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Letter to the Palace Developers Group By Clifford Smith

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A letter written to the Palace Developers Group by Clifford Smith, also known as City Slicker.

Dear Friends and Family,

I apologize in advance should what you now read causes you any upset or distress, but this is something I must say. Delete this or save this for a later time if you are vulnerable or in particular crisis in your own life.

As many of you know, and others have surmised, I am having a major problem emotionally resulting from reaction to the holocaust in NYC and Washington D.C.

Let me explain my feelings as this may be helpful to you and therapeutic for me.

I am aghast and shocked beyond description with the events recently. My feelings range from extreme sadness to extreme anger.

Obviously, I am saddened beyond ability to explain over the deaths and destruction by this abominable terrorist act. That any human being(s) could even contemplate such an act is beyond my ability to imagine, much less actually accomplish it.

Yes, I am angry. I feel a deep anger, approaching a hatred, for the people who would attempt this disaster, or who would encourage or support them. I want nothing less than a complete and total reckoning of this event against the people who were directly involved and are supportive of this atrocity.

Yes, I am frustrated. I feel frustration that I am unable to be of any beneficial assistance in this effort. I wish I could be in NYC helping to find survivors of this tragedy. I feel so ineffective.

But where I am frustrated most is not being able to reach out and hold all those that I love. I have visited, and been visited by, my immediate family. I have held each of my children, grandchildren and my mother and have had the opportunity to tell each of them how much I love and cherish them.

My brother and my father are in Missouri, far from my reach here in Ohio. But I have shared my love with them as woefully limited as it is.

My friends, mostly avatars on a computer screen, are few that I have been able to meet and share a personal closeness. But that blessing has taken on a new specialness for those I have had the opportunity to tell face-to-face how much they mean to me as a human being and a friend.

Now I find another need, a need to see and be with these people again, and the need to be with and see the people I have yet to meet. I have a burning need within myself to be able to express in my own words, in my own voice, just how important and special you are to me. I need to hold you in my arms and express my true deep love for you and tell you how much I care.

My frustration grows knowing that many of you are far from me geographically. Some, if economics and geography were unexpectedly overcome, could again be within my arms. Some are much too far away for me to ever contemplate being able to reach under my own resources. I am extremely frustrated in this need to be able to share my feelings with you in person.

I am deeply concerned how each of you is affected by the events of the past few days. I am frustrated that I cannot ease and console the feelings and emotions you are experiencing. I wish I had a magic eraser that I could apply to erase what has happened. If this is a wish were not possible after rubbing a magic lamp, I would then wish that however it is affecting you that those effects would be eased or removed. Alas, I have no such eraser or lamp available to me.

I am left with only one way to express this....here in this expression of love and concern in simple electronic text. I have shed countless tears for the victims of this catastrophe. I have shed countless more in longing to be with you, my special and abiding friends.

If, after being online with you, you find I am suddenly unavailable, chances are that I am sharing a closeness with those I can so share, or I am having to remove myself from the frustrations of not being able to do the same thing with you. I may be hugging you via proxy with someone nearby just to be able to imagine, with the physical sensations, that I am in fact hugging you.

I cannot express just how much you have enriched my life by just being associated with you. For those I have been able to enjoy a close moment with you in person, in your home or mine, know those feelings have exploded within me and I cherish the privilege and opportunity with which I have been graced to have been able to be with you.

I have one request. Let us all take our petty differences, our petty squabbles, our differences of opinion and set them aside for the duration. Let us embrace that we do have each other and cherish the friendship, love and camaraderie that we share, online and in real life, with all those who touch our lives. May we grab each thread of friendship and bind each other together with that thread until we have a cocoon of love and support holding us all together, as a Family that the world has never seen.

May our differences in religion, skin tone, language, body structure and everything else be felt as a new offering of experience to enhance us and not something to distance us from one another. With each person I have met, no matter in what context, I have been enhanced by their differences as those differences were pieces of experience and life I could not have obtained on my own. Let us savor and enjoy these differences, not avoid them.

May whatever deity, power or energy you consider supreme take you in it's power and protect you from as much affect from this as possible. May we all be safe and protected from further hurt and anguish.

UNITED is the first word in my country's name. UNITED we stand! UNITED we shall be! UNITED we shall overcome!

.---. .----------
/ __ / ------
/ / (..)/ -----
////// ' / ` --- City Slicker
//// / // : : --- a.k.a.
// / / /` '-- Cliff Smith
// //..\
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