This past September, we marked the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Towers which changed who we were and how we conducted ourselves in the world. No single drop of rain holds itself responsible for the flood that follows but the rainfall continues.
This weekend the news stories have been about the casual contempt in which the New York Police Department, seemingly with the knowledge and permission of their Mayor (who staunchly defended them after they were caught), violated the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Muslim men and women within and without the city's limits just in case 'they' were up to something, somewhere at sometime with someone.
I'm still enough of the wild-eyed boy of the Sixties to worry about 'The Man' and to have felt very frightened while outnumbered (or feeling like it) by Ray Kelly's Brown Shirts last October Occupying the Banks as part of OWS. We found ourselves at the safest place on earth, at least on Manhattan, as we were coerced by cordons to stay on the sidewalk, surrounded by a thousand or more riot gear clad cops, shoulder to shoulder with a phalanx of police buses and vans ready to rush miscreants to Rikers if provoked.
Where do you draw the line and who does the math? When does reasonable concern for public safety turn into hob nail boots in the early morning hours? When does national security become wrapped in the newspeak of nacht und nebel become the language of the incarcerated and their jailers? How much is perception of persecution and how much is perceptible persecution?
And did we turn the calendar pages back far enough-not to this past September but to this date nineteen years ago and what was, at that time, considered unimaginable. It was, until just now, probably forgotten in the flood of events, minute by minute, that make up our lives and so often overwhelms us.
-bill kenny
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