To: K-list
Recieved: 2001/10/14 06:52
Subject: Re: [K-list] Peace Another Perspective (1)
From: Bestpoet
On 2001/10/14 06:52, Bestpoet posted thus to the K-list:
<<If our leaders, any leaders really, had the hearts of healers...how different this world might be.
Hi All,
This thread really interests me. I've been "battling" perspectives in my own mind so much lately. I live in New York City and was working at my job a mere 4 blocks away from the WTC when it was hit. Was part of the mass exodus making our way uptown thru the desert-looking street covered in WTC remains crushed to fine sand. All thru the "event", I don't remember feeling much, just was focused on trying to get out of my building's lobby. I remember them telling us to go back to our workstations, the building was secure, and none of us would.
But we were stuck in the lobby, because of the collasping towers turning the air into grit-filled night. I walked to a friend's house (because I don't have a television--by choice, not poverty), and it wasn't until I got there safe and sound and started watching tv and really realized what had happened that I got anxious. By the next day, the wind had shifted and the air was so full of abestos and bones I escaped to the Catskills with two friends, where we stayed the remainder of the week. My office was closed during that time.
As far as I know, nobody I knew was killed in the attack.
Politically, I consider myself perpendicular to the whole line, left-center-middle. Since Sept. 11, I've become a reading addict. Been reading so much history--of the jews (my birth religion, long ago abandoned), the Ottoman Empire, Palestine, the Oslo Peace Agreement, The Initmate History of Humanity (the history of how we converse with each other). I've been to a bunch of websites: afghanistan websites, hizbollah and hamas (militant palestinian groups), militant israeli groups, newspapers from all over the world.
And there is this feeling in the streets of since Sept. 11 that's become more acute since the U.S. retaliation and the anthrax scares. The feeling is one of living in the moment. Each moment seem to have a heightened sense of presence, I am more aware of the actual living of life, not so lost in the past or future or daydreamy way I often had when moving thru the city. Many people report feeling like this.
And the absolutely gorgeous outpouring from people all over the world that manifested in so many locations--parks, firestations, by neighborhood walls--as deposits of flowers and candles ringed by poems, messages (some neatly computer-produced, some scrawled on the likes of paper plates), posters of the missing.
At Union Square, a real people's park, there were night and day gatherings around huge flower/candle/poster displays. Passersby stop and tend the candles, re-lighting those that blew out, straightening flowers and posters, then walk on about their business. In one section of part the Tibetan community chanted softly led by three monks. The hari-krishnas were in another sector. In a third, unknown singers took turns at a mic singing something beautiful. African drum circles sprang up elsewhere. Some people drifted thru the crowd handing out free candles. Oh yes, and flags. Flags everywhere.
Now I don't like flag-wavers, and I don't the U.S. flag is very interesting looking (just like our national anthem isn't a very interesting tune either), but I can recognize that the flag is the only a symbol of connectivity at this point in time.
A few peace marches were formed, and I was going to go to one, but the same old-school leftists--Socialists Workers Party and Revolutionary Communist Party, as usual, made and passed out placards to innocents, and were trying to use the event for their own agendas. I used to be interested in their agendas, but mostly they're about trying to build the elite party vanguard for the American Revolution, Lenin-style. And their groups are mostly about in-fighting, tired rhetoric, and illusion (with women doing most of the grunt work of the offices). Like any good 60's leftist, I once felt these sorts of groups my kindred spirits. Fortunately, I got older.
But there were no elite vanguard parties in Union Square. Just people spontaeously gathering out of a need to be around others who were equally sad, equally in shock and equally in love with New York City. There were no agendas (except for a few born-again Christians doing their preaching thing--in that way their much like the old left). Mostly people weren't speaking. They were chanting, listening, reading messages and posters and just being together in that beautiful spot that humans "gardened" together, knowing what to do without being told. It was such an incredible gathering of humanity.
This went on for two weeks in several parks, till the city tore them down.
Barg
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