The Cost of 9/11
I watched as she furtively emptied the contents of the small container of mixed nuts onto a napkin and into the handbag on her lap which was already filled with nuts. I was seated next to her at the stool in the fancy bar in a corner of the lobby at Avery Fisher Hall. I was finishing a glass of white wine, waiting for the start of a special concert of the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers. My sister was there on that fatal morning, working for the New York Corporation Counsel in a building on Church Street, just three blocks from the Towers. She was knocked down by people fleeing the building in panic after the first tower collapsed. Since she was considered a survivor she was offered free tickets to the concert and invited me to be her guest. I had met her in the bar around 6:30 and as she and her friends, who had also arrived earlier, repaired to the restrooms, I had moved from the bar to the banquettes in the middle of the room to finish my drink.
I turned my attention to the woman seated to my right. She looked different from the rest of the fashionably dressed upper middle class people at the bar. Thin, maybe in her sixties, slightly disheveled, wearing a worn track suite, Then I noticed that the drink she was nursing wasn’t really a drink. It was a large glass of iced water. At that moment, one of the barmen passed near her, noticed the empty nut bowl, glanced briefly at her and went back to the bar.
Suddenly I realized what was happening. He knew who she was, probably because she visited the bar on a regular basis. Either he was complicit in allowing her to stay there because he knew she was hungry or he actually was helping her on a regular basis to overcome her plight.
I also realized that this whole scene was a metaphor for what really happened on September 11, 2001 when terrorists attacked the United States: We reacted exactly as Osama Ben Laden wanted us to: We went to war on two continents, spent trillions of dollars, destroyed the economic strength of the U.S. for a decade, and made enemies of Muslims throughout the world.
In the meantime, 48 million people in the U.S. are now below the poverty level, millions of people are unemployed, volunteer soldiers who weren’t killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are returning to their families horribly wounded both mentally and physically and they also can’t find jobs. And people like the woman at the elegant bar in New York City are hungry enough to steal mixed nuts at the commemorative concert for the victims of 9/11.
Gerri Gewirtz (9/15/2011)
