In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Taking PATH to the new WTC station.
When heading into New York City yesterday for the film screening I left extra time to take the PATH train to the new WTC station that has opened in the whole that is referred to as ground zero.
Though I've been to NYC many times since 9/11, this was my first time back to lower Manhattan. I really wasn't ready until now. In the late eighties/early nineties when I lived in the city, I worked at Banker's Trust for two years, first taking the World Trade Center PATH train to Jersey City every day for a year, and then working at the Banker's Trust tower right across the street from the WTC for a year.
When I moved back to the NYC area in 1999 I would commute into the city everyday, for much of my first year back, to the same WTC PATH station. I remember when I first moved back feeling an eerie nostalgia of being back a decade later taking the same escalator up into the basement of the two towers. Now just a few years after that the experience was just overpowering sadness.
You come out of the tunnel that goes under the Hudson and you are right in the pit, if I had known ahead of time I might have been a bit more prepared. The station itself is stuck onto the church street side of the pit, like a modern cliff side dwelling. Moving up the escalators it became very unnerving as the walls are nothing more than pro-New York slogans on thin plastic sheeting hiding the chain link fencing that separates us from the rest of the hole. The station layout was almost exactly the same as it was before. I was again in the station I had been in over a 1,000 times, but this time, there was nothing above me.
Here is an excellent slide show of the new station and its construction.
Coming out on Church street it was amazing and wonderful to see everything back to normal. The Christmas decorations were up, the model thin millennium Hotel doing business, it looked like Century 21 had expanded (discount department store), and even the goofy Burger King on the corner of Liberty and Church Street was doing a brisk business. When it opened in 1990 fast food restaurants were very very rare in Manhattan (I know that is hard to believe now), so to make it more "special" for the first month or so when this Burger King opened it had a person playing music during lunch hour on an organ, and a red carpet that featured two "door women" wearing fishnet stockings who said all day long "welcome to Burger King."
That seemed to be the only thing left in business on Liberty heading east. Here the store fronts were still damaged and still closed and there draped in black was the Banker's Trust building I had worked for a year in over a decade ago. A cloth covered tower with a basically gutted interior. Here's a good video showing the building (warning requires real Video).
Along the fence the surrounds the pit (ground zero) were memorials, the history of lower Manhattan, photos of 9/11, and lists of the dead. On the lists were post it notes from family members: "happy birthday, we miss you" and more. I didn't want to read them, they weren't there for me to read.
People in other parts of America seemed to happily chant "Remember 9/11" as they supported the war in Iraq. A crime on top of a crime. The Bush Administration has turned the nation's anger and outrage not at the enemy (bin Laden and Al Quaeda) but to a 3rd party, an evil and despicable 3rd party without question, but a 3rd party nonetheless. The destruction and deaths were turned into an excuse to finish family business and to reward donors. It is as simple and tragic as that. It wasn't to make America safer. If Bush wanted America safer, first responders would be fully funded, port security would be fully funded, and troops would be scouring the hills of East Pakistan. Instead our troops are getting food poisoning from Halliburton (via KBR) in a destroyed country that doesn't want us there.
In a horrible admission to the Bush Administration's co-opting 9/11 for political purposes, the Republican Party holds their 2004 convention in Manhattan near the anniversary date. This will make Karl Rove's Aircraft Carrier blunder simply disappear, because this is going to pan out to be the biggest political misstep for decades to come. New Yorkers sense the truth about what is being done in the name of their loved ones. The nation is starting to. It'll all become apparent at the end of August.
- rob 4:37 PM - [PermaLink] -
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