Family, extended and otherwise:
I'm sorry I've been out of touch.
As you might imagine, in order to maintain composure and sanity, I've let myself become a machine, with short lists of tasks and functions to spend the waking hours. Via the TV, internet, the occasional newspaper, information is sucked in without much processing or reaction, just accumulation.
Past the initial shock, watching the towers burn and crumble, I've felt very little. I'm maintaining while this city, this crossroads of the known universe, is shut down a few degrees north of full-on martial law, with armed officers and soldiers on every corner. I've thought very little of it; if anything, through my filters, I've felt mild irritation at the transit inconveniences.
Unfazed, I have made soup and grilled cheese for the past two nights.
Untroubled, I have slept through the endless sirens of ambulances passing almost overhead on the Manhattan Bridge.
Knowing a fact and feeling the reality it represents are distinctly different experiences, and it is only today, on the third day, that my emotions have begun to creep out from under denial's rock.
My reaction is prismatic; I am simultaneously:
-proud as hell of my neighbors, who have turned out by the thousands upon thousands to donate blood, time, money, sweat, and endless compassion for those directly affected by this disaster. New Yorkers are a tough lot, with more heart than our 'Fuck You' reputation would bely. The violence visted upon us is more than matched by the love we've responded to it with.
-impressed with the capability, strength and sensitivity our mayor, whose policies and performances I've seldom agreed with. Rudy Guiliani, who've I've often felt to be a despicable tyrant, has risen to the occasion better than we could have hoped for, and I'm very grateful for whatever he's made of under these conditions.
-scared to my core with every new bomb threat that comes in. The rumor mill is relentless with talk of Tuesday's attack being but phase one of a much larger assault on the U.S., the next involving chemical and biological warfare amid more sneak attacks. I know that worrying will do little good, but it's inevitable in human nature.
-far less microcosmic in my vision. A friend, who was all too close to ground zero at the time of the attacks, forwarded a list I'm on the following URL, which I feel the need to circulate as well. It's an eye-opener, puts a lot of what we already know and dismiss in perspective:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,551036,00.html...I then read the following article written by someone who represents all-too-broad a cross-section of the U.S., and my fear at further attacks are replaced by fear and loathing of the attitudes and potential actions of the common American reactionary:
http://www.nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter091301.shtml...I consider the international witch hunt for those responsible for Tuesday's attacks, realize that our rage, pain and confusion are all-too-easily mobilized into further violence, on scales both large and small. It's just as likely that my local Arabian-American shopkeeper gets lynched as it is that our Great Nation turns Afghanistan into a parking lot, and I pray that neither possibilities come to fruition.
-determined, to go on living as a New Yorker. I know a growing number folks who have fled town out of fear and horror-driven survivalism. While I understand their actions, I cannot bring myself to do likewise. For my end it would only give our attackers more of a victory...and until something other than the smoke of the fallen WTC touches my building, I will continue to live in and love the city I've chosen to call home.
I currently share my loft apartment with a jew and a muslim, and that's a living testament to the fact that love is bigger than religion, that humanism is bigger than patriotism.
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The best thing most people can do, beyond giving anything they can to ease the suffering of the victims of these acts, is to maintain their own lives as usual. I will not offer the military my services, like so many overzealous youths and their outraged veteran fathers. I will not use my passion to foster hate; the last thing we need, from the most intimate community to the world in general, is to feed this fire with that most destructive fuel.
My greatest hope for the nation at this most pivotal of moments is that, from the highest elected official down to the pimple-faced high school freshman, we are forced into a new age of awareness. Nothing like a national invasion to get Joe Average hip to the global scene...to find that nobody is innocent.
I am now going to mount up on my bike and venture over to Manhattan, donate some food, (I can't give blood). Then I'm heading over to Tomkins Square to sit with my smokes, a pad of paper, a pen, and, under the advice of my beloved Aunt, some Puccini.
La Boheme lives on in Greenwich Village...I'm sorry I've been out of touch.
Yours in times of mad love and war,
Minerva
