24 pounds of flesh

The Contentious One was struck (struck, but not killed--ho ho) by a story in the January 12 issue of Newsweek titled, "Remains of the Day." It turns out that to this day, there are people who are still collecting, storing, cataloguing, and DNA-matching pieces of flesh from the remnants of 9/11. And Mr. CI (quit referring to yourself in the third person--a sure sign of mental illness!) made special note of the following: "What's left of the terrorists--which, all told, likely amounts to less than 24 pounds of flesh and bone fragments--are sequestered at undisclosed locations in New York and Virginia. They are 'stored as evidence in a refrigerated locker in sealed containers and test tubes,' says Richard Kolko, a spokesman for the FBI." And, surprise, surprise: no one quite knows what to do with these 24 pounds of flesh and bone.

Like many other endeavors in life, this one has its gruesome qualities. I can't imagine what it's like to be a mortician, or a coroner, or a slaughterhouse worker, or an EMT, or a surgeon, where the "physicality" of things is right in your face. When Madonna sang that it's a "material world," she was right in ways that she probably didn't even realize. In the U.S., many of us are largely shielded from the "grittiness" of things--e.g., pieces of individuals strewn about in a cafe by a suicide bomber in Israel, urine and bowel movements in plain view on a sidewalk in India, chickens being killed right in front of you at a wet market in Malaysia (a personal gruesome moment!), public beheadings in Saudi Arabia, and so on. The enormity of it all leaves one with only coping strategies; as noted in other posts, I have given up trying to change the world significantly--there's just too much to change. My youthful idealism has given way to a combination of (a) resignation and (b) quiet optimism that sometime in the next couple of centuries things will get better. But right about now, all I can think about is what those 24 pounds of flesh must look like, and how ghastly and bizarre a sight it must be.