how to make the world stop turning

As a kid, I used to read constantly. I would stay up until after my college-aged, party-going neighbors were long since asleep, curled up on my twin bed with a novel to read and a Granny Smith apple to snack on. I turned myself over to the worlds of the Babysitters Club, Maniac Magee, Ramona Quimby, and others. I read about how to handle sibling rivalry and what to do if I should lose my shoe, or worse, my pants on my way to school. (It didn't matter that I lived one block from school, I was prepared to fabricate a skirt and a spare shoe out of paper towels and staples, should the need arise.) I discovered, somewhat unconsciously, how to handle the fears and misfortunes of a nine-year-old's life. But of all the books I read then, and those that I have since read, only one has ever brought me to tears. It's a book whose title and author I have long ago forgotten, but whose character I still remember clearly. He was a ten-year-old boy, the same age that I was at the time, and he lost his mother to cancer. I had always known that losing my mom would upset me, even make me cry, but now I was nothing more than bony knees and lanky arms, piled onto my bathroom floor, sobbing. Losing composure to the reality of the emptiness that would replace the one thing that had been a constant in my life since birth, and whose principal purpose in life was the betterment of mine, of the sting felt when an unknowing teacher requested to speak with my mother, the mother I no longer had. I had read about death before, about the death of pets, friends, loved ones, and yes, even parents, but no account had ever effected me in this way, had ever caused me to feel the pain of a fictional boy as if it were my own. But this one did, simply because it built a foundation upon emotions that I knew, and then extended those same emotions into the unknown, into the unknown battle of returning to school after such a loss, and of moving on while not forgetting.

It may sound trite, but it was this same principle that first drew me into my engineering textbooks as a young college student. The fundamental concepts were old adn well-known, based on the idea that something cannot be created from nothing, and that every action requires a reaction. If you push on a wall, it will push back on you. But these principles were extended into new applications, from engines to water pipes to springs systems. And it fascinated me, but as more than just knowledge needed to land a secure job. I remember learning about equal and opposite forces, and later about torque, and I wondered what it would take to stop the earth from spinning on its axis, or at least to slow it down. I performed a rough calculation and determined that if our world's population united together, (strategically placed, of course), and all walked in the same direction, we could, in fact, slow the earth's rotation. We may have to enlist our pets in the cause, just to be on the safe side, but we could do it.

There have been songs written about love that lasts until the earth stops spinning, and one now familiar song that named September 11, 2001 as the day the world stopped turning. I prefer the love songs, and not only because I'm a sucker for anything corny, but because they seem to understand how to actually make the world halt. Only by unifying our planet's entire population, from the oldest to the youngest, richest to poorest, can we conquer a feat that great. I only hope that they then change the lyrics to allow love to last longer than the earth's rotation. And while September 11 may have temporarily united our nation, it created a larger rift in the world's unity. That rift admittedly had been there for years, decades, maybe even centuries, but it did nothing to repair it, only to deepen it. Individual lives were lost, and each American's world was effected, thousands directly through the loss of a friend, brother, sister, parent, or worst of all, a child. And as I relive the grief I felt for those lives, and the panic at realizing that a friend of mine may have been very near the buildings at the time of the crash, I take comfort in knowing that suicide bombers, terrorism, and hate, however devastating, cannot bring the world at large to a halt.