Marmalade Daydreams

2 AM Saturday, I found myself stumbling about the glass and steel canyons of lower Manhattan, when I looked up to behold a perfectly vertical shaft of pure white light uniting the earth and the heavens. This light seized me, transporting me back in time. I was abroad for 9/11 and for nearly a year thereafter; the events surrounding that time have always remained somewhat of an abstraction for me. To tell you the truth, I don't even really remember the towers all that well. Despite being born and raised in the immediate vicinity of New York's orange glow, the World Trade Center has taken on more significance in its absence -- this is where you could have seen the twin buildings looming over the harbor from my rooftop, that is the eerie shudder I get from feeling the thousands of ghosts flutter about Ground Zero (or, as it's been renamed, the "9/11 Memorial Hole"). But, I think, most poignantly, there were the "Towers of Light", two groups of massive spotlights shining from near the footprint of the original towers, forming a sort of Jacob's Ladder, two luminous parallel pathways, a dual proclamation: we remember, but life must go on.

9:03 AM yesterday, to mark the fifth anniversary of that morning, the second plane that everybody else saw live on television -- that day I, in the mountains of India, feared I might never be able to go home again, the first time I'd seriously considered an external threat to our homeland since the death of the Commie bogeyman -- our arch-patriot of an assistant principal, he who doggedly includes the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, Supreme Court be damned, went on a mini-tirade over the public address system about how this date must never be forgotten, not only for all of the innocent blood shed on that date, for all of the heroic emergency personnel who gave their lives trying to rescue those trapped in the towers, and for all of the volunteers who are now sick from their tireless hours spent looking for survivors, but also for the soldiers who've been sacrificed in the fight against "the enemies of this country". I felt sick myself. I don't mean to to use this blog as a soapbox, but to conflate a 9/11 memorial with justifying America's war in Iraq equivocates jihadists and insurgents, whom, if if both groups of militant Sunnis, remain strange bedfellows, united by misery. After the shortest "moment of silence" I've ever observed, we were led in a rousing rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance, and I stood dumbfounded by the spectacle of my bilingual students, many of whom could not piece together a basic English sentence, mimicking a pledge they most definitely can not understand.

But tonight, coming home after dark from what all agreed was a pointless Open House (a week into school, we don't have a whole lot to say to the parents, and they certainly didn't have a lot of questions for us), I stopped by my local polling place for the Democratic primary, and I was filled with genuine love for my country. People of all ages, creeds and colors filled the brightly lit gymnasium of the local elementary school. On one line, a young Caribbean woman with a baby in a stroller sporting a Marcus Garvey T-shirt waited behind a white lesbian couple and a few men with full beards and Muslim skullcaps. It's a fairly important primary for local politics, as it will probably decide the winner of the Congressional seat that's opening due to our Representative's retirement. And, just to see the people out -- the single moms, the old folks with missing teeth, the businessman in a tailored suit with a walrus mustache and the guy in a pinstriped sportscoat whose unbuttoned shirt revealed a purplish chest and belly covered in fine white hairs -- to see these people and to realize that, despite the Halliburtons and the undying agribusiness subsidies, perhaps the people who make our laws are flawed because they reflect us, well, it made me happy.

As I walked out into the Brooklyn streets, I walked down the sidewalk with an older Bengali gentleman, trying not to picture the 17 skyscrapers that are probably going to be built and turn our neighborhood into Tokyo (according to the Wikipedia entry, if built according to plan, the proposed development will be the most densely populated area in North America). Some teenagers played basketball in the darkened schoolyard by the lights of the orange streetlamps half a block away. An enormous cream-colored tourbus was parked on our corner (across from a rehearsal space that opened last year) and a few guys (who turned out to be in the band Citizen Cope, celebrating the release of their new album and about to go on a national tour) were smoking cigarettes and drinking out of plastic cups. I wanted to stop a minute and talk to them, but my Muslim neighbor was on his way home, so, before parting ways, I asked him what he thought of the election. "It's good," he said, "but too many vote." I guess that says it. If less people voted, maybe some of the candidates I liked would have won -- I guess that's democracy.

Oh, and happy anniversary, Mom and Dad! (30 years!)