The Radio Announcer is a Person

This is a short essay that I wrote about a personal event tied into (sorry) the attacks that occured on September 11th, 2001.

It is a stark realization that I had today. On the anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the world trade towers. I sometimes have a hard time remembering how I felt on that Tuesday morning two years ago. There was a little confusion in my mind but mostly a lot of annoyance; everybody wanted to talk about their feelings and everything. Mostly I felt that I just wanted to get over it, put it behind me and forget the entire thing happened. And this thought came to mind today:

An announcement at work made about 10:30 am this morning struck me. You see at work, there are often announcements about fire drill testing, blood drives and other miscellaneous events and concerns. The speaker is almost always the same person. He speaks in a plain voice that isn't like any announcer on NPR or something like that, it's not very alive. In the normalcy of events where I work, this same voice is reduced to an almost computer like quality. The voice itself is scratchy and has that through-the-microphone sound to it. For all we know the voice may as well be a program that the words are typed in and the message comes out. It was this voice that gave an announcement today on the anniversary of September 11th.

The message was not anything super special, mostly a recap of president bush's speech made earlier in the morning. Apparently the speech was a resolve to continue fighting terrorism. Some other thoughts and statements about how Americans will rise to the challenge and all that. Then, at the end of the recap, the announcers request for a moment of silence. There was a short pause, and then the announcer said "Thank You".

That short silence and those two final words reminded me of something very important: the announcer was a person. In the moment after his words I had felt as if I almost encountered this man, as if I saw a part of his heart while listening to his voice. All of a sudden this mechanical noise giving information less-than-crucial to daily work information had sprung to life in the uniquely human manner that us humans can do at times. I imagined that maybe he was immediately affected by the attacks. Not being far from New York City, it was possible that he had friends or even close family living and working there. But at very least it seemed he was at least moved, he at least cared and he was not the robot that I made him out to be.

In light of this experience, my initial reactions to 9/11 are understandable. It can hurt to see other humans as persons. When you see them as they are in the person-hood with all their troubles, heartaches, glories and in-betweens, you get hurt. Maybe not physically, or even emotionally, but on some level your heart goes out to them and it breaks, it breaks and it hurts. And in response to this heart breaking for our fellow man we try to protect ourselves, and we do it by turning these people into mere faces, and mere voices mostly for the sake of our own comfort, but also because it's just easier. In our minds, the ones around us lose their individuality, they take up the space that we want to use, they make us late by being in front of us, they cause long lines at stores, and they always seem to be causing all those problems.

However, I would alert the readers or listeners to this very dangerous behavior that may occur in ones own life. The warning is that the engagement in this behavior would actually make that person also less human themselves, forgetting about the relationships that they were created to have in order to become more self-seeking and selfish monsters. This leads to a downward cycle where people treat each other more and more inhumanely until finally we hate one another and resort to killing each other over seemingly unimportant things. Wait, we already do that.