16 September 2010
Beating CNN to the punch: J. Breyer on the 1st Amendment
Supreme Court Justice Breyer weighs in on the Quran-burning scandal and the Constitutional 1st Amendment Right to freedom of expression here on CNN...about three hours after I did so myself.
15 September 2010
Holy dogshit: someone who actually might have read and/or studied the Quran
Saw this in the New York Times today.
Agree or disagree, at least this guy did SOME homework, making him infinitely better qualified to speak than the endless talking heads who ignore the opinions of actual Muslims (I'm talking about the normal people: your son's friend at school, your daughter's math teacher, your neighbor's doctor...not the radical terrorists that make up less than one percent of the world's Muslim population) or never got past the front (or rather back) cover (for those that don't understand that last bit, you need to go ahead and Wikipedia "Arabic language").
Not-in-chronological-order Suras, reference to Judaism and Christianity to include Moses and Jesus (and not in bad ways)...I'm just going to go ahead and say "I told you so." Thank-you Professor Reza (the prof who taught my Islamic Law class in law school) for saving me from being an ignorant asshole. I can still be an asshole, but I try to at least be a well-read asshole.
Forgive my fervor: I just really hate dumb people. It's a character flaw that I fully disclaim.
And of course, due to the political nature of this topic, I also fully disclaim the fact that this opinion is mine alone, and not representative of the people I work for. If you didn't understand that, please go to the very top of this page, or the right side of this page: it's on here twice to make sure there is no misunderstanding.
Fuck it, that brings up another point. As part of our FACCC small group setup, our instructor makes one of us brief the day's news at the beginning of each day (yeah, it's essentially Current Events for grown-ups). Obviously the crazy I-want-to-burn-Qurans guy in Florida has been a headliner for the last couple weeks, and much has been made about General Petraeus' decision to speak publicly on the topic.
Traditionally, it has been considered a faux pas for uniformed military personnel to speak out on political issues. As a military, we are considered to be a military means to a political end: an extension of political will at the nation-state level. Consequently, there is a perceived conflict of interest: an attitude that is fundamentally rooted in our rock-steady belief in military subordination to civilian authority. No one will ever contest that.
Soldiers talk about politics all the time: within the confines of the barracks or in their homes. To think otherwise is naive. To demand otherwise is foolish. Rigorous intellectual discourse and debate is what stimulates or catalyzes learning and discovery. The words I commit to this page might not be sanctioned or approved by the institution I volunteer my life for, but any debate or thought it stimulates is a positive contribution.
Since the military is an instrument of national policy, it is critical that our military leaders be in tune and in touch with the pulse of America. This is now encroaching on another blog topic that I've been piecing together ever since I had a drunken conversation at a Buffalo Wild Wings with two fellow Army officers a couple weeks ago, but the basic premise is such: as American society's moral values/ideals/goals shift over time, our military institution must be flexible and shift with society. This is one of the greatest challenges facing senior leadership in the modern, technologically rich and information-saturated, flatter global environment. A directly related challenge is whether we should recognize the emergence of a warrior class in today's America (also another blog topic for another day).
But I digress. GEN Petraeus decided to speak out on the Quran-burning affair. Outwardly, it was justified by an undoubtedly genuine concern for the welfare of our servicemembers currently in-theater. And nearly every government official (with half a brain) has been careful to underscore the fact that crazy-Florida-guy does have a Constitutional right to burn Qurans if he wants to (remember, the 1st Amendment doesn't protect only the speech we like, it protects all speech: even unpopular or loathsome forms of expression).
But perhaps this has also been a signal of a shift. Not only a shift in senior leader's TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) regarding interaction with the media, but maybe a signal to America of a different United States military. All of this comes amidst a sea of debate and national turmoil over salient political issues: burning Qurans, mosques near Ground Zero, Don't Ask Don't Tell. And now we have a four-star general pleading against the burning of holy books, senior Pentagon leadership saying maybe it's okay for gays to serve in the military...all in the public arena.
