Thursday, September 27, 2001
Look, Ma, we still have the Statue of Liberty
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
"Unity Square," 9/20/01. Under a leaden September sky, on the ninth day of New York’s recovery, I revisited our Union Square Park, which had become the memorial for the nearly six thousand New Yorkers lost in the WTC tragedy. Rain was threatening, and I wanted to record some of the sentiments my fellow citizens had expressed about the slaughter of the innocents. The hundreds of yards of mementos in Union Square Park had shrunk somewhat, and there were people who, to my horror, were taking them down. My concern turned to relief when it was explained that volunteers were taking them to a Parks Department truck, to be saved for a future museum, and I pitched in.
The memorial candles in some twenty groupings throughout the park that had burned all night had lost some of their brightness in the morning light, but the sentiments expressed were strong, projecting gratitude and confidence The hundred small flags were standing up well, and people on their way to work were dropping off fresh bunches of flowers and lighting new candles, disregarding the threat of the impending rain.
The memorials, posted by the thousands of New Yorkers and visitors who created this never-to-be-forgotten event, ranged from elaborate six-foot elevations on which people taped or wrote messages, to notebook pages taped to the fencing wires. Kids from grade school classes in New Rochelle, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had created beautiful boards of drawings poems and sayings..Kiwis from New Zealand had two boards of letters, praising the inhabitants of this island. Heart-wrenching were the Xeroxed "Have you seen.." posters with pictures of the missing, loved ones at weddings, on the beach, relaxing with family or hugging children. Death would be too mild a punishment for the monsters who conceived this tragedy, a nearby poster proclaimed. My sentiments, exactly.
Support our troops...United we stand...Solidarity...never forget our fallen heroes...NYFD, we love you...We miss you. Those were the main sentiments, interspersed with expressions of strength and expectations of victory. Where is God in the midst of tragedy, a question asked ever so often, was answered by lines from the Bible, the Bahaai Book of Prayers and quotes from Mahatma Gandhi (...goodness and truth will prevail...), Kahlil Gibran, and, inadequately but beautifully, Lynyrd Skynyrd (...If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?...). . Many printed signs dealt with prejudice - Safety begins at home, protect your Arab-Muslim neighbors - although there were very few direct accusations against terrorists that specified ethnic or religious bias. Osama bin Laden was identified in Dead or Alive and Wanted posters. Most curious was a small e-mail letter offering to get rid of bin Laden without body-bags or bombs, simply by having people concentrate, at 6 and 11PM EST, on the picture of the terrorist, imagining him consumed by flames. It would be death by ESP, a potent force, if sufficient numbers participate, the letter proclaimed.
Reluctantly following the call to duty, I abandoned the park and went to work, my second day. The IRT train would not stop at Wall Street, and the day before I had gone past that station, to peaceful Whitehall Street. Today I wanted to see the dirt and the smoke firsthand, and exited early, at Fulton Street. The station choked one with the overwhelming acrid odor we had felt at home only occasionally, when the wind from the disaster area turned from northeasterly, torturing the downtown and Brooklyn, to southerly, blowing uptown. Coming out of the underground, I was directly in sight of what had been the No 1 WTC, jagged edges pointing skyward, above the broken windows of the Borders bookstore. The view on CNN had not prepared me for the shock and horror of the actual thing. Fortunately I could not stop. Police along the sidewalk urged passerby to hurry, there was no gawking, and tourists with cameras held them high, shooting on the fly, above the heads of people and tops of parked rescue cars, not a common sight on Broadway. I was directly walking the length of the Red Line, looking into the Ground Zero.
The next stop was at No1 Liberty Street, where the windows of Brooks Brothers were grimy but the building, although often bruited to be on the verge of collapse, seemed to be standing firm. Here the fingers of a jagged multi-story wall of No2 WTC stuck into the sky, like a giant toy. When I came back after hours, with a borrowed camera, it looked almost pretty, more like a honeycomb, with the sunlight from the West illuminating the edges of the empty windows. The fires underneath had risen again, towards nightfall, and the area looked like a gigantic boiling cauldron. A friendly policeman explained that the efforts to remove the debris exposed some smoldering fires and brought them to life. During the day I had seen giant flatbed trucks taking giant twisted girders up Water Street, on their roundabout way to be smelted back into useful forms. It is a mightmare to contemplate what harm four idealogues with box cutters who are willing to die can do to the entire world.
