The Skyline Has Changed
September 12, 2001
As many of you know from private e▴mail from me, I’m fine, finally not evacuated and managed to get supplies of water, food, paper prods. etc before most of the stores ran out or closed down. However, I had to go north of 14th street today to buy cat food. One cannot get below 14th Street without ID and only local traffic, meaning autos from the ‘hood, are allowed in. Occasionally a truck carrying supplies goes down my street. I live at Washington and W. 10th which is directly North of the World Trade Center and about 11 blocks south of 14th St. (due to named streets in W. Village.) I watched the towers burn from my corner. Today the skyline has changed. For me, the most disheartening aspect of this is the few minutes of TV news I could stomach this a.m. Headlines being shown “IT’S WAR!!” or “ACT OF WAR”. Bush’s attitude. Former Israeli (a major player in this long term fiasco) prime minister Ehud Barak’s call for all of “us” in the “free world” to act strongly against “them” and naming names. I see this event as a wake up call and not unexpected. A devastating heads▴up that we can not go on as we have, thinking about “us” and “them.” We each need to look inside of ourselves, purge whatever hatred we find there and stop acting out on each other. This is ONE small planet. I wish we’d begin to think of ourselves as citizens of the planet instead of citizens of any certain country. As five of us sat in my living room last evening, watching news, we discovered a grasshopper on the table. In a 4th floor apt. in NYC with fully screened windows? I am touched by remembering (I didn’t think about it at the time) how careful another and I were to capture it without harm and put it safely outside because we knew it couldn’t fly. Maybe that’s what I mean. Can we take a more caring attitude? Care about each other and all life forms, instead of constantly raising the stakes and blindly defending our allies for economic and political advantage? I’m sticking my neck out here folks to say, in my opinion, what this was, was the chickens come home to roost. Please be tolerant of this post (as an exercise in tolerance if nothing else). (copyright Aysha Quinn 2001)