Maybe I'm jumping at nothing, but we are a professional Army that has been engaged in continuous combat for nearly a decade: no Army sans conscripts/draftees has ever done that before in American history. Today's military institution is profoundly different, and has undergone more change and transformation in the last ten years than it did in the preceding half-century. So maybe this is the flip-side to the arguments that denounce the evolution of a warrior class. Who knows. I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop now.
Agree or disagree, at least this guy did SOME homework, making him infinitely better qualified to speak than the endless talking heads who ignore the opinions of actual Muslims (I'm talking about the normal people: your son's friend at school, your daughter's math teacher, your neighbor's doctor...not the radical terrorists that make up less than one percent of the world's Muslim population) or never got past the front (or rather back) cover (for those that don't understand that last bit, you need to go ahead and Wikipedia "Arabic language").
Not-in-chronological-order Suras, reference to Judaism and Christianity to include Moses and Jesus (and not in bad ways)...I'm just going to go ahead and say "I told you so." Thank-you Professor Reza (the prof who taught my Islamic Law class in law school) for saving me from being an ignorant asshole. I can still be an asshole, but I try to at least be a well-read asshole.
Forgive my fervor: I just really hate dumb people. It's a character flaw that I fully disclaim.
And of course, due to the political nature of this topic, I also fully disclaim the fact that this opinion is mine alone, and not representative of the people I work for. If you didn't understand that, please go to the very top of this page, or the right side of this page: it's on here twice to make sure there is no misunderstanding.
Fuck it, that brings up another point. As part of our FACCC small group setup, our instructor makes one of us brief the day's news at the beginning of each day (yeah, it's essentially Current Events for grown-ups). Obviously the crazy I-want-to-burn-Qurans guy in Florida has been a headliner for the last couple weeks, and much has been made about General Petraeus' decision to speak publicly on the topic.
Traditionally, it has been considered a faux pas for uniformed military personnel to speak out on political issues. As a military, we are considered to be a military means to a political end: an extension of political will at the nation-state level. Consequently, there is a perceived conflict of interest: an attitude that is fundamentally rooted in our rock-steady belief in military subordination to civilian authority. No one will ever contest that.
Soldiers talk about politics all the time: within the confines of the barracks or in their homes. To think otherwise is naive. To demand otherwise is foolish. Rigorous intellectual discourse and debate is what stimulates or catalyzes learning and discovery. The words I commit to this page might not be sanctioned or approved by the institution I volunteer my life for, but any debate or thought it stimulates is a positive contribution.
Since the military is an instrument of national policy, it is critical that our military leaders be in tune and in touch with the pulse of America. This is now encroaching on another blog topic that I've been piecing together ever since I had a drunken conversation at a Buffalo Wild Wings with two fellow Army officers a couple weeks ago, but the basic premise is such: as American society's moral values/ideals/goals shift over time, our military institution must be flexible and shift with society. This is one of the greatest challenges facing senior leadership in the modern, technologically rich and information-saturated, flatter global environment. A directly related challenge is whether we should recognize the emergence of a warrior class in today's America (also another blog topic for another day).
But I digress. GEN Petraeus decided to speak out on the Quran-burning affair. Outwardly, it was justified by an undoubtedly genuine concern for the welfare of our servicemembers currently in-theater. And nearly every government official (with half a brain) has been careful to underscore the fact that crazy-Florida-guy does have a Constitutional right to burn Qurans if he wants to (remember, the 1st Amendment doesn't protect only the speech we like, it protects all speech: even unpopular or loathsome forms of expression).
But perhaps this has also been a signal of a shift. Not only a shift in senior leader's TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) regarding interaction with the media, but maybe a signal to America of a different United States military. All of this comes amidst a sea of debate and national turmoil over salient political issues: burning Qurans, mosques near Ground Zero, Don't Ask Don't Tell. And now we have a four-star general pleading against the burning of holy books, senior Pentagon leadership saying maybe it's okay for gays to serve in the military...all in the public arena.
