Issue #1
September 2001
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New York, Center of the World
September, 2001
New Yorkers have always felt that they lived at the center of the world, and that we and our city were the best there was. The events of September 11 and the days that followed have merely confirmed that our feeling was accurate. The terrorists that demolished the World Trade Center towers felt, like everyone else does, that if they could make it here, they could make it anywhere.
In addition to the immense sorrow that New Yorkers are feeling over the terrible loss of life, there is immense pride. That pride is in ourselves: the behavior of New Yorkers in the face of catastrophe; the skill and courage of our emergency services, especially the fire department that lost so many in the building collapse; the efficiency of our hospitals; the effectiveness of our emergency preparedness that mobilized, guided and directed an army of workers and kept the city functioning in a way that no other city could have matched; and in our sheer scale, that allowed us to absorb a blow of this size, shake our heads and come back slugging.
New Yorkers include not only the residents of the five boroughs. They include the commuters from Long Island, Westchester, Connecticut and New Jersey that share the daily life of the city, and now share its grief. And, for a wonder, they now include the upstate legislators, so often hostile to the city's interests, that helped shepherd relief bills through the state legislature and national Congress.
Despite the amazement of news commentators that this attack could occur here, New Yorkers have always felt that we were a primary target. At the height of the cold war we knew that if there was an atomic attack, we were ground zero, and took some odd comfort in the thought that if the result of nuclear holocaust was that the living would envy the dead, we would go quick and clean. It makes perfect sense to New York that the most spectacular attack in our nation's history would be shared between New York and Washington, DC. Had the attack fallen on, say, Cleveland instead, we would have been relieved to have missed out but in some obscure way insulted.
If the efforts coming to reduce the threat of terrorism in the United States are ineffective, New York will continue to be the country's most prominent target. We will cope, as the residents of London and Tel Aviv have coped, because we are a city of survivors. And when the sources and facilitators are terrorism are traced, it will not be a pretty sight; the United States has a history of responding slowly to provocation, but also a history of responding with awesome ferocity. In the immortal line from Star Wars, "Don't tease the Wookie."
Whatever they throw at us, we can handle, and handle with grace. Like Timex, we can take a licking and keep on ticking.
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