Collected Prose

3000 innocent people, we experienced that day as a family tragedy. Most of us went into a state of intense mourning, and we dragged ourselves around in the days and months that followed engulfed by a sense of communal grief. It was that close to all of us, and I doubt there is a single New Yorker who doesn’t know someone who didn’t lose at least one friend or relative in the attack. Compute the numbers, and the results are staggering. Three thousand people in addition to their immediate families, their extended families, their friends, their neighbors, and their co-workers, and suddenly you’re in the millions.
    Last September 11 was one of the worst days in American history, but the dreadful cataclysm that occurred that morning was also an occasion for deep reflection, a time for all of us to stop and examine who we were and what we believed in. As it happened, I spent a good deal of time on the road last fall, co-hosting events with Jacki Lyden of NPR in connection with the release of the National Story Project anthology, I Thought My Father Was God . We traveled from Boston to San Francisco and points in between, and in each city contributors to the book read their stories in public to large and attentive audiences. I talked to scores of people on those trips, perhaps hundreds of people, and nearly every one of them told me the same thing. In the aftermath of September 11, they were reassessing the values of our country, trying to figure out what separated us from the people who had attacked us. Almost without exception, the single word they used was “democracy.” That is the bedrock creed of American life: a belief in the dignity of the individual, a tolerant embrace of our cultural and religious differences. No matter how often we fail to live up to those ideals, that is America at its best—the very principles that are a constant, daily reality in New York.
    It has been a year now. When the Bush administration launched its War on Terrorism by invading Afghanistan, we in New York were still busy counting our dead. We watched in horror as the smoking ruins of the towers were gradually cleared; we attended funerals with empty coffins; we wept. Even now, as the international situation turns ever more perilous, we are largely preoccupied with the debate over how to build a fitting memorial to the victims of the attack, trying to solve the problem of how to reconstruct that devastated area of our city. No one is sorry that the Taliban regime has been ousted from power, but when I talk to my fellow New Yorkers these days, I hear little but disappointment in what our government has been up to. Only a small minority of New Yorkers voted for George W. Bush, and most of us tend to look at his policies with suspicion. He simply isn’t democratic enough for us. He and his cabinet have not encouraged open debate of the issues facing the country. With talk of an imminent invasion of Iraq now circulating in the press, increasing numbers of New Yorkers are becoming apprehensive. From the vantage point of Ground Zero, it looks like a global catastrophe in the making.
    Not long ago, I received a poetry magazine in the mail with a cover that read: USA OUT OF NYC . Not everyone would want to go that far, but in the past several weeks I’ve heard a number of my friends talk with great earnestness and enthusiasm about the possibility of New York seceding from the Union and establishing itself as an independent city-state. That will never happen, of course, but I do have one practical suggestion. Since President Bush has repeatedly told us how much he dislikes Washington, why doesn’t he come live in New York? We know that he has no great love for this place, but by moving to our city, he might learn something about the country he is trying to govern. He might learn, in spite of his reservations, that we are the true heartland. 

    July 31, 2002

References

    THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE. New York, Sun Books; 1982. Reprinted by Penguin USA; 1988. First British publication by Faber & Faber; 1988.

    HAND TO MOUTH. New York, Henry Holt; 1997. First British publication by Faber & Faber; 1997.

    TRUE STORIES. ‘The Red Notebook’ ( Granta , 1993); ‘Why Write?’ ( The New Yorker , 1995); ‘Accident Report’ ( Conjunctions , 2000); ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’ ( Granta , 2000). All four pieces were later collected in The Red Notebook . New York, New Directions; 2002.

    GOTHAM HANDBOOK. In Double Game , by Sophie Calle.