Maybe I'm jumping at nothing, but we are a professional Army that has been engaged in continuous combat for nearly a decade: no Army sans conscripts/draftees has ever done that before in American history. Today's military institution is profoundly different, and has undergone more change and transformation in the last ten years than it did in the preceding half-century. So maybe this is the flip-side to the arguments that denounce the evolution of a warrior class. Who knows. I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop now.
11 September 2010
After the fall
I can't remember how long it took to see my father in person. Days, maybe weeks.
The day of, it took me hours to get a hold of my dad on the phone. He worked on John St, just a few blocks away. I would find out much later on that he was scheduled to attend a meeting in the towers that day: he was an engineer who dealt with the Port Authority routinely (and the PANYNJ had its main offices in the WTC on the high floors of one of the towers: sixty- or seventy-something). He was running late that morning, and his tardiness likely saved his life.
It was early afternoon -- maybe. The towers had been gone for hours now.
I watched as people passed me on the street, heading north. Some covered in the ashy white dust. The cellphones had been jammed since ten o'clock that morning. Landlines were worse: calls to my dad's office didn't go to his message box, but rather to an automated message that seemed to imply the nonexistence of the number I was trying to dial.
I remember seeing live footage on the news: street scene from somewhere in the city. Showed a guy on a Nextel, talking. It woke me from my daze. I stopped every guy in a suit. "Do you have a Nextel phone? Do you have a Nextel? I need to make a call."
Finally one guy actually stopped. Maybe he was talking to his wife or girlfriend. "I gotta go, honey. Yeah, I'm okay. I gotta let someone use my phone for a second. I love you. Bye." He handed the phone over to me, and I don't think we even said anything to each other. He held my cigarette for me as I struggled to dial the numbers: my hands were shaking.
It took a couple of rings, but finally I heard my dad's voice. I can't remember the first words we exchanged. Maybe "Are you okay?" or "Thank god you're alive." I don't know. I remember cursing a lot. "Jesus fucking Christ! It's like a war zone down there!" I remember my dad admonishing me for cursing, telling me to calm down. "How the fuck am I supposed to calm down?! They're trying to kill us!" It irritated me.
I asked him where he was. Chinatown, he told me. He was walking north. He heard someone say that there were buses that would take people off the island above 34th Street, so that's where he was walking. He asked me where I was. "Fourteenth Street," I told him, standing outside of an NYU dorm that had become a rally point for displaced NYU students who were living further south, below 14th Street. He wanted me to get off the island -- find a way to mom's house on Staten Island. I told him I was staying in the city.
It was a while before they re-opened lower Manhattan to civilians. At least a week. Maybe two. My dad called and told me he was coming into the city to see if he could get to his office. He wanted to know if I was interested in doing lunch. He picked a seafood place in midtown: Dock's.
I was sitting on the train, headed to Grand Central. We rumbled to a stop and sat there. Nothing out-of-the-ordinary: just another train delay, and there were lots of those as of late. The PA system in my car was jacked up: the conductor's voice came over garbled. Suddenly people from the car behind us started coming into our car, pushing their way to the front.
Whoa whoa whoa. What's going on? They're saying we gotta evacuate. What? Go to the front of the train! We hustled forward, and following the herd, gingerly made our way down onto the tracks, following a loose string of bobbing flashlights that were being wielded by subway workers. We were just a couple hundred feet from the platform, but there was another train in front of ours. I wondered if the third rail was electrified or if the emergency workers somehow disable it during evacuation scenarios.
As we approached the stairs at the end of the platform, we were greeted by cops, frantically waving their arms at the shoulder in a big circle, telling us to get the hell out. Get up to street level now! Oh my God, it's a bomb! Go topside!
As I emerged from Grand Central onto the street, I had that feeling again. That sensation of not being able to control anything; not being able to influence my fate. We could all die at any given instant, and that wasn't rhetoric. The threat was tangible, something that no one had ever felt before. How many times was this going to happen? How many times were we going to have to endure the singular feeling of someone trying to kill us?
I finally made my way into the restaurant probably 30 minutes late, and my dad was showing impatience. "Dad, I just walked out of a fucking bomb scare in Grand Central." Lunch was awkward.
