194: Before and After
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Sarah was at Pier 94 in New York City a couple of days ago. It was the place where families of people who had worked in the World Trade Center were going to give DNA samples to police for using identifying their loved ones. And she was standing in the parking lot. Then I saw this guy walking around basically in a circle looking at people and he kept touching his hand to the top of his head, like kind of rubbing the top of his head. And his movements were so strange that I actually thought that maybe he was deranged a little bit. Then these circles got a little bit smaller and he came closer to where I was. And then I just realized that he had a flyer pinned to his t-shirt. And the flyer had a picture of this guy's black and white pictures. And some writing on it I realized he was somebody's relative. He'd been walking all over New York City posting this flyer over a 40 block area. He had a picture of his father. He'd gone to the armory, he'd filled out a missing person's report. He tried to reach other people in his father's office in the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center. He'd gone to every hospital and he'd just given some DNA. So I said, "What are you gonna, what do you do now?" And he said, "I don't know." And he said it like, not just like, "I don't know." He was like, "I don't know where to go." He just had no idea where to go or what to do. And he couldn't go home. It was like, I think there's this sense that as long as there's daylight, you should be traipsing around the city looking for whoever. And it was sort of early afternoon and I could just tell he just had no idea what to do physically with himself. He said, "I was walking around over there and I realized I was literally walking around in circles. And I don't know what to do." What's so strange is that it wasn't just people touched so directly by the tragedy who felt that. Don't you believe we've all been in a little bit of a fog? It's hard to sleep. It's hard to know what to think of things. We want to help somehow, but beyond a few simple things, it is not clear what to do or how to do it. Walking in circles is such a primal response. A friend who was in Washington Square Park in New York when the World Trade Center buildings collapsed said that a man that he was standing there started walking in circles at that moment, screaming. And maybe it's just me, but before last week I could have never imagined the feeling that would lead to somebody doing that. But now I can't. In Chicago, where I live, when I'm in the car driving around, I find myself obsessively staring at the Hancock Center and the Sears Tower. Two buildings that are about as large as the World Trade Center buildings. And I look at them and try to get my mind around the scale of it. About what it means for something so crazily big that I'm crumbling to the ground. For two of them. Two something's that big. Somebody told me that for the first week that this happened, she slept with the radio one because she didn't want to miss the chance that somebody would explain why this happened. And didn't you feel this? No matter how much we have all learned in the last two weeks about Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan and the huge military bases that have been in Saudi Arabia since the Persian Gulf War basis that people hate our guts for and who, you know, who knew?
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