UTC,
One of my colleagues in the esoteric field in which I do scholarship,
mid-19th century journalism history, wrote the following article
about his visit to New York City a day or two after September 11.
The article will appear in
09/11 8:48 AM: Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy." (Booksurge.com /
BlueEar.com, 2001)
I am taking the liberty of sharing it with my UTC companions. You
may, as I do, find the experiences of my friend of value.
By the way, David has participated many times in our UTC Symposium on
the 19th Century, the First Amendment, and Free Expression.
--kit
--------------------(article follows)------------------
A Moroccan Driver and the Great Experiment
By David T. Z. Mindich
Days after the terror attacks, I flew from Burlington, Vermont, my
adopted home, to New York City, where I spent my first thirty-five
years. Although a bit scared to fly, especially with my wife and two
small children, I never miss the Jewish New Year with my parents and did
not want to give terror even a small victory.
On the way to the city from Kennedy, I started talking with the driver,
a Moroccan Muslim. He took pains to show his sorrow at the terror. I
took pains to express my abhorrence of the attacks on Muslims and Sikhs
in the United States. He told stories of Moroccan Jews; I of being a
Jew visiting Morocco. I asked him if he felt worried about being an
Arab in America. Not in New York City, he said. His brother, in
Seattle was worried, but New York is used to diversity. At the end of
the ride, I said goodbye to the driver, feeling fortunate to be in a
city in which diversity trumps terror, even fresh, immediate terror.
New York has always had to balance fear and accommodation. In the 1970s,
when many families fled the city's violence and escaped to the suburbs,
mine and others didn't. Those who stayed behind were faced with a city
that was impossibly violent but had an unexplainable hope as well.
Those who stayed were driven by a stubborn optimism, sometimes
misplaced, that we could all somehow live together. New York was, and
continues to be the world's greatest experiment in communal living.
My New York was a city in which my black karate teacher would chat in
Mandarin to Chinese delivery men. It was a city in which my best
friend, a black Jamaican, and I could watch a pick-up basketball game on
West 4th Street involving nine blacks and one Orthodox Jew. It was a
city in which everyone mingled together: artists, Brazilians, bankers,
Italians, doctors, Puerto Ricans, engineers, Madonna, Indians,
construction workers. One of my greatest loves has always been
walking down New York streets, wrapped in a throng of people from all
over the world.
It would be poetic to say that everyone lived together under the shadow
of the World Trade Center, but this is not true. The city is so vast
that the Twin Towers were never more than a tiny part of it. The
terrorists, in destroying them, did far less and far more than they
imagined. Far less because those big dour buildings were shells and
will be rebuilt, either there or elsewhere; far more because of the six
thousand killed, but also because the terrorists have attacked New
York's dream of living together in peace.
During my trip to the city, I lost my wallet. Was it on the street?
Was I the victim of a pickpocket? If I left it in the taxi, I told my
wife, the driver would return it. The wallet really wasn't a big deal
anyway, especially in the face of a city grieving for six thousand. I
went to the local precinct to report the lost wallet and saw police
officers hunched over desks, reading newspapers. They all looked
tired. While filing my report, a policewoman spoke matter-of-factly
about her twelve-hour days. She lost two cousins in the Trade Center.
Later that night as a subway we were taking into Brooklyn crossed the
Manhattan bridge, we peered into the bombsite. Illuminated by rescue
lights, the black smoke still pluming out of the rubble looked an
iridescent and ghostly gray. Against the normally twinkling New York
skyline, the buildings around the rubble were black silhouettes. And
under it all were more than 6000 lost. Lost from America, but also lost
from Britain and Germany, Israel and Egypt, India and Pakistan, Iran and
Iraq. The scene said something terrible and special about New York
itself.
The essence of New York is an experiment in getting along with others,
regardless of race, creed, or color. True, people haven't always been
kind to each other, terrible inequities exist, and the city's civility
is often fragile and tenuous. At times the tribalism seems to crowd
out everything good in the city: the black mobs in Crown Heights, the
white mobs in Howard Beach. But, increasingly, New Yorkers were
beginning to recoil from such events and the city's tempests had begun
to subside. By the end of the 1990s, the city had become much safer
and had cut its murder rate by two thirds. Every day, New Yorkers hurl
through the subway tunnels along with representatives of more than a
hundred countries; the vast majority get to their destinations
unscathed.
What the terrorists will never know is how beautiful it is to rise above
tribalism. To be a Czech in a Turkish restaurant. To be a Korean who
dates an Irishman. To be a black who loves yoga. To be an Arab who
loves bagels and Kafka. To look out from the World Trade Center's
observation deck and see in one of the greatest cities in the world, an
army of people trying their best to see each other for who they are, not
where they're from.
Not that where we're from is unimportant. New Yorkers have all escaped
from somewhere. One of my grandfathers escaped from the Cossacks.
Another escaped from a Polish shtetl, and then from the Nazis. Whether
it's the African American who fled the South in the 1920s, or the
Haitian fleeing poverty in the 1980s, they came and they continue to
come. They come from Russia for the extra Glasnost of Brooklyn. They
come from Oklahoma to be gay in Chelsea. They come as outcasts from
ten thousand small towns around the world to reinvent themselves in the
Big Town.
Can the terrorists blast away New York's fragile trust and humanism?
Will we be a society of roadblocks and security checks and preconceived
notions? I don't know.
What I do know is that the cab driver showed up at my parents' building
with my wallet. Unclear about my address, he had combed the
neighborhood asking doormen if they recognized me. The Muslim Moroccan
had found a Christian Dominican who recognized the Jewish American.
But that night we were just plain New Yorkers.
-----
A New Yorker until 1996, David T. Z. Mindich is the chair of the
Journalism Department at Saint Michael's College, Vermont and is the
author of Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American
Journalism. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New
York Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. He visits
New York City as often as he can.
----------------------(end of article)---------------
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Dr. Kittrell Rushing
Head, Department of Communication
311 Frist Hall
615 McCallie Avenue
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Chattanooga TN 37403-2598
Voice: (423) 755-4400 Facsimilie: (423) 755-4695
[log in to unmask] *** http://cecasun.utc.edu/commdept
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