OFF! The top of my head

By Chad Armbruster

Hello my fellow Americans. It's been almost a month now since September 11th and in that time much has occurred on our sleepy little continent. Buildings have fallen, holidays have passed (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kipper for those of you who are Jewishly challenged) and there are more flags waving around town than in the small Japanese manufacturing plant in which they were made. Now, I could go on and on for days about the events that took place on September 11th but I'm going to narrow it down to just one story that will always stand out as the most memorable moment connected to those events.

Now, patriotism at the moment seems the highest it's been in my lifetime. Everywhere you go flags wave on cars, street corners and anywhere else they can be attached. My story on the other had has to do with the most unpatriotic event to occur through out the past month. See while we were all in shock watching buildings fall and seeing the abundant loss of human life, I'm sure we all felt the need to mourn. We all felt the need to give to charities and wanted to help out anyway we could, but still for some it wasn't enough to take away the pain we were feeling. Some of us wanted to know someone in one of those buildings or on one of those planes just so we could have some black and white reasoning as to why we felt the need to mourn.

And that's where my story begins. See, for someone I know that's what she did. They told a bold face lie to anyone who would listen about how one of their relatives was on one of the flights and proceeded to absorb all the attention that was lavishly placed upon them. Now, before you place me in the category of an inconsiderate jerk that feels the needs to pick on others, only to make himself look better, I tell you that these claims that this person made were within minutes of one of the crashes. Before any information was given about any of the flight numbers, this person was running around screaming about how they had just lost a relative. And within days it was discovered that yes, this person was indeed lying about knowing anyone on one of planes and was lying even more to cover their tracks!

If you ask me lying about something this serious is one of the more childish, grotesque, ludicrous, hideous, abhorrent, offensive, repulsive, appalling, disgusting, hideous, horrid, loathsome, repugnant, atrocious, obscene, dreadful, frightful, ghastly, grim, and grisly things someone can do. (I'd like to thank http://webster.com/ for the help they gave me on that last sentence)

Now, as you can tell I don't even remotely condone the actions of this person nor do I claim to know why they said what they said. The only response I can give to this person and their actions would be that we all felt hurt and saddened by what happened. Even if we weren't directly involved in any of it we can still feel the hurt. But as someone told me "It's not stupid to get upset over this." It's ok if you feel a little down about it, it's ok if you feel a little scared about it, it's ok if you feel stressed about it and it's ok if you cried about it. But, to lie about knowing any one of those people just so you can have people's feelings and prayers focused on you and not those who really need them is in my mind inexcusable and unforgivable. I only hope that you NEVER teach one of my children.