A New York Story
One of the people I mentioned in my column last week didn’t appreciate my point of view. He suggested that I “go write one of [my] columns on New York that nobody cares about.”
Any journalist will tell you that the quickest way to get on their bad side is to tell them what to write. (Another thing you shouldn’t say, “I am above the Sunshine Law.” That stuff tends to stick in their craw, too.) But it just so happened that I had planned to write about New York today anyway.
I was having a conversation with Jim McCall the other day and as we are wont to do, we were discussing a wide variety of Parkville “issues.” We discussed the opinion page of this newspaper, and whether or not he would be reading a letter from Riss Lake’s Gordon Cook in this week’s episode that deals with the 2004 Capital Improvement Project bonds and the new city hall. I told him that I was in the process of gathering numbers – a lot of numbers, from almost every entity in Parkville – and it would take me at least another week. I’m not that good with numbers. I became a journalist because I was told there would be no math. Anyway, I said, the opinion page this week would be devoted to 9/11. He kind of paused. Weekly newspapers aren’t supposed to write about 9/11…right? “Yeah,” he said, suddenly out of the mood to talk about what we consider “problems” in our off-the-cuff chats, “you should definitely do that.”
When you drive past Stone Canyon during the day, the guy sitting next to Kevin Heaton on the bench in the tie, sweating in the sun because he dresses like an idiot, is me. Sometimes our conversations veer into real philosophical territory. One day we were talking about downtown Belgrade during the Balkan War. (Yeah, we’re just great at parties.) “You know, if we lived in a war torn country right now, someone would be bombing the Tom Watson Parkway and we’d feel safe because we were all the way down here, less than a mile away,” he said.
How’s that for perspective?
September 11 has become politicized to the point of bad taste. This isn’t a national holiday. I cringed when most Republicans made the attacks on America the centerpiece of their 2004 convention. I was offended when the top Democrats didn’t mention the day even once during their 2008 convention. But after pondering that for a moment, you start to wonder why you care what either party says about it all. The people that went to work that morning, the passengers on those planes, they sure as hell wouldn’t care.
I was living in Brookside on September 11, 2001. I worked for the Olathe Daily News, and I didn’t go to work that morning. My editor, Terri Hurd, was completely cool with that. I had just moved here from downtown Manhattan. Flight attendants just had their throats slit with box cutters. The guy from Boston flying to see his grandchildren in California died when his plane was smashed into a skyscraper. The World Trade Center had just collapsed. The Pentagon – the Pentagon! – was attacked. Thousands of people were dead. I couldn’t figure out the “Olathe angle” that day. (The Johnson County Courthouse actually evacuated that morning. Certainly, after the World Trade Center and Washington D.C., the Sonic capital of the world was next on Al-qaida’s hit list.)
She let me write the editorials for the newspaper for the next few days. Later, I found out that one of our night editors was submitting them to the AP wire with a warning attached – I was branded a “jingoist” (overly patriotic). Whatever.
This morning, the first e-mail I received came from former Kansas City mayor and Democratic congressional candidate Kay Barnes. Journalists are supposed to be skeptical, but when I saw that it was a 9/11 message, I confess that I was cynical. I read the first few lines, but I kept waiting for the sellout. I kept waiting for the obligatory attack on her opponent. Thankfully, it never came. So we ran it, and it’s not about politics – at least I don’t see it that way. (Congressman Sam Graves traditionally does not write releases like that…had he, I would have given him equal time for those of you counting column inches and coverage.) I thought about running President Bush’s statement, but I knew that would only upset a bunch of readers. I thought about running Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s statement on how America deserved the attacks, but then I decided he could go [copulate] himself.
So yes, here’s another New York story. I’m thinking about Michelle Robinson, the little girl I used to swim with in her above ground pool as a kid, who died in the towers that morning. I’m thinking about Tom Tarantino, the kid I grew up with, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald but didn’t get to work that morning because his wife (purposely?) didn’t set his alarm. I’m thinking about Fred Ceraso, who spent his morning watching people hold hands as they jumped to their death.
We’ve seen the footage so often, it doesn’t seem real anymore. “Let’s roll” is an ad campaign slogan. But we cannot forget. This happened. Those towers are gone. This is very real.