Moving on at a fast pace, I saw buildings splattered by the gray mud that covered everything, gray store windows with defiant sentiments scratched through the dirt, porters trying to wash off the gunk-covered sidewalks. A grizzled veteran in what had once been a WWII army uniform was slowly pushing along a small upright cart of souvenirs and loudly berating the demons responsible for the carnage. "God don’t do s---t like that," he repeated over and over. Exactly my sentiments.
Slaughters committed in the name of faith are blasphemies, whether committed by the Crusaders (President Bush has got to watch out for this offensive word, he already inadvertently blurted it out once, and the BBC made a big thing of it), Hussein and his whirling dervishes, or auto-da-fe administered by a Catholic order. Today, when religious tolerance is prevalent, radical reactionaries should be truly anachronisms, yet they prevail in Ireland, Algeria, Egypt, the Philippines, and especially in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and of course Afghanistan, countries where sectarian terrorists operate. Our adversaries would like to taint us with an anti-Moslem crusader image, a method to set all of the world’s 1.1 billion touchy Islam adherents against us. One would hope that more of the American Muslims would speak out loudly, condemning the terrorist fanatics in public. A question raised on the Internet to this effect elicited answers that indicate the American adherents of Mohammed might be intimidated by their warlike brethren. Can this be, even in this, the land of freedom and justice, where Howard Stern can hold forth with impunity.
It took the giant bull in front of the Bowling Green Post Office to snap me out of the maudlin mood, this time. In front, its giant horns were elongated with American flags, while the right rear haunch bore a poster from the Post Office - Wanted, one of top ten criminals - with bin Laden’s mug shot right on it. That was sort of appropriate. As to the heading for this article, it was overheard in a discussion group, recited by the proud Mom of a six-year old. Out of the mouths of babies....
.
"Unity Square," 9/20/01. Under a leaden September sky, on the ninth day of New York’s recovery, I revisited our Union Square Park, which had become the memorial for the nearly six thousand New Yorkers lost in the WTC tragedy. Rain was threatening, and I wanted to record some of the sentiments my fellow citizens had expressed about the slaughter of the innocents. The hundreds of yards of mementos in Union Square Park had shrunk somewhat, and there were people who, to my horror, were taking them down. My concern turned to relief when it was explained that volunteers were taking them to a Parks Department truck, to be saved for a future museum, and I pitched in.
The memorial candles in some twenty groupings throughout the park that had burned all night had lost some of their brightness in the morning light, but the sentiments expressed were strong, projecting gratitude and confidence The hundred small flags were standing up well, and people on their way to work were dropping off fresh bunches of flowers and lighting new candles, disregarding the threat of the impending rain.
The memorials, posted by the thousands of New Yorkers and visitors who created this never-to-be-forgotten event, ranged from elaborate six-foot elevations on which people taped or wrote messages, to notebook pages taped to the fencing wires. Kids from grade school classes in New Rochelle, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had created beautiful boards of drawings poems and sayings..Kiwis from New Zealand had two boards of letters, praising the inhabitants of this island. Heart-wrenching were the Xeroxed "Have you seen.." posters with pictures of the missing, loved ones at weddings, on the beach, relaxing with family or hugging children. Death would be too mild a punishment for the monsters who conceived this tragedy, a nearby poster proclaimed. My sentiments, exactly.