I was never close to my father growing up. He was not the good job, I'm proud of you, let's go in the backyard and play catch type of father. He threw himself at his work to provide for me, and while I never went hungry, I also never really got to know my father. I'm not sure which is the worse option.
Even today, I don't speak much with him. In the nine years since, I graduated college and I graduated law school. My parents felt that I should be doing certain things with my life, and I deviated from their desired path for me by joining the Army. I went to war and came back. I came back hoping that I could finally bridge the gap with my parents -- that maybe the stress of having a son overseas in combat would allow them to drop the shields and just accept me and the choices I have made.
Instead I came back to a lot of dinner-table arguments, poorly informed by 20-second sound bites and the media. Opinions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the president. Doubts about our ability to accomplish the mission, and insensitive and ignorant generalizations of an entire culture and religion.
"Dad: I spent a year there. I lived it every single day. I think I might know what I'm talking about. I think I might be more of a subject matter expert than some talking head on Channel 5 news or Newsweek magazine." My parents could not accept my four-year-old decision to join the Army, and understood less about what I did in Iraq than my friends. Hell, my friends were more family to me than my family.
So that's where it stands. A lot of things can happen in nine years. But a lot of things can stay the same.
If you have a good thing going, cherish it. I look back and sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision. I gave up a prosperous livelihood and any chance to sustain a normal relationship or start a family or just be a normal fucking person in order to serve this country and take care of soldiers. Sometimes it drives me crazy. But in the end, if I had to do anything differently, it would have been to sign on the dotted line earlier.
The day of, it took me hours to get a hold of my dad on the phone. He worked on John St, just a few blocks away. I would find out much later on that he was scheduled to attend a meeting in the towers that day: he was an engineer who dealt with the Port Authority routinely (and the PANYNJ had its main offices in the WTC on the high floors of one of the towers: sixty- or seventy-something). He was running late that morning, and his tardiness likely saved his life.
It was early afternoon -- maybe. The towers had been gone for hours now.
I watched as people passed me on the street, heading north. Some covered in the ashy white dust. The cellphones had been jammed since ten o'clock that morning. Landlines were worse: calls to my dad's office didn't go to his message box, but rather to an automated message that seemed to imply the nonexistence of the number I was trying to dial.
I remember seeing live footage on the news: street scene from somewhere in the city. Showed a guy on a Nextel, talking. It woke me from my daze. I stopped every guy in a suit. "Do you have a Nextel phone? Do you have a Nextel? I need to make a call."
Finally one guy actually stopped. Maybe he was talking to his wife or girlfriend. "I gotta go, honey. Yeah, I'm okay. I gotta let someone use my phone for a second. I love you. Bye." He handed the phone over to me, and I don't think we even said anything to each other. He held my cigarette for me as I struggled to dial the numbers: my hands were shaking.
It took a couple of rings, but finally I heard my dad's voice. I can't remember the first words we exchanged. Maybe "Are you okay?" or "Thank god you're alive." I don't know. I remember cursing a lot. "Jesus fucking Christ! It's like a war zone down there!" I remember my dad admonishing me for cursing, telling me to calm down. "How the fuck am I supposed to calm down?! They're trying to kill us!" It irritated me.
I asked him where he was. Chinatown, he told me. He was walking north. He heard someone say that there were buses that would take people off the island above 34th Street, so that's where he was walking. He asked me where I was. "Fourteenth Street," I told him, standing outside of an NYU dorm that had become a rally point for displaced NYU students who were living further south, below 14th Street. He wanted me to get off the island -- find a way to mom's house on Staten Island. I told him I was staying in the city.
It was a while before they re-opened lower Manhattan to civilians. At least a week. Maybe two. My dad called and told me he was coming into the city to see if he could get to his office. He wanted to know if I was interested in doing lunch. He picked a seafood place in midtown: Dock's.
