People are chatting and snapping away as if they are on a picnic. This is the ground where people, some holding hands and some alone, jumped off and splattered. Can't you see the blood stains? Severed body parts? The planes still fly past the World Trade Center, just not through it this time. I startle the same.
I was here decades before. I climbed up one of the towers, leaned onto the narrow window between the vertical combs that formed exoskeleton of the building and looked down. People and yellow cabs milled around below like ants. 1362 feet below to be exact. How did it feel to jump?
Hate begets hate. All the imperialism we practiced in the Middle East came back home to roost on that day. Then we went in, in the name of WMD and "almighty's gift to humanity" and killed half a million of wrong people. It was a revenge killing. It was our Allahu Akbar. The image of an Iraqi mother with a severed child in her arms and two big puddles on her face is seared in my memory just like people falling from the sky. After 8 years of closing the wounds and making peace best we can, we have another a-hole in the White House. Maybe we should just consider ourselves lucky that the mental one is only an a-hole, not an ideologue.
Anyhoo, I ended up with another 11,000 step day. I was still tired this morning even after a day of rest, thanks to the 12,500 step day on Friday in Flushing and Upper West Side. I'll have to take another day off tomorrow. Except that we are meeting my sister and her family for lunch in Bayside, way past Flushing. I'm just thankful that I recover, at least partially, after sleep these days.
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