These essays, written by John Updike and Susan Sontag, were both in response to the tragic happenings of September 11th, 2001. The essays themselves were both very well written, but the Updike essay and the Sontag essay had complete opposite messages.
The Updike essay talked about how it felt to experience such a horrendous event. He explains how the whole event doesn't ever seem quite real, that television clouds the truth and dulls the senses. "... there persisted the notion that, as on television, this was not quite real; it could be fixed" I think this is typical human behavior, something tremendously bad happens and our brain fails to wrap around the occurrence, so we imagine it wasn't as bad as it seems and that we can all sleep peacefully and in the morning everything will be right as rain. In my opinion, his essay is very childish and immature. Instead of face the reality of the World Trade Center collapsing, killing thousands, he'd rather remark on how there seems to be a lack of planes in the air. How can such an event slip right through his mind and not even strike any chord of thought more than, "we have only the mundane duties of survivors -- to pick up the pieces, to bury the dead, to take more precautions, to go on living." It infuriates me to think that we can witness such a catastrophe and move on saying, 'Well, I guess no one is traveling by plane any time soon... let's go have lunch.' The notion that it will all be just peachy if we just get back to normal is naive and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone older than seven.
Susan Sontag's essay, on the other hand, makes complete and total sense to me. The American populous can't just be herded around like a bunch of blind mules. Calling our enemies "cowards" and throwing out propaganda like "Our country is strong", "America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken." over and over isn't going to fix what happened. People need to be able to see for themselves and not be shrouded by the government's swaddling. She makes some excellent points, we need to not dwell on what happened, but rather find the problem and fix it. She states, " Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together." There is a time and a place for grieving, and there is a time and a place to buckle down and fix our country. Ms. Sontag is right, the time for grieving and morale boosting is over. Now is the time to fix our country.
--A_Walk
I agree that Updike didn't focus on the "reality" of the World Trade center collapsing, but I think that most people who are reading this article probably already know what happened. I liked how he focused on some of the less publicized things, because it gave a different insight on, for example, the lack of planes and how these little things are making it even stranger. I also liked how Sontag wrote about the government's "swaddling" and how she felt that we shouldn't all "be stupid together."
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