DAY TWELVE:Sept. 22:
The sun broke through this morning, and New York City is bathing in warmth. Today the city knows -- really knows --- that it is loved. The Mets returned from their road tour to play in Shea for the first time since the catastrophe, and thousands packed the stadium for a show of love and solidarity. Diana Ross belted out the national anthem, the crowd wept, all the city could see it on television and baseball healed us, at least a little bit, as the national sport has so many times before. It helps, of course, that the Mets won, thanks to a dramatic homer by Mike Piazza, New York's own.
Last night's international telethon for New York also extended a warm embrace over the city, in a surprisingly artistic and genuine manner. Given television entertainment's abysmal quality these days one had every right to expect something so dreadful as to rank down with the worst of Jerry Lewis telethons. But the artists seem to have risen to the occasion, mustering something inside their creative souls that was, in several cases, quite profound. Watching the telethon, I finally wept. Not crocodile tears, but true, overwhelming sobs, as I felt both the pain of the past twelve days and the joy of the world's love and concern for my adopted, beloved city.
So much money has been donated for the families of lost firefighters, police and Port Authority personnel that it seems obvious they will be cared for, their children's education fully subsidized, their mortgages paid off, their lives at least economically healed, if not spiritually and emotionally. Last night's telethon raised many millions more, and it now becomes imperative that dollars get to the hundreds of immigrants' families, both here and in their home countries, most of them yet to be identified. People wonder why the estimated numbers of dead keeps rising: it is because so many of the workers inside Manhattan's skyscrapers are members of the faceless immigrant masses that clean, repair, deliver, and vend. The Missing Persons signs that cover the walls of hospital emergency rooms, rescue centers and all of downtown have the names and faces of Africans, Asians, Latinos, Russians, Israelis...and, of course, Arabs. In the Times Square subway station immigrant families have created their own missing persons "office": walls plastered with handmade signs begging for word of their family members' whereabouts. The names read like a United Nations list: Gian Gamboa, Mario Nordone, Casey Cho, Jorge Velazqueuz, Yang Der Lee, Roshawn Singh, Moises Rivas, Zhe Zang, Salman Hamdani, Michael Arczynski, Nurul Miah, Rhondell Tankand.......
Under these names are notes: He is from Paraguay, she I from Bermuda. Hi home is in Dominican Republic, all of China misses him. One sign says simply: "Please help! 50 Bangladeshis are missing!"
When I look at these posters I think of the work my sister, Linda, has done for two decades, focusing on Latino immigrants. From her I have learned how heavily villages all over the poor world depend on monthly checks sent by family members toiling here, in the rich world. Will any of these funds raised in telethons, baseball games, and hundreds of benefits worldwide make their way to those desperate, dependent villages and Third World families?
Do we even know who those families are? That's a genuine question. Registering a missing person who is presumed to have perished in the catastrophe is a police procedure, involving some 16 pages of forms, questioning by uniformed officers, DNA sampling, photographs and assorted items that the deceased may have used shortly before heading to work on September 11th. For immigrants, particularly those who live illegally in the US, this is a threatening, frightening procedure. There will undoubtedly be many souls left eternally unclaimed in that debris.
Temperatures and humidity have been climbing all day. By midafternoon it was 83 degrees, with humidity topping 80%. Despite the warmth, both emotional and physical, in which Gotham is basking today a sort of depressed malaise has set in. Nearly everybody I speak to, other than those directly involved in rescue or catastrophe-related efforts, is complaining of fatigue, of not being able to climb out of bed, of a sense of omen and of sluggish thinking. Those who have hard working lives can bury themselves in routine, but to a one they say the routine is offering less solace with each passing day. Paula, a Jamaican-born woman who cleans my apartment once a week, lost three of her church members on September 11th. For the first week post-catastrophe she buried her own emotions in favor of spending every spare moment at the side of the fearful families, praying -- literally -- for miraculous rescues. But this week, as hope of rescue yielded to recognition that nobody was coming alive out of that horrible heap, Paula sank into a deep depression. On Thursday she said, "I am doing things, working, but I don't even know what I am doing. I don't see it. I don't feel it. I just do it."
This isn't a class thing. Everybody, regardless of their station in New York life, is struggling with depression. A woman who lives in an apartment down the hall from mine greeted me this morning, hauling her garbage to the chute, and I could see she hadn't slept in ages. I asked her how she was holding together, and she said, speaking in heavy measured tones of exhaustion, "Well, I don't have an office anymore. I can't work. I can't do anything but sit and think about it all."
She works for Lehman Brothers, the investment banking firm that with American Express owns the World Financial Center, located across the street from the WTC. The Financial Center lost all of its windows and some of its outer shell in the blasts, but is structurally sound. Nevertheless, neither of the multinational firms wish to return their world headquarters to the site. Mayor Giuliani is anxiously negotiating with both corporations, pleading with them not to abandon the city, taking their dollars to another locale. But in all likelihood AMEX is headed to New Jersey and Lehman Brothers may follow. In the meantime, all their traders and brokers and analysts and clerical workers and computer operators spend their days, like my neighbor, at home, dwelling on the horror and loss.
