A blizzard screams at my window. People are walking down the center of the street. I have two dear friends, Shelagh and Brad, in from out of town. It has been so wonderful seeing them. It has been too long.
Yesterday was very intense. Shelagh, Brad and I went down to Ground Zero. I have never been. Why would I want to go see a big hole in the ground? I watched those towers fall with my own eyes. It’s a morgue. But now I am so glad I went.
We got out at the Chambers Street station; as we approached, I could feel the difference in the air. We were moving towards something important, something awful. As we climbed the steps up to the street, we could see, at the top, the black wrought-iron gates outside St. Paul’s, the church where George Washington used to pray, the church that miraculously survived intact. The gates are covered with notes, Tshirts, flags, flowers. We stood in front of the gate, there were crowds all around, and we read the notes. From all over the world.
Shelagh, who had lived in New York for many years, started to weep. And suddenly I felt the event on a whole other level. It was out of my head, and in my senses. I have numbed myself. New Yorkers move on. Every single day we deal with that hole in the skyline. But … to see it … to see it again … It was terrible. I was feeling what had happened in my heart, in my gut, my eyes filling up with tears. I took Shelagh’s arm, and held on. She cried.
We crossed the street, to where the huge hole is. The 16 acre hole. People were there taking pictures, staring through the gate. It is shocking. Shocking. To see it. There was a man there, yelling out facts about the WTC. “This isn’t a tourist site, folks … this is history! Know your facts, know your facts.”
There was the iron cross, the famous iron cross, which was discovered intact, in the middle of the rubble.
It was a jitteringly cold day. I don’t even know how to talk about yet what I felt, staring in there. I felt pride. Pride at how quickly that pile of rubble was taken care of. Unbelievable. The teamwork, the relentless attention … those men and women got the job done. All of the naysayers said right after it happened, “It is going to take years to clean up the mess…” And look. It was done in less than a year. I am very very proud of that. Proud that America is so filled with people who get the damn job done, who do what needs to be done. But still.
I was remembering the horror of that day.
Also remembering: I took a class every Monday night in 1 World Trade Center. Those buildings were not abstract to me. They were not “a symbol of American wealth and power”, they were not “a symbol of US capitalism”. They were buildings, where I went for a class, they were buildings with a shopping mall, there was a PATH station in the belly of the building where I would commute … they weren’t symbols of anything. I was there every single week, I knew the security guards by name, I had drinks at the Marriott after class … I hung out in the courtyards, I walked through the atrium (which has survived … halleluia) to catch the ferry back to Jersey. I knew my way around.
So I was trying to picture where everything used to be. And it was terrible, but it was so hard … I couldn’t get my bearings. I couldn’t remember where things used to be, where things were placed in that giant void.
There is grief in my heart. Grief. And also RAGE. I look at that big empty hole in lower Manhattan and here is what I feel: Think of how we COULD have retaliated. Think of what we are actually capable of. I feel that America was incredibly MILD in its response, compared to what we could have done. We could have dropped a nuclear bomb on Afghanistan. It is in our capability to do so. And we did NOT. We collaborated with the Northern Alliance, we fought a war there at the same time we were dropping down food onto them … And for me, being confronted, once again, with what the hell was done to us, I am amazed. I am amazed at what we did NOT do. Especially when confronted with Ground Zero.
Bastards. Bastards.
We have held back, actually. And anyone who doubts me, go the hell down to Ground Zero and look at that site with your own damn eyes, and remember the 3,000 plus people who died that day. Innocent civilians.
I’m still in a screw the world mood … and it was only reinforced by looking at the giant morgue in lower Manhattan. You think we’re a big imperialist giant? We were savagely attacked, and we have BARELY fought back yet. We are not going for revenge … if we were going for revenge we would have turned Afghanistan into a parking lot, and buried everybody there.
It was a terrible thing. A beautiful thing to see it, actually, but terrible. Terrible. We all shed many tears.
Then we went to go see “Chicago”, and tried to forget it all.
