My nephew wrote some more about what is happening in city, this time at Union square:
Street scenes from last night 9/14 at Union Square on 14th st in Manhattan:
The George Washington statue -- -- covered with chalked "PEACE" messages
Every vertical surface and a lot of horizontal ones plastered with missing person flyers.
Crowds of people in heated political arguments.
Candles in huge clusters on the sidewalk, around flyered street signs, lining the concrete street dividers. With hand scrawled notes, flowers, "get well soon" teddy bear balloons, pictures of the WTC.
I've been collecting WTC-related flyers. Couldn't bring myself to take down any of the missing person flyers, though. felt like I would be desecrating a grave.
A crowd about 25-50 doing a singalong with any song they could find. Broadway-level singers involved. An opera singer did 'danny boy.'
Chalked on the sidewalk: "Fucking Killers"
Demonstrators with signs like "Arabs are not the enemy", "Will vengeance bring peace?" and "War is not the answer." Not an organized demonstration -- a lot of the signs were being held by anybody in the crowd who agreed with them. People in the crowd starting heated arguments with the peaceniks.
EMTs wearing flags as bandannas.
One political conversation: a working class sixty something white guy with an accent from the boroughs talking affectionately about how Union Square used to be full of politics like some place in England that I never heard of, a 19 year old latino guy who struck me as an upwardly mobile poor kid, a 30 something white guy with a light beard talking in a patronizing way about how the situation was complicated and leading every conversation towards his point about relativism, an ultra skinny and tall black guy with leathery skin and an american flag mounted on his baseball cap, in his 50s, angrily cutting short the conversation with "WHATEVER YOU ALL THINK, WE'RE GONNA BOMB THE SHIT OUT OF THEM" and riding away on his bike. In my turn at the soapbox I had a little speech prepared: "When those people died on Tuesday, they were living in a democracy. If we water down democracy for the sake of vengeance, we'll make them martyrs for the side that killed them." It was oration. After that I did some FoRKy clashing of intellectual horns with other bucks in that group.
Few woman taking part in the political arguments. One, a college-age Chinese woman taking a hardline pro-peace stance, saying "you've never lived in the third world, you don't know what it's like."
I was looking at a flyered lamp post, recreating the people in the pictures, staggered by the reality of the lives lost. There was another guy doing the same. He said "that's the saddest thing I've ever seen" to me, without looking away from the flyers. I didn't look away from the flyers either.
Much personal bonding, including a more than healthy pickup scene. a young Indian guy from New Jersey who had held a sign that said "Transcend Nations" for six hours sat down next to me, said that his parents wanted him to go home hours ago, but this was the first time he felt like he was involved in history. A blonde Puerto Rican woman telling me about her nightmares on Tuesday night. She told me there were ten Puerto Ricans doing food service on the top floor that day. She said that nothing was certain anymore, and she had packed a bag with her passport etc in it in case Manhattan is evacuated.
As the night went on the thing changed from mourning to demonstration. There was strong consensus not for peace but for a reaction other than obliterating the most convenient victim. There was a guy with five pads worth of names, phone numbers and email addresses of people in the crowd who might attend an organized instead of ad-hoc demonstration in the future. The email address column was always filled in, mainly with spam-resistant Hotmail accounts; the phone number column was mostly empty. The guy taking names felt that the cause was peace, but he was wrong.
Cameras. People taking pictures of pictures. People taking pictures of places where people had taken pictures,. Not a rush to take pictures first but a pileon to places where other people had taken pictures.
Me writing here now. Me there last night, memorizing details to write down the next day. Me now picturing myself picturing five minutes ago.
Death is one of the few things more powerful than irony. I wonder if the heavy irony of 90s pop culture will go away because of the WTC? Will 'That Seventies Show' get lower ratings because of the disaster? Will 'Touched by an Angel' move from syndication to prime time? If so, we should definitely glass Afghanistan.
The crowd was still strong when I left at 3:30AM.
What do the flyers mean? There are no missing persons from the World Trade Center: everybody who worked there that survived has long since checked in. The flyers are expressions of grief, mementos of the dead, Art, protest, participation in a historic moment, gravestones, gravestones with contact details in case of the dead rising. |
