Actually, there were about five or six–most of the guys were caught.
Things have changed according to people’s personalities. We are very relieved when something bad happening, like the blackout, is “just” an accident. When the subway stops, when there’s an explosion nearby, everyone is as alert as a herd of deer, ready to run. Cops and firemen still get respect and the latter are usually stood a round of drinks if they’re in a bar. Almost all the firehouses have completed their plaques–names of up to fifteen guys out in front, tasteful but devastatingly sad.
On Thursday, the majority of people I saw in Manhattan were wearing black, some all black. Lots of flag pins and patches, flag do-rags, Old Nav flag T-shirts, worn without irony or politics, just with respect for the fact that we in NY and Washington represented America to those bastards, even though the WTC at that point was pretty much just an ordinary office building despite its name, and frankly a pretty outmoded one.
So many people lost their jobs due to 9/11 (including me) that all you have to say at an interview that you were laid off after it and everybody understands, with no stigma attached to you. For every person on Wall Street who’s now unemployed, there were tons of support staff–the guys who shined their shoes, the women who cleaned their offices, the dudes with the hotdog pushcarts, the Chinese garment workers whose workplaces were closed and inaccessible and lost weeks worth of wages they could barely afford. Things have largely come back down there, but the bar is set a lot lower for earnings, etc.
I guess we all had it drilled into our heads how live can change, no matter how innocent or apolitical you are, and how much we all have in common. The stockbroker from Greenwich and the Muslim Bangladeshi waiter at Windows on the World died together, in agony, and the widow/ers and children feel the same way. Community groups have strengthened a lot, but it’s harder because jobs are less secure and some of my friends have had to move out of the city, taking their charity and tax money with them.
Caught a play at the New-York Historical Society on Wednesday called “The Guys”, and there was crying aplenty at the end. It still hurts. And as the female lead said, “Yes, things are getting back to normal. But normal has shifted.”