Day 2 - The city stilled
01/9/12 12:10 PM - There was
no New York Times home delivery this morning, nor delivery of
anything else below 14th Street in Manhattan. Like yesterday,
the sky is absolutely clear except, today, for the huge
white cloud of ash and dust, hovering like a ragged pointer to
where the twin towers stood yesterday. Sirens are screaming again
outside they must have found more survivors clinging to
life. The sirens are always of ambulances heading uptown, to
the city's hospitals.
At my insistence, Susana and
I jogged around Washington Square Park again, just as we had
been doing 24 hours earlier when we heard that first crash --
in part because we needed the physical activity to break out
of stunned paralysis, and in part because we didn't want to surrender
our routine to the assailants. As we jogged, we tried to make
sense of the horror. This is what, together, we came up with.
For us and for almost all New
Yorkers, the most appalling thing is the thousands of deaths,
and that so many died in such terrifying ways trapped in
a doomed airline, consumed by flames in their offices, hurtling
out of high windows to escape the flames, buried under rubble.
The second most appalling thing is the huge economic loss, including
the loss of livelihoods for tens of thousands of people who worked
in the twin towers and in the surrounding buildings, now evacuated,
plus the temporary or permanent loss of their homes by people
living in the surrounding blocks, the loss of business for that
whole section of the city, and so on. Finally, we will notice
the absence of the towers as landmarks. I never liked them, and
I'm old enough to remember New York City without them, but I'd
come to count on them as part of the landscape, identifiers of
a city I love.
For the authors of the attack,
though, the meanings must be entirely different. They cannot
have cared about lives lost. They themselves those who
took over the four planes were deliberately sacrificing
their lives, and must have regarded that act as noble and meritorious.
If they were at all like the suicide bombers in Israel, they
were believers in a God, and imagined themselves to have immortal
souls that would be rewarded for their glorious acts. As for
the others who died, well, their souls, whether good or bad,
must be immortal too, and that same God would sort them out.
The deaths, I'm sure, were just collateral damage as far as the
attackers were concerned.
What did matter to them, then?
Humiliation, according to some premodern code barely accessible
to most of us in this city today. They cut off the two great
phalluses of America's financial power, and penetrated the vagina
of its military power.
If their aim had been to kill
as many people as possible, or if it had been to disable this
whole city, I can think of other things they might have done.
No need to specify you can imagine, too, and I don't want
to suggest anything to other crazies. Instead, they attacked
those two great symbolic structures of American power.
I was able to get the New York
Post, and we saw a lot more TV than we normally watch, and we've
seen scenes of Palestinian kids celebrating. They cannot understand
what this disaster means to us, nor how many perfectly ordinary
civilian lives have been ended or horribly disrupted. Just as
we cannot understand, and too few of us have made the effort
to understand, their enormous frustration as their homes have
been bulldozed and their schoolmates shot and their leaders assassinated
by air-borne missiles supplied by the US.
There are many lessons from this
disaster. Some of them will be the wrong ones. For example, Steve
Dunleavy in the Post this morning urges GWB to rescind Executive
Order 12333 (1976), the ban on assassinations, so we can send
people out to go kill the bastards. Dunleavy hasn't thought through
the consequences of his proposal, or probably in the heat
of the moment he doesn't care. Other lessons are more complicated
and nuanced, and will be more useful to guide us in the future.
One thing we've all learned is
how quickly and nobly the people of a great and diverse city
can come together to help each other in time of crisis. There
have been many such scenes. We have all discovered that we care
about each other, even total strangers. That's comforting to
know. Then, maybe in weeks or months, when we revert to our cantankerous,
pushy New York manners, maybe we'll still be able to recognize
our common humanity and how much we depend on one another. Another
thing that we need to learn is that the glaring disparity of
wealth and power between us and other peoples of the world does
not make us invulnerable, but turns us and our symbols into targets.
We Americans need to do everything we can to reduce these disparities,
so that next time, if somebody does something awful to us, kids
around the world will grieve with us instead of celebrating.
Day
1 - The first impact
| Day 2 - The
city stilled |
Day
3 - An cloud and pleas | Day 4 - Back to work
| Day 5 -
A final word