SexyPrime, a blog by Susan Crain Bakos

COME TOGETHER--In Memory of Shared Loss, In Commitment to Tolerance

Photo Credit:  "Rose" by Rocandy on Photobucket 

The city of New York will mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11 in what has become a familiar ritual, the laying of wreaths by dignitaries, the reading of nearly 3,000 names by friends and relatives at the Ground Zero site and moments of silence at the times when the two planes struck the towers. Additionally, this year there will be a protest rally against the proposed mosque being built near the site and a counter-protest rally against the protesters.

Increasingly the city is home to people who were not there and did not watch the towers fall from high rise office windows or the roofs of apartment buildings or walk through the ash that drifted like huge fluffy snowflakes over us for a few days and surely contained the minute remains of some who died.  Each little trip outside to the deli or Duane Reade contained moments of reverence for what we lost.

Yesterday at a stoplight on 26th and Lexington, a group of well-dressed twenty-somethings commented on soldiers standing outside the Armory:  "What is that a recruiting center or something?  Like here?"  I told them it is the National Guard Armory where members of the Guard put in weekend duty time.

I instantly recalled standing on the corner of 23rd and Lexington on September 12, 2001, and watching Army tanks turn the corner and rumble down the empty street--something I never expected to see in my city, my country in my lifetime.  And thank god for them--and for firemen and cops, the people who run into the trouble, like burning buildings, civilians flee.

In those hard days following, I realized how much I love this city and take pride in being a New Yorker and always will be a New Yorker even if I do live somewhere else again one day.  As a New Yorker, I can shrug at the latest wave of young people wearing their net worth on their backs and almost painfully devoid of knowledge about where they are, who else is there alongside them and what really happens outside trendy bars and clubs.  They will grow and learn or they will leave--or both.  

I do not have that compassionate patience for the people protesting the proposed mosque.  Some of the ugliest hate speech has poured corrosively from the mouths of Christian church and community leaders--people who seem to have forgotten the core values of the United States of America, values that entitle each of us to freedom of worship, that require each of us to respect the faith of the other.  We are not at war with Islam.  We are at war with terrorists who wrap themselves in a distorted fundamentalist version of the Islamic faith.  

This is New York City, rich in diversity, home to people who practice every faith known or no faith at all.  Many of our neighbors are Muslims, good people mourning their own losses on 9/11, working at their jobs, caring for their families and contributing in many ways to our community.  If we can't have religious tolerance here--where then?  

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I LOVE NEW YORK!

 

Photo credit:  "Rose" by Rocandy on Photobucket

 

9/11/2009 is a chilly, rainy day in New York City.  Eight years on--people remember but mostly go about their business as if it were any other day.  That is the right thing to do--for the city and its people and in memory of those we lost.

 

Dr. Charles Weiss says in "A Fortress City That Did Not Come To Be:  Recalling The Fears of September 12," The New York Times:  'There's a tremendous drive of human beings to make the most of life.  We're not hermits.  We rise up and move on."

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime 

September 11, 2001--Remembering

Photo Credit:  "Heart" by Keefers on Photobucket

 

Everyone who was living in New York City that day--and probably most other Americans--will never forget where they were at 8:45 a.m., or how they heard the news, when the first plane flew into the North tower of the World Trade Center. 

Alex Zola wrote in The New York Press his memories of working as a bartender at the old Park Avenue Country Club.  People walked into the bars and restaurants that were open, looking dazed, covered with dust and sometimes bleeding, seeking the solace one can only find in the company of others and hoping their neighbors and colleagues would be waiting inside.  (Click the above link and read Alex's recollections, a different take on the tragedy than you have probably read before.)

I stayed home that day, but the next I went out into the city.  Riding the subway was an act of courage then and no doubt it still is.  The passengers had the faces of shell-shocked soldiers who'd seen their comrades fall.  I walked west on 23rd Street; and an army tank turned the corner in front of me onto Lexington Avenue.  Pieces of ash filled the air, landing like big chunks of dandruff on shoulders, swirling into gutters.  I was on my way to meet my pal Joey at Cal's on 21st Street (another restaurant now gone.)

Suddenly I realized:  The ash falling like big flakes of snow--that ash almost surely was partially made up of human remains.  I remembered a painting that hung for a while at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.:  women ascending into a starry sky, houses lit below them, appearing to effect a beautiful and spiritual transition to another state of being.  (If you know that painting, please send me the name of the work and the artist.)  Some of what was left of the too many people that we lost on September 11 were giving New York City one last caress. 

I felt like they were blessing us with the will to stay on.

 

copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime