2004-09-11 - 7:27 p.m.
I was struck when I walked into school this semester how small everyone looked... the younger folks (freshman and sophomores) as a group just seemed, well... younger. It reminded me of that time, not so long ago really, when I moved to NYC and it all seemed so new and cool and overwhelming and Lang was new and overwhelming and a bureaucratic headache and already totally frustrating and not what I had (unrealistically) hoped and expected it to be. I overheard one young woman remarking on the seeming heterosexism of her class, confused because she thought this was a school with a lot of queer girls. I had thought that too, before I realized I would be way too embarrassed to even try to date someone from school (that didn’t stop futile crushes though).
I guess it struck me because now I am seeing who I was and how obvious it seems to be now how unemotionally prepared I was to even deal with NYC (and I was more prepared than many, having already lived away from home in PDX for a year), and even more with September 11th. Perhaps I should have gone to union square today to see if people were lighting candles and engaging in debates as they were back three years ago (I remember the whole square being illuminated by candle light and I remember the sentiment of retaliation in the form of military action being the last thing folks wanted, but I also remember one of my friends being told she should “leave” if she didn’t like the way the US was). I didn’t though, I biked to Coney Island instead and had just another fun day in Brooklyn with my friends, the kind of day that sustains me here. Three years since and it really has become just another day. Of course, I didn’t loose anyone, today is not a marker of this being the day that I lost a loved one, a friend, or a family member.
However, now it is hard for me to feel overly saddened about this day when it has been invoked over and over again to justify US military action all around the world (in Afghanistan and Iraq being the ones that loom largest right now) and also violence against immigrants and poor communities here in the US and the curtailing of civil liberties and the cutting of social programs. I remember when the number of Afghanis killed by US bombs surpassed 3,000... it was only a few months after September 11th, 2001 and still the drums of war have beaten incessantly. And now it is over 1,000 US soldiers killed in Iraq and over 20,000 Iraqi civilians by some estimates. And I hate the way the attack on the World Trade Center is used to justify this... in downtown Manhattan, only a few blocks from “ground zero” (a name I despise) there is a building (this is in the middle of the financial district) draped with rainbow flags that say “New York Says No to War and the Bush Agenda.”
This shows to me again how the sentiment inside New York and how events in New York get represented to the rest of the country via the media are so different from each other (of course I cannot generalize for every New Yorker, you find opinions that run the gamut, of course... last night walking in my neighborhood someone had stuck a sign in their flower bed that read “ I support President Bush and our troops”). But it seems that the places around the country that seem to have people continuing to call for revenge (not justice) for “the terrorists” also seem to be the ones that would be the least supportive of New York City and its many many diverse communities and the fact that it is majority people of color and working and middle class people. Of course we know that the elite shape the agenda, but I am determined to find and support ways that “we the people” can really communicate our experiences to each other and thus try to stop this racist, bull shit spewage under the guise of patriotism that just seems to be everywhere right now.
