I decided to stroll down to Cafe Amrita, a very groovy eurocafe replete with coffee bar and a TV always tuned to soccer, for some coffee and pastry and to read the paper. It was delightful to sit, overhear conversations and people watch. The weather is glorious here, and it was just lovely to watch the world go by. I recalled a statement made by my voice teacher after he underwent open heart surgery-- 'No matter what happens in your life, Joanna', he said, 'existence is pretty incredible'. Sitting in that cafe this morning, I'd have to agree. The privilege of being alive, is a beautiful and fragile gift.
So that was my profound moment of the day. Next, I decided, since its the kind of thing I never do, to go down to the World Trade Center site and just see what was going on.
I confess, I was fascinated.
Once I got topside from the subway ride, the first thing I noticed were the cops. They said the police presence was going to be overwhelming, and it was, but not in an oppressive way. Camera crews were everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Here was a vertically challenged lady trying to file her story:
Next I ran into a group of fundamentalist Christians from North Carolina handing out tracts in one of the many impromptu holding pens the cops had set up for people who wanted to assemble. I think you just got in your pen and did your thing. Passerby's could watch you and talk to you but it did make a clear point of dilineation between protester and pedestrian. It was kind of like the zoo. Anyway, I'm not sure if they were here to protest the mosque or what, but here were there t-shirts:
I heard them singing praise songs to Jesus when I was finally leaving the area.
Right beside these guys was the group that thinks that 9/11 was an inside job. They were well organized and did the T-shirt thing too. I have their tract and honestly, I have no idea what they are talking about, but I'm going to do some google searches later on tonight.
I finally got down to Ground Zero, and the official 9/11 televised memorial service was still going. It must have been over two blocks away from where the barricades were set up for tourists-- we couldn't see anything from where we were. We could listen, though, and hear the names of the victims being read, and taps being played. It was very moving. Everyone was respectful and extremely quiet. There were few to no signs. Instead, a lot of American flags, and this piece of artwork:
The mosque protesters were around the corner at the Park51 site, and at about 45 minutes before their start time, they didn't have a lot of people there, but they did have this guy:
He's really got to believe in what he's doing to wear that on a day like today.
The people protesting the people protesting the mosque had a much better turnout, from what I could tell. They were an interesting group-- ex-Hippies, people with communist leanings, some Buddhist monks were there, college students, a handful of obviously Muslim people. All peaceable, very energized:
I did have a very interesting conversation with a woman in line for the bathroom at Starbucks with me (God bless Starbucks for being the public restroom provider of NYC!). She was two blocks away on 9/11 and now writes for an online newspaper warning people of the dangers of Sharia law and Islam. We had a cordial conversation in the bathroom line, and to my surprise practically everyone in the line weighed in, too.
I gotta say, I left feeling proud of a country where all these people-- half of whom I'd put in the crazy crackpot category-- can exercise their right to assemble, their right to speech. I wondered what all the cops thought about this. And then I went to Trader Joe's.
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