New York is slowly returning to something approaching normal, week now after the disaster (what do you call it? "The Attack?" "The Bombing?" "The Crash?"). Well, "normal" in the sense that people are going back to work, the stock market is open again (and it promptly fell 700 points—whee!).
But not "normal" in the sense that things will go back to the way they were. They'll never go back to the way they were. It's like a giant hole has been punched through the heart of the city, and even though all wounds heal with time, this wound is going to take a very, very, very long time to heal.
An early estimate is that it's going to take about a year just to clean up the mess. And it's probably going to be more complicated than that. You see, when they were building the WTC, they had to contend with the fact that they were building the world's tallest buildings (at the time) in what was essentially the middle of a river.
And now that they have to tear it down and clean it up, they're faced with exactly the same problem.
But that's just physical infrastructure.
There are still (as of this writing) almost 5,000 people still listed as missing, and, unfortunately, it's pretty unlikely that any of them have survived this long. The flyers with names and pictures of the missing are all over Manhattan. The greatest concentration of flyers is at the memorial site at Union Square. It's numbing to see all the names and faces and the pleas for information.
Young, old, middle-aged. White, black, brown, yellow, and all shades between. Newlyweds, near-retirees, recent graduates, new parents. Bankers, waiters, analysts, security guards, policemen, musicians, firemen, drivers, secretaries, engineers, traders, handymen, bartenders, flight attendants, athletes, writers, stage-hands, pundits, pilots, artists. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, pagans, agnostics, atheists. Brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, lovers, sons, daughters.
All gone.
Everyone who died had a story. Everyone who died had hopes. They had dreams, fears, desires, duties. They had their favorite things—their own versions of brown paper packages tied up with string, their own bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. They had their own lives, each as rich and complex and full of incident as any other. And they all left those they loved, and those who loved them, behind.
One of the more remarkable things I noticed at the memorial were all the calls for peace. Maybe I'm stating the obvious here, but bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age (doing so wouldn't accomplish much, since they're already there) isn't going to bring the dead back. Do those who did this horrible thing, those who are behind it, do they need to be punished? Absolutely. There is no question about that. But in fighting our enemy, we cannot become them. Justice will be served—it must be served—but it cannot come with a steaming, stinking helping of revenge. We need to heal our own, to mend somehow this gaping ugly stinking hole that has been ripped through the city.
Maybe it's a little pat, and a little too alliterative, but healing needs hope, and it needs love.