Fellow New Yorkers . . .

Did you see the blue lights yesterday?

 Image from here

This is what I saw coming over the Tappan Zee Bridge last night.  This is my skyline.  I fell in love with its splendor and majesty when I looked at it from across the river visiting my future college home, St. John's University.  I watched it change from across that river from the roof of my dorm room.  I didn't watch it on television.  I watched it live and in person.  I cried and I dialed the cell phone numbers of friends who lived a block away at NYU and Pace University.  One week into my freshman year of college and my world was shattering around me.

I don't watch the memorial on television.  I avoid it on purpose.  It's not that I don't want to remember.  It's not that I want to forget either.  The problem is I do remember and the images wake me in the night sometimes.  I didn't watch it from the streets like my friend's did but I watched helplessly in the borough next door.  I couldn't help them.  My campus shut down and wouldn't allow anyone to leave.  I couldn't run to help them.

Two months later, while coming home from visiting my friend at Pace, I walked down the streets to the nearest ACE subway.  Maybe it's because it was 4AM.  Maybe it's because I wanted to believe it was a dream.  Maybe I had become numb to the smell of death and burnt out steel.  I came to a barricade.  At that moment, I didn't understand why it was there.  I looked beyond it and saw the rubble.  Another image I cannot erase.

I will not forget.  I will remember.  I will always be haunted.  I hope you feel the same.

Post-Script: I know that non-New Yorkers feel the void, too.  I just live in the shadow of that great big city and those lights carried me home last night.  They haunt me and I need to vent.

Politics

I know that this vote was from last week but I never did get to post about it.  I'm proud that Anthony Weiner is from my home state of New York but I'm still ashamed that Democrats still want to play the politics game.  In the words of a close friend of mine:

If somebody without legal citizens status aided, in any way, in the first response to the 9/11 attacks at Ground Zero, then I think that they should not only receive taxpayer funded health care for illnesses directly related to being there, but they should be automatically granted citizenship. In fact, the cost of their health benefits should be taken directly from the health care packages provided to all members of Congress.

The fact that this bill couldn't pass upsets me as human being.  I lost a family member who was a first responder as did many others.  Those that survived are suffering every day with health problems due to their selfless act of heroism. Shame on you Congress.  Shame on you.

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