I was sitting on the train, headed to Grand Central. We rumbled to a stop and sat there. Nothing out-of-the-ordinary: just another train delay, and there were lots of those as of late. The PA system in my car was jacked up: the conductor's voice came over garbled. Suddenly people from the car behind us started coming into our car, pushing their way to the front.
Whoa whoa whoa. What's going on? They're saying we gotta evacuate. What? Go to the front of the train! We hustled forward, and following the herd, gingerly made our way down onto the tracks, following a loose string of bobbing flashlights that were being wielded by subway workers. We were just a couple hundred feet from the platform, but there was another train in front of ours. I wondered if the third rail was electrified or if the emergency workers somehow disable it during evacuation scenarios.
As we approached the stairs at the end of the platform, we were greeted by cops, frantically waving their arms at the shoulder in a big circle, telling us to get the hell out. Get up to street level now! Oh my God, it's a bomb! Go topside!
As I emerged from Grand Central onto the street, I had that feeling again. That sensation of not being able to control anything; not being able to influence my fate. We could all die at any given instant, and that wasn't rhetoric. The threat was tangible, something that no one had ever felt before. How many times was this going to happen? How many times were we going to have to endure the singular feeling of someone trying to kill us?
I finally made my way into the restaurant probably 30 minutes late, and my dad was showing impatience. "Dad, I just walked out of a fucking bomb scare in Grand Central." Lunch was awkward.
I was never close to my father growing up. He was not the good job, I'm proud of you, let's go in the backyard and play catch type of father. He threw himself at his work to provide for me, and while I never went hungry, I also never really got to know my father. I'm not sure which is the worse option.
Even today, I don't speak much with him. In the nine years since, I graduated college and I graduated law school. My parents felt that I should be doing certain things with my life, and I deviated from their desired path for me by joining the Army. I went to war and came back. I came back hoping that I could finally bridge the gap with my parents -- that maybe the stress of having a son overseas in combat would allow them to drop the shields and just accept me and the choices I have made.
Instead I came back to a lot of dinner-table arguments, poorly informed by 20-second sound bites and the media. Opinions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the president. Doubts about our ability to accomplish the mission, and insensitive and ignorant generalizations of an entire culture and religion.
"Dad: I spent a year there. I lived it every single day. I think I might know what I'm talking about. I think I might be more of a subject matter expert than some talking head on Channel 5 news or Newsweek magazine." My parents could not accept my four-year-old decision to join the Army, and understood less about what I did in Iraq than my friends. Hell, my friends were more family to me than my family.
So that's where it stands. A lot of things can happen in nine years. But a lot of things can stay the same.
If you have a good thing going, cherish it. I look back and sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision. I gave up a prosperous livelihood and any chance to sustain a normal relationship or start a family or just be a normal fucking person in order to serve this country and take care of soldiers. Sometimes it drives me crazy. But in the end, if I had to do anything differently, it would have been to sign on the dotted line earlier.
Facebook says I should never forget; let me tell you why I choose not to forget
Three thousand people were killed in our backyard, and everyone says it's a good thing to move on, but you know what, I don't want to move on. I want that hurt and that pain to stay with me, because if I ever forget even a small piece, then I start feeling guilty. Hell, I am stuck in the middle of Oklahoma right now, and I feel guilty that I am unable to be home in my city to grieve in my concrete jungle.
People throw up a Facebook status, then go back to watching their college football or mall shopping or whatever the fuck it is that they are doing. They have no understanding of what happened to our city that morning, and will never understand the magnitude of the tangible assault on the senses (I say that literally: the sights, the smells, the sounds).
If you weren't there, people, then don't patronize me with some empty patriotic saying in between your Saturday errands. Come sit down with me, buy me a beer and listen to what I have to say, and learn about what it was like to be a New Yorker on that day. But don't ever think that a couple keystrokes on your smartphone will ever be enough to give back what so many people lost that day. If you don't understand, then just accept that you are not part of our fraternity, and stop pretending.
