wtc attack page 2

I went to meet my friend Mike in the East Village. My first goal was to buy a New York Times, but since all of Manhattan was closed below 14th Street, there was no way for the delivery trucks to deliver papers in my neighborhood. We had breakfast, then walked uptown past 14th to try to find a newspaper. We walked over to Union Square and met Marshall. All the newspapers were sold out everywhere. We decided to go to a bar where there was a TV and watch the news. There was a strange feeling of chaos, almost an excitement in the air mixed with sadness. This was a completely different city.

We went to Mike’s house on 10th and A. On CNN, the reporters were trying to make sense of the events. We felt powerless and confused. We didn’t know what to do or where to go. We decide to go try to give blood. We walked by a big mural that had already been painted by Chico on the corner of Avenue A and 14th Street. people were lighting candles and crying.

Next we walked past the road block on 14th Street to Union Square again and saw that the memorial had grown. There were now reporters milling around. I saw a group of Israeli and Arab students arguing about the state of world affairs. It was heated and emotional, but civilized.

My overall impression was that New Yorkers have been a mixed bag of cultural and ethnic heritages for a long time. We have learned how to get along, how to air out our differences, how to yell and scream at each other but basically GET ALONG. I realized that this is what makes America great. It also reinforces the stupid brutality of this act of terrorism. Whoever targeted New York for destruction was targeting a sample of every cultural and ethnic group of the world, including Arabs, Jews, Christians, Atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Satan worshippers, idiots, heads of industry, vandals, perverts, fathers, mothers, scientists, religious fanatics, and stoned slackers. New York is not America, New York is the world.

We walked to a hospital on 17th and 1st Avenue. There was a big crowd of people trying to donate blood. They were being turned away. There was a posted list stating all the parameters for giving blood. You may not give blood if ;
"You are a man and you have had sex with another man since 1977.
You have sniffed cocaine in the last 12 months.
You have ever used intravenous drugs.
You have had sex with anyone in the above categories.
You have a tattoo."
There a big fat man standing in the crowd, loudly making comments about how ridiculously strict these guidelines were. I chimed in with him that this would exclude most of the population of New York. Then I asked a nurse about the blood supply and she said they had plenty of blood. She said New York was having a blood supply shortage before but that this was a good thing. She also hinted at the fact that there were not many wounded people being brought into the hospital. Most of the people found at the scene were dead. This theme would be echoed many times later on.

We decided to go have a drink and find a bar with a television. We were emotionally drained. We had no jobs to go to, nothing we could do. On television, they were saying that there were too many volunteers. We went to 7A and drank beer and discussed what was going on. The residents of the East Village were all in shock, tired, numb. There was an overall sense that something terrible was going to happen.

George Bush had made a speech that morning, and it reinforced everyone's mistrust and dislike for our accidental leader. He quoted the Bible, used a bunch of clichés and platitudes, and ended his speech with "God Bless America."

The reason why we are in this mess in the first place is that nations align themselves with religious ideology. If we want to be truly evolved and lead the world into a new era, we have to truly OUTLAW the mix of religion and politics. We should be tolerant and accepting of all religious expression, as long as it is not destructive or oppressive to a group of people or gender. But the government has absolutely no business proclaiming its alignment with a religious belief. George Bush has to stop quoting the Bible and saying "God Bless America." It offends me and it is not helping the situation.

In the days following the first speech, Bush made some better speeches and showed his compassion, but also his determination to get revenge and go to war. This is not the answer. The nation's renewed patriotic fervor is helpful for dealing with grief and for unifying the nation, but it is also dangerous. We can't give George Bush carte blanche to lead us into war as a nation. He has not really earned our trust or our respect. Just because he put his arm around an old firefighter and wore a casual shirt at the site of the explosion doesn't mean he's no longer a rich frat-boy oil baron from Texas who single-handedly made our budget surplus disappear.