Support our troops...United we stand...Solidarity...never forget our fallen heroes...NYFD, we love you...We miss you. Those were the main sentiments, interspersed with expressions of strength and expectations of victory. Where is God in the midst of tragedy, a question asked ever so often, was answered by lines from the Bible, the Bahaai Book of Prayers and quotes from Mahatma Gandhi (...goodness and truth will prevail...), Kahlil Gibran, and, inadequately but beautifully, Lynyrd Skynyrd (...If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?...). . Many printed signs dealt with prejudice - Safety begins at home, protect your Arab-Muslim neighbors - although there were very few direct accusations against terrorists that specified ethnic or religious bias. Osama bin Laden was identified in Dead or Alive and Wanted posters. Most curious was a small e-mail letter offering to get rid of bin Laden without body-bags or bombs, simply by having people concentrate, at 6 and 11PM EST, on the picture of the terrorist, imagining him consumed by flames. It would be death by ESP, a potent force, if sufficient numbers participate, the letter proclaimed.
Reluctantly following the call to duty, I abandoned the park and went to work, my second day. The IRT train would not stop at Wall Street, and the day before I had gone past that station, to peaceful Whitehall Street. Today I wanted to see the dirt and the smoke firsthand, and exited early, at Fulton Street. The station choked one with the overwhelming acrid odor we had felt at home only occasionally, when the wind from the disaster area turned from northeasterly, torturing the downtown and Brooklyn, to southerly, blowing uptown. Coming out of the underground, I was directly in sight of what had been the No 1 WTC, jagged edges pointing skyward, above the broken windows of the Borders bookstore. The view on CNN had not prepared me for the shock and horror of the actual thing. Fortunately I could not stop. Police along the sidewalk urged passerby to hurry, there was no gawking, and tourists with cameras held them high, shooting on the fly, above the heads of people and tops of parked rescue cars, not a common sight on Broadway. I was directly walking the length of the Red Line, looking into the Ground Zero.
The next stop was at No1 Liberty Street, where the windows of Brooks Brothers were grimy but the building, although often bruited to be on the verge of collapse, seemed to be standing firm. Here the fingers of a jagged multi-story wall of No2 WTC stuck into the sky, like a giant toy. When I came back after hours, with a borrowed camera, it looked almost pretty, more like a honeycomb, with the sunlight from the West illuminating the edges of the empty windows. The fires underneath had risen again, towards nightfall, and the area looked like a gigantic boiling cauldron. A friendly policeman explained that the efforts to remove the debris exposed some smoldering fires and brought them to life. During the day I had seen giant flatbed trucks taking giant twisted girders up Water Street, on their roundabout way to be smelted back into useful forms. It is a mightmare to contemplate what harm four idealogues with box cutters who are willing to die can do to the entire world.
Moving on at a fast pace, I saw buildings splattered by the gray mud that covered everything, gray store windows with defiant sentiments scratched through the dirt, porters trying to wash off the gunk-covered sidewalks. A grizzled veteran in what had once been a WWII army uniform was slowly pushing along a small upright cart of souvenirs and loudly berating the demons responsible for the carnage. "God don’t do s---t like that," he repeated over and over. Exactly my sentiments.
Slaughters committed in the name of faith are blasphemies, whether committed by the Crusaders (President Bush has got to watch out for this offensive word, he already inadvertently blurted it out once, and the BBC made a big thing of it), Hussein and his whirling dervishes, or auto-da-fe administered by a Catholic order. Today, when religious tolerance is prevalent, radical reactionaries should be truly anachronisms, yet they prevail in Ireland, Algeria, Egypt, the Philippines, and especially in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and of course Afghanistan, countries where sectarian terrorists operate. Our adversaries would like to taint us with an anti-Moslem crusader image, a method to set all of the world’s 1.1 billion touchy Islam adherents against us. One would hope that more of the American Muslims would speak out loudly, condemning the terrorist fanatics in public. A question raised on the Internet to this effect elicited answers that indicate the American adherents of Mohammed might be intimidated by their warlike brethren. Can this be, even in this, the land of freedom and justice, where Howard Stern can hold forth with impunity.
It took the giant bull in front of the Bowling Green Post Office to snap me out of the maudlin mood, this time. In front, its giant horns were elongated with American flags, while the right rear haunch bore a poster from the Post Office - Wanted, one of top ten criminals - with bin Laden’s mug shot right on it. That was sort of appropriate. As to the heading for this article, it was overheard in a discussion group, recited by the proud Mom of a six-year old. Out of the mouths of babies....
.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 2:58 AM 