Here is the reality, as much as it hurts, you have to accept it: if you were in a position of safety where your life was not physically threatened, then you haven't earned the right to have your voice heard over those that died or those that lost something. If you didn't spend your entire life living and breathing in the greatest city, then you will never understand. If you were sitting in some class in junior high or high school two thousand miles away, watching it on TV, you may take solace in the fact that you can participate in the shared national shock suffered by all across the nation, but you will never be one of us -- we who were there.
Yes, you're right: it is a shallow, elitist and exclusive view, and I should be bigger than that. I should be better than that.
But you do not know what it was like to have a brigade-sized element murdered in your backyard. I do.
You can say what you want, you can feel you want, and that's fine: my soldiers and I risk our lives so you can enjoy that right. But I don't have to like what you have to say, and I don't have to listen or care. Not on this day. Be deferential today and be sensitive, because it's not your day. It's mine. And it's the only day of the year that I deserve to be as small or shallow or insensitive to your feelings as I want. Tomorrow, the status quo returns, and the emotional and physical and security needs of America will once again go before mine.
But let me have today.
If I don't care about the "Ground Zero Mosque", why should you?
This was written a few days ago, before the crazy Florida guy backed off from his plan to publicly burn Qurans...
I'm gonna lay it out there: I really don't give a shit about who practices what religion in whatever location.
Here are my credentials: I'm from NYC; I was in NYC on the island of Manhattan on 11 SEP 2001; I'm in the military; I served in Iraq; we lost soldiers.
An Islamic Center downtown really doesn't bother me (assuming they are not being funded by al Qaeda, the boogeyman or the Devil). So somebody explain to me why people who aren't from MY goddamn town who weren't there on THAT day and who think Sharia is representative of everything radical and crazy (newsflash: it's not; it's just overarching classical Islamic law -- there's even a book or two out there on this stuff: I read 'em, I recommend everyone else do so as well) are making such a big f*cking deal out of this "Ground Zero mosque" nonsense???
I'm serious, I actually need some convincing. If it was all 9/11 families, that would be one thing: I can understand the difficulty in separating the traumatic emotional hearbreak of losing someone from other issues. But I do NOT understand these random people from all over the country weighing in on this shit.
And now some church in Florida is going to burn Qurans on 9/11 because they think Islam is evil?? Seriously?? Do those idiots really think that the proper way to "remember the 9/11 victims" is to fucking burn Qurans??? Are they even aware that some of the victims were Muslim (and I'm not talking about the hijackers -- I'm talking about regular people)? Shit, do you think they even plan on looking inside these Qurans before burning them? Do you think they know what a Surah is? Do you think they know that the Surahs are ordered not in chronological order, but by length (because it was originally an oral text passed down from generation to generation, and the ordering facilitated memorization). Who are we joking: of course not. Even without doing any research, I think I can safely assume that that church of idiots is completely ignorant of everything that is outside of their little bubble.
It's all right I guess, I'm sure there won't be any images or video of this retardation and I'm sure it won't make it onto the Internet and I'm sure it won't be manipulated for God-knows-what kind of purposes.
Does anyone else see the absurdity in all of this, or am I the only one? If I am the crazy one, someone please set me straight.
I'm gonna lay it out there: I really don't give a shit about who practices what religion in whatever location.
Here are my credentials: I'm from NYC; I was in NYC on the island of Manhattan on 11 SEP 2001; I'm in the military; I served in Iraq; we lost soldiers.
An Islamic Center downtown really doesn't bother me (assuming they are not being funded by al Qaeda, the boogeyman or the Devil). So somebody explain to me why people who aren't from MY goddamn town who weren't there on THAT day and who think Sharia is representative of everything radical and crazy (newsflash: it's not; it's just overarching classical Islamic law -- there's even a book or two out there on this stuff: I read 'em, I recommend everyone else do so as well) are making such a big f*cking deal out of this "Ground Zero mosque" nonsense???
I'm serious, I actually need some convincing. If it was all 9/11 families, that would be one thing: I can understand the difficulty in separating the traumatic emotional hearbreak of losing someone from other issues. But I do NOT understand these random people from all over the country weighing in on this shit.
