An Uneasy Quiet...
The city is quiet.
Now it may seem that way to me because I haven’t been out a lot this past week as I’ve been fighting a cold, slurping chicken soup and popping Tylenol. But I actually believe the city is quieter than it should be.
Granted, the city’s airwaves are filled with the discordant pro and con ads for the West Side Stadium. Preparations are being made for the Holidays. Store windows are unveiling their Christmas decorations and every conceivable advertising medium trumpets ads encouraging us to flex our credit cards this Holiday season.
But there is an emotional quiet that is upon the city that I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on. I see it in the mornings on the way to the subway; the faces of people on Broadway seem pensive, thoughtful, quiet. There doesn’t seem to be the sound of laughter in the restaurants I visit. Clinking glasses, yes, laughter, not much.
This week, in a meeting, someone said: well, we’re two weeks into the post – election time and nothing has happened.
Ah, I thought! I think we may have hit on something here.
There has been a sense that may be something should have happened. And that something is something bad. Something big bad. I am not sure that people in other cities feel this way. But I think New York does. Washington, D.C. also.
We don’t hear much about the war in Iraq. War reports often follow the latest exploits of the pop tart of the month, after the latest news on Scott Peterson’s trial.
The other night the television news rattled from one banal story to another until finally the anchor arrived at the news from Iraq, where, of course, there had been more deaths, more suicide bombings, more...
I wondered why it was that bitter fighting in Fallujah should follow the details of Scott Peterson’s trial? Shouldn’t he have been relegated to some lower spot in the line-up and not BEFORE reporting the deaths of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens in a bloody battle half a world away?
It is hard for me to imagine that if television news had been around during the Second World War that the battle reports would follow coverage of a murder trial.
If New York and Washington feel sober it may well be it’s because we’ve been attacked before and there’s no doubt among any of us that we’re still “targets.”
The quiet is, I think, the result of an unspoken fear settling in. The election is over. The die is cast. The Rubicon has been crossed – use any other of those kinds of metaphors that are out there. We are in this now for the long haul.
So now that we’re in this for the long haul, I personally think it’s time to pay attention to the stories. It is important to know top of the hour what is happening on the front lines. We deserve to know what’s going on and the soldiers who are fighting deserve to have us know what’s going on.
A friend who is an embedded journalist in Iraq sent me an e-mail yesterday. He sounded tired and from his note the soldiers he is with sound tired. There is no more talk of politics among the men, he said. They only talk of getting home alive.
So it’s my belief that the trials and travails of men and women whose only thought is of getting home alive belongs top and center of the news right now, out of respect for them and so we do not lose sight of what is happening in the world today.
We started this war; we need to know its costs every day.
No pop tart of the month, no sensational murder trial, and no corporate merger is more important than the individuals who are bleeding in Iraq because we made the choice to go there.