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From the Editor's Desk
But I'm not condemning everyone. I drove over a thousand miles to be in New York a month after Sept. 11, 2001. I felt it was important to see it with my own eyes, to try to somehow grapple with what had happened in some visceral way. To me, seeing that tragic attack compressed down to the size of a television screen just didn't make sense. What I found was that looking at ground zero through the slices of New York city streets still didn't really help put together the enormity of what happened there. It wasn't until my friend and I turned back to get to the ferry that I saw a woman praying on a street corner. Scaffolding was everywhere, and at just about every corner were tarps, presumably so people wouldn't stop at the street corners being lookyloos. But those little corners had been turned into makeshift memorials. Messages scribbled on pieces of paper were taped to the tarp. Drawings, messages of love, flowers and candles crowded the little concrete corner. And there was this woman, a shaft of light hitting her face, looking up and reading or maybe praying, her hands clasped and this look of reverence and sadness clung to her face. It was only then that I was able to begin to put things together. I went out of some journalistic sense to be a witness for the event, to help make it real for others. I don't know if I ever did that. But I came back I think with a better understanding of how the people and the places where we live, are linked. The triumphs, tribulations sadness and joys of life and community swirl around us and the buildings we inhabit. When they are destroyed, and the lives connected to them are destroyed, we all lose something of ourselves. But I saw something else there that disturbs me to this day. There were people, I only saw a few, but they were there, having their pictures made in front of the destroyed towers, in front of this grave, in front of this wreckage of steel and extinguished human life like Ground Zero was Old Faithful or Cinderella's Castle. And so it really bothered me when I heard of the popularity of these tours. "People need to see what's happening here," my sister said. And she's right, just like people needed to see what happened in New York. And maybe they'll see what I've seen in New Orleans. Maybe they'll see the first and second tragedy. Maybe they'll see the hurricane's wrath, the failure of the levees and the mud and muck that ripped the guts out of this city. And maybe they'll see the second tragedy, the one that's happening in slow motion. Maybe they'll see the failures of our governments, our law enforcement, of ourselves. Maybe they'll see that two years later, people, like my sister, are still fighting to get back in their homes. They're fighting insurance companies, bureaucratic red tape, the fraud that very red tape was intended to prevent but can't, the increased and increasingly violent crime, and just how ineffective press conferences really are when it comes to rebuilding a city.
But I have to agree, they need to see it. They need to see what happens when half the people of a community are gone, and the structures that were their homes are reduced to mold infested rat havens. When those joys and trials and tribulations have nowhere to reverberate, and it becomes a rotting stinking pile of wood and rubble. The hard-working honest people of the community lose, and we lose.
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