A hundred times I have thought:
New York is a catastrophe,
and fifty times:
It is a beautiful catastrophe.
- Le Courbusier


(Incised in the pavement of Battery Park City's esplanade which was built atop landfill from the World Trade Center's excavation.)



By the time I got to work, both planes had crashed. We knew it wasn't an accident. My first reaction came before the towers fell, before I began to fully empathize with the people killed, the people trapped, the families destroyed. At first, my intellectual mind began to think of the political consequences of the terrorist attack, before my emotions began to deal with the consequences upon human life.

This is it, I thought, this is the beginning of the end. This is the event that will provide the excuse for the military buildup, that will lead to the wars, that will end the world. I knew, and I continue to know, that the United States will not take this as a chance to reexamine our assumption that we are the police of the world, that we are invincible, and that none dare oppose us as we impose our will on the rest of the planet. Our very country gained independance through the use of guerrilla tactics against an imperialist military superpower, and we're supposed to be surprised when we become what we fought against and the same thing happens to us?

I was not suprised at all, for reasons I will explain later. I thought it would happen on Dec 31st, 1999, but I knew it would happen in New York City. Simply the fact that it is such a concentration of people makes it the most obvious target. I thought it would be a nuke, smuggled out of the Ukraine by the Russian Mafia and smuggled into New York harbor on a ship to be detonated. In a way, we are lucky that our false sense of invulnerabilty was shattered in such a minor way- minor in that the deaths could have easily been in the millions with a nuke or a virus.

I'm sure I'll be viewed as callous for taking a macro view, but it's the way my mind works. I am no poet, and I could not possibly do justice to the pain, the shock, the terror of the incident better than anyone else in this country. Maybe it's too early for me to start thinking about consequences, because we don't know who's to blame for this. I think we will, though, because obviously they had a message they wanted to get across- unless this was the act of some sort of doomsday cult or militia whose members wanted only to take lives.

I hope it was. If it was a random act of terrorism, and not an act of war, then maybe people will think about how ready they were to go to war without even anyone to go to war against. Our country has committed crimes, many crimes, and we know it, because we pointed the finger right away at those with a reason to get revenge on us. If it turns out that they had nothing to do with it, then maybe we'll wonder why we pointed that finger so quickly, and think about what we have to answer for. The cynic in me says "no chance."

I want peace. I am a pacifist. I do not want retaliation, I want PEACE. I want the killing to STOP. Even if this has nothing to do with its proximity to the anniversary of the Camp David Accord, we're still bombing, and killing, all over the world in order to secure economic interests for the very same people in our country who are responsible for the poverty here. Yet I don't hear cries that we focus on running our own country before we go out and try to run others. Instead, I hear cries for blood. For revenge. From people who are normally rational. From people who claim to be Christian. Most of all, from the military spokespeople, whose eyes gleam when they speak in anticipation of glorious war. It's frightening to watch.

The real tragedy of yesterday's catastrophe is that it won't be taken as a message to stop the murders we're committing, but rather as an excuse to commit more. I don't want a military buildup, as if, as IF the military could have protected us from such an attack. Intelligence, maybe. But I don't think it's acceptable to say that with a strong military we could have occupied the entire third world and prevented this- no amount of military might could have stopped this- only a reduction in worldwide economic disparity could have and will prevent things like this. I don't want the U.S. to rule the world with an iron fist simply to enable us to exploit the third world's natural resources and the lack of laws protecting human rights so we can have cheap tennis shoes, cheap coffee and bananas, and more goddam fucking S.U.Vs. And after what happened yesterday, I don't want the people of the United States to demand that we up our existing practice of murdering civilians in retaliation for the murder of some of our own- for if there is world peace tomorrow, and all of yesterday's deaths added up, there would still be more blood on our hands than theirs.