drifting into one's mouth! Early in the pandemic I recall lying awake one night, feeling shortness of breath, and wondering if rubbing my eyes when I got home from Walmart -- before washing my hands -- had given me Covid!