Thanks for Nothing

I'm sitting in a car dealership in southern New Hampshire, waiting for my replacement all-weather tires, so I can drive in bad weather without worrying about a repeat of this experience. Thanksgiving was okay this year, nothing out of the ordinary, but any joy I could take at having a few days off and spending time with family was tempered by the sickening news out of Mumbai, which reminded me, once again, of the sad and dangerous world we're living in. When I was a kid, nuclear war was the thing we worried about, news of ICBMs launched from the Soviet Union and landing in Omaha, Boston and Houston, and wiping whole populations in a flash of light and fire. The disturbingly real t.v. movie The Day After, which depicted the aftermath of a nuclear strike on a Midwestern town brought it home by showing people vaporized in an instant, their skeleton shadows cast against concrete buildings. I had nightmares for a week. I couldn't get the image of Jason Robards out of my head, him stumbling around, delirious from radiation, waving a rifle at hungry, hair-depleted scavengers who were threatening to loot his house for food.

When the Cold War ended, I thought my fear of falling victim to an indiscriminate violent death was in the past. I should have known that's not how human history works. There's a horrific, karmic symmetry to the way human beings keep repeating their mistakes and, in some ways, making them worse. Napoleon invades Russia in winter and ultimately loses the war. Hitler does the same. The Roman Empire over-extends and bankrupts itself. The British Empire does the same. And the American Empire is doing it again right now. An oppressive wall finally goes down in Berlin, signaling freedom and the removal of ideological separation. Two decades later, two walls go up in Israel and the southern United States, signaling separation and failure. The United States funds and supports Islamic fundamentalists to help defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Two decades later, the same Islamists attack New York and Washington D.C. and kill 2700 Americans. We drop two nuclear bombs on Japan and... well, let's leave that one alone for now.

Living in New York, it's perfectly fair, indeed realistic, to assume that in my lifetime, perhaps sooner than I'd like to believe, we'll see another Mumbai or Madrid-style attack, possibly on the very subway and building (Grand Central) I travel to each day for work. It's scary to think about, but let's be real, for determined psychopaths with access to deadly ammunition, a massacre is impossible to stop without turning this country into a police state and bringing transportation to a standstill. The stories out of Mumbai were excruciating to watch, the blood in the hotel lobby, the beautiful Taj hotel going up in flames, the remorseless killing of women and children, purely for the body count. Each lifeless body is a tiny notch on the terrorist hatebelt. It makes me wonder, is there any honor among terrorists? Was there ever one? Sound like stupid questions, yes, but at one point, didn't terrorists have rules about who they killed and why?

If they ever had rules, they're gone now. In this age of the devaluing of human life, of Grand Theft Auto, planes flying into buildings, of Virginia Tech and Columbine, AK-47s and bunkerbusters, Daisy Cutters and serial killers, human trafficking, Saw IV, Hostel II, and torture porn, and smart bombs and Predator drones, the headlines go to the biggest, flashiest, and bloodiest massacres. The more audacious the attack, the bigger and more diverse the body count, the larger and more dramatic the stage, the more the world pays attention. The longer the world pays attention, the greater the glory of the perpetrators of these acts. They want something, they always do, but now, their political goals seem far less important than their egotistical narcissism, their deep-seated desire to do in death what they couldn't do in life: Be important. Make a headline. Just for a day. These nobodies have a political ideology, but it's their goal to BE SOMEBODY that takes precedence, that leads them into death themselves. Their own lives are expendable. Glory and bringing "honor" to their name is all that matters. It's damaged egos run amok. It's Virginia Tech and Columbine on a much larger scale. There are no rules. There is no mercy. There's just blood on the floor.

It's hard to feel good, living in a world like this. I drive around New Hampshire, which is small and peaceful and clean, and I can't shake the feeling that places like this aren't living in the real world. They're removed from things and the bad stuff they see on television is happening somewhere else (it is). By contrast, people living in cities like New York and Tokyo and Mumbai and London and Tel Aviv and Madrid and Beirut and Kabul are fighting a quiet, personal war each day: a war against fear. A war against the desire to run away, to move, to get out, to withdraw, to go somewhere safe. A war against statistics and probabilities. I work in place X, I take Y train, it's a Tuesday before a holiday, it's the 11th or the 7th or the 15th, it's 8:30 a.m., the military guys in green fatigues and holding machine guns are not paying attention, they're flirting with cute tourists. Is this the day? What will I hear first? Will I see something or hear something first? Will it take me out for good, will I just see black, or will I be maimed or burned horribly for the rest of my life? Will I be in my office, or on the ground floor going up the escalator? Will I run? Will there be a stampede, or will people just stand there like blinded deer?

Not every day. I don't calculate the probabilities every day. But at least once a week it runs through my head. And not in any freaked out kind of way, either. It's more like a rational, clear, dispassionate kind of analysis What if? It's like trying to decide which highway to take, or which cereal to buy. Deep down you convince yourself that by thinking about it, it won't happen, that you're inoculating bad luck with your paranoid thoughts. The reality is, it could happen if you live in the wrong place (I do), and happen to cross karmic paths with the wrong people on the wrong day.

Someone asked me the other day if I'd ever thought of leaving New York, if I ever get tired of the threats and warnings, like the one we got last week about the subways and trains being targets. Sure I have. Most people who live in New York have at least thought about leaving, especially after 9/11. There's a bullseye on this city and it's going to get hit again, it's just a matter of time. New York symbolizes the best and worst of the United States. That's why it's a target. That and there are a lot of people here. So why the hell stay and live in a danger zone? For me, it's pretty simple. I love it here, and I don't want to leave. Why the fuck should I? Apart from the fact that I love the city, turning tail and altering my life path based on fear is not the way I want to approach whatever days I have left. I just couldn't do it. If I ever do leave, it'll be for reasons that I choose (a family, more space), not because fear and a bunch of cowardly and sad fanatics forced me out. Either that, or I'll go down with whatever may be coming here. Of course I hope it doesn't happen, or that I'm somewhere safe if it does, but if it does happen, then it was meant to happen, and if I were living somewhere else, somewhere safe, I probably would have choked to death on a Ritz cracker that day. You can't worry about these things, you just have to live your life. Some things are worth dying for, and the freedom to live where I choose and experience this place each day is one of them.

So... it wasn't a great Thanksgiving this time. The human race, which is capable of great things when it operates for good, just showed us, once again, what it can do when it dedicates itself to the opposite, to death and destruction. We're amazingly good at the latter. Too good for our own good. It's now up to the world to swing the pendulum back the other way and keep it there for awhile. Then we'll have something to be thankful for.