And now some church in Florida is going to burn Qurans on 9/11 because they think Islam is evil?? Seriously?? Do those idiots really think that the proper way to "remember the 9/11 victims" is to fucking burn Qurans??? Are they even aware that some of the victims were Muslim (and I'm not talking about the hijackers -- I'm talking about regular people)? Shit, do you think they even plan on looking inside these Qurans before burning them? Do you think they know what a Surah is? Do you think they know that the Surahs are ordered not in chronological order, but by length (because it was originally an oral text passed down from generation to generation, and the ordering facilitated memorization). Who are we joking: of course not. Even without doing any research, I think I can safely assume that that church of idiots is completely ignorant of everything that is outside of their little bubble.
It's all right I guess, I'm sure there won't be any images or video of this retardation and I'm sure it won't make it onto the Internet and I'm sure it won't be manipulated for God-knows-what kind of purposes.
Does anyone else see the absurdity in all of this, or am I the only one? If I am the crazy one, someone please set me straight.
That morning, the sky was blue: not a single cloud in sight
The sky was a perfect kind of blue without a single cloud in sight; it was still t-shirt and shorts weather. Nine years later and I can still remember what it smelled like, the way my skin was numb, the mass exodus to go north or just get the fuck off the island, and the strangeness of hearing total silence that night: no cars, no planes, not a goddamn thing except for a fighter jet that screamed overhead every now and then that freaked us the fuck out.
Everybody was in shock. It was so offensive and so personal, like getting punched right in the mouth...nobody knew what to think or what to feel. Am I supposed to be a an ignorant gung-ho idiot and say I hate all Muslims? Am I supposed to preach peace, love and tolerance, so the terrorists don't win? Somebody tell us what the fuck we're supposed to feel, because right now nobody fucking knows.
For days afterward, people walking around like zombies in the middle of 5th Avenue and Broadway because everything below 14th St was in the lockdown zone (no cars except emergency vehicles), making crazy shadows in the dust (which hung around for a solid 3 weeks) especially when the sun was low -- like out of a horror movie.
The Cortlandt Street stop
I remember the mall that was underneath the towers: Cortlandt Street stop on the 1-9. Or the N-R stop a couple blocks away. MetroCards were blue and tokens had that pentagon-shaped silver thing in the middle (after they replaced the ones with the hole in the middle and the ones with the big cutout Y of N-Y-C). Hell, just walk it -- just a few blocks. Go the back way through Battery Park: go into that other mall with all of the glass and metal, take the bridge across the West Side Highway; forget about trying to cross it at street level: you'll die.
I used to go into the Sam Goody in the basement mall underneath the towers as a kid, trying to figure out which CD I was going to waste my money on to stick into my bright yellow Sony discman. I remember the greasy and overpriced slices at the Sbarro. I remember snickering at all the poor Jersey fucks who had to take the friggin' PATH train to come into my city. I remember the bigass escalators in the lobbies, with all of the international flags on the second floor.
Suits on Motorolas and Nextels, and tourists all over the place, waiting for the elevators. Shoeshine guys buffing away on Italian leather wingtips that cost more than your parents made in a month. Express elevators that skipped whole bunches of floors -- different ones for different sky lobbies. I remember the home video my dad took of me on the roof when I was little, and how the audio on the VHS was all fucked up from the interference from the gigantic antenna and how absurdly small the city's huge buildings looked, with little yellow matchbox cars sliding up and down the pencil-thin streets with little tiny dots playing Frogger in between them.
I remember eating lunch in the plaza at the base of the towers: sitting at the fountain thing with the big metal globe, surrounded by businessmen taking drags off of their cigarettes in between bites of a $1 hotdog and a Poland Spring or Snapple, their suit jackets folded neatly beside them, company badges and ID cards hanging from belt loops or shirt pockets or coat lapels. Tourists, arched backwards aiming their cameras straight up, trying to get both towers in the frame, pointing towards infinity. I remember exiting any subway station within sight of the WTC and automatically looking for the towers to orient myself: our compass.
What do you remember?
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