Reply #86: I live in New York City [View All]

[murdoch]

I live in New York City. I guess it's probably correct to say that this had more of a psychological, and actual effect on people in New York City than say, people who lived in Fresno, or Juneau, or Oahu.

When I woke up that morning I turned on my TV and saw static. I figured my TV had broken or something. Then I went on the Internet to check my e-mail or something and saw something about the airplanes, and then I realized what had happened. I was actually in the direction of prevailing winds, so that night the toxic ashes of the WTC flew into my Brooklyn apartment.

I was actually planning to go to Windows on the World on Thursday of that week with my friend.

I had a friend who worked directly next to the towers. If they had fallen eastward, they would have fallen on his building. I tried calling him but the cell phone network was overloaded. Eventually I got through to him and found that he was OK.

Also, I had computer equipment nearby which went down for a few weeks.

I'll tell you what effect it had on me, although it might not be pleasant to hear what effect it had on my thinking.

Perhaps the biggest psychological effect is I had interviewed for a job on the 103rd floor of the WTC at the end of 2000. Or to better express my views of work, bosses and corporations better, I went in and begged for their corporation to hire me as a wage slave. My begging came to nothing - they turned me down, and some other "lucky" worker took my position. I later found that the person who interviewed me was killed on 9/11. Probably everyone I passed in the office, if they were there that day, were killed as well.

Then it occurred to me that the Saudi nationalists were not bombing shopping malls in Omaha, Nebraska - they were attacking perhaps a better symbol of Wall Street than the New York Stock Exchange, as well as the Pentagon. Inside these places, white collar workers, like myself work, and I suppose in some way contribute to things such as the American army's presence in the Saudi dictatorship for the decade previously.

It's a very jarring thing. One the one hand I am a wage slave at the mercy of these Wall Street corporations. On the other hand I am a white collar professional worker, fixing computers so that the Wall Street robber barons can rob the world. I, like so many, throw my hands up and say "What can I do about it?" But the Saudi nationals care little for my professed lack of control over things and see me and the Pentagon bureaucrats as the white collar professional class brains acting in service for the rich, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, whatever you want to call them. They wanted to send a message, and on 9/11 thousands of Pentagon bureaucrats, people on business flights and financial workers in the WTC were killed.

I could very easily have been one of them. And *WHAT* the hell would I have been dying for? For being a wage slave to a boss who gives me BS? For having a beeper and being oncall 24/7? For working with no job security, no pension but what I put in a 401K? For having "competitive" bonuses so everyone in the office is at each others throats instead of being cooperative? For in some small part helping these Wall Street bastards rob the world?

Then again, I have to make a living, right? I have to eat. How unfortunate that I have to do so in this imperialistic, capitalistic world.

9/11 had a radicalizing effect on me. I guess I've had a left wing view before that but was never active or involved or anything. On February of 2002 I went to my first demonstration though. It was in New York City, against the World Economic Forum.

It's sometimes talked about how world poverty is the swamp where terrorism is created, but I want to actually DO something about that, instead of to talk about it. And I don't think anything will happen by mealymouthed DLC planks. In Nepal, the peasants got fed up with their landlords and began taking over their country. The workers were treated like garbage and did something about it. Maybe it's not in an ideal fashion, but nobody gave a hoot in hell about their misery until they got up and did something about it. And what does the US government under Bush do? It's sending millions to Nepal to put down the peasant uprising. The Nepal rebels, who control most of the country because the peasants hate their oppressors, shot two guards at the American embassy. Nepali guards guarding the American embassy. They haven't killed any Americans - yet. But who knows what they'll do now that the US government is trying to ruin their lives and kill them? Why the hell is the US trying to screw over the poor peasants of Nepal? It's sickening. More sickening than any excesses to their revolution in my opinion. I learned about this at a local volunteer bookstore in New York City. I don't follow their whole philosophy and so forth, but I'm always glad to see workers empowering themselves, and the Nepali peasants have had it awful until now.

Maybe I can peacefully in a political fashion stop the US from killing and oppressing these people in the middle of nowhere, things can get done without some Nepali (or Colombian, or Iraqi, or Haitian) commandos coming up here and blowing stuff up. As Martin Luther King Jr. said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." People talk about the angry white men in this country and perhaps I can get into that frame of mind sometimes. But I try to not be angry, or at least to channel that anger into positive things like organizing, because if enough people are organized and doing the right thing, *that* prevents violence. I didn't live through the 1960s so I've never seen the US make a change for the better, whether organized working people can push the idle class in this country back somewhat in their heinous deeds, and so that working class people can empower themselves. But for now I'm keeping positive, organizing and seeing where that gets things.