It doesn't help that the FBI has warned that intelligence indicates the terrorists were planning another attack upon New York, TODAY. Why today? We are told there is some significance to September 22, and that we must be prepared. Be prepared --- what the hell does that mean?
"There is very little you can do to protect yourselves from bioterrrorism," Jerry Hauer told the faculty of Rockefeller University yesterday. "There is very little you can do to protect yourself if a plane crashes into a building. If it happens, it happens. We have to go on."
Hauer, who created New York's emergency response system --- which performed remarkably well last week --- is now a bioterrorism advisor to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. With intelligence pouring in that indicated the terrorist network is allied with Sadaam Hussein's bioweapons laboratory personnel, as well as missing Russian BW scientists, Hauer said they are scrambling in Washington to get ready. (See today's Newsday web site for my article on why we are totally vulnerable to BT and have no solid preparedness policy in place.) As horrific as the deaths of more than 7,000 people in the WTC disaster and two other plane crashes may be, a bioweapon release would be orders of magnitude worse. And we are not ready, in any way, shape or form, for such an eventuality.
Yesterday Hauer spoke in the famous Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome audiorium on the Rokefeller campus. Security was tight. The scientists, an elite group at Rockefeller that includes several Nobel Prize winners, listened carefully to every word Hauer uttered. He told them what most these laboratory men and women already knew, if they'd thought about it: That microbes are the ultimate weapon. And when the question and answer period came every imaginable accent inflected their English. It has always been on of my favorite features of Science --- its intellectual internationalism --- and some of the questions came from scientists who had toiled amid terrorism elsewhere, such as the Middle East or south Asia.
One female scientist, speaking in an accent I believe was Lebanese or Syrian, asked a deeply profound question: Can we remain intact as souls? She wanted to know whether New Yorkers will be permanently psychically altered by these events in harmful ways. The venerable, elderly Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg rose carefully from his seat to respond.
"I've shared this fear," Lederberg said. "The horrors of people leaping out of buildings never leave me. Those are obvious. But I've had a much more deep-seeded anxiety and I can't share it exactly. An anxiety that we've been forced to put aside that which made u good people. I remember Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor started a process that ended with Hiroshima. My fear is that we are at the beginning of process now that may take us to something in the end like that. My fear is that we may change ourselves in ways that are not desireable."
Before the lecture Hauer, who I have known for years, confided that he had just been involved that morning in identifying the body of a close friend, John O'Neill, who died in the WTC. Hauer said "body", but from what else he indicated it was obvious O'Neill?s remains were nothing the family ought to view. Hauer hasn't slept in days. He is haggard and jittery. Distraught.
"John O'Neill was head of the FBI's counterterrorism branch in Washington," Hauer told me privately. "He led every important investigation you can name --- the USS Cole, Tanzania, Kenya bombings. He retired three weeks ago. I helped him get the job as head of security for the World Trade Center. And the irony is the guy he chased for most of his career killed him."
When Lederberg spoke of his fears for the future Hauer thought of O'Neill. And he told the audience a tory O'Neill had recently relayed to him, regarding the capture of a member of Bin Ladin's network two years ago. O'Neill and his prisoner were in a plane, flying in from overseas, "and he flew over the World Trade Center in a helicopter with this guy," Hauer said. "And the guy said to O'Neill, If I had more money I would have brought that building down."
My dear friend Karen told me this morning that she has been overcome by a sense of doom. I have not. I truly believe that New York will triumph, grow, and be a better city and community five years from now than it has ever previously been.
But I confess that, for the first time in my life, I now believe in the concept of evil.
This afternoon ---- in the surprisingly hot steaminess of the day --- thousands of New Yorkers and tourists descended upon Ground Zero. Having been there several times now, I was startled by the scene. For the police crowd control has become a major headache. And smart storekeepers smell profits: WTC souvenirs and I Love New York T-shirts are on sale, and savvy photographers have set up street stands, hawking their old photos of the NY skyline with the Twin Towers prominently displayed.
If New York has, historically, been about anything it's money. So I suppose I should not have been surprised today when I walked down Canal Street and discovered that every single Missing Person poster and candle shrine had been removed. Bad for business, no doubt. Sets the wrong mood. In contrast, a SoHo shop had a kitsch window display: dozens of Barbie dolls, each dressed in a fur coat and waving a teeny American doll.
Rudy Giuliani told New Yorkers that the best way they could help would be to spend money, go to Broadway shows, eat out. Today, it seems, Gotham followed the Mayor's commands. SoHo stores were packed with eager shoppers, cafes and restaurants were doing fine business, and Broadway was packed. The doorman at "The Producers" bragged that everything was back to normal, meaning getting a seat in that theater will require an act of god.
I needed a hearty laugh. So I saw a new musical called "Urinetown" Yup, urine - town. Yes, it was hilarious. And damned if it didn't feel fabulous t laugh too loudly, guffaw too much, and milk the play's gags for all they were worth --- and then some.
Be well. Be safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
