The New Abnormal

I didn’t think twice about descending into a crowded New York City subway station yesterday. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and, under “normal circumstances,” far less death defying than your average taxi ride through midtown.

By all accounts, this city — like all other cities but maybe just a smidge more — is on high alert. Bomb sniffing dogs, increased police presence, Fort Knox style security in my daughter’s downtown office building, and invisible measures we average folks can’t even imagine, no matter how many episodes of Homeland we watch. New York still goes about its business, though. Surly crowds, accents that make the literate sound uneducated and the nice sound nasty. Old fashioned comforts of home.

It occurred to me, as I waited in my daughter’s lobby watching all the smartly dressed twenty-somethings slip into the heavily fortified bank of elevators. that 9/11, to them, is the defining event of their pubescence. When I was the age they were then, the south tower of the World Trade Center had just been completed; and it would be a year before the twin towers were officially open for business. The scandal-gate era had just begun with the Watergate break-in. We were fighting a pointless and horrific war, but it was really far away — particularly for a middle class Jewish kid in New York. As bad as things were, fear had not yet become a way of life.

What went up has since come down. The image of Richard Nixon insisting “I am not a crook” seems sweetly nostalgic. We pay more attention than we used to Asia in general these days, but it still seems very far away and vary unfamiliar. It’s not uncommon for people to ask me whether my son, who has lived in Japan for almost four years, is fluent in Chinese.

No matter what was going on in the world, back in the day, I don’t recall feeling vulnerable or threatened. Except when my mother caught me sneaking some Twinkies. I never thought movies or concerts or subway stations were dangerous on a mass scale. Sure, there was always street crime, but all I needed to do was pay attention, or, as my father always told me, “keep my wits about me.”

My daughter, the one who lives with the daily reality of twenty-first century New York, doesn’t think twice about taking the subway, or going about her business the way she has since moving here. When her younger sister said she would take the subway to her office, though, she put her foot down and insisted she take one of those garden variety death defying taxis. The kind of threat that seems manageable. We accept that we have no control over what happens to ourselves, but when it comes to the ones we love, the known, old-fashioned evil is definitely the lesser one.

My subway ride yesterday was indeed cheap, fast, and, to the naked eye, at least, not particularly death defying. It was mildly unpleasant, being crushed by way too many bodies crammed into way too small a space, but everybody seemed far more interested in getting to where they needed to be than, say, destroying human life. Despite the harsh accents, I could just tell.

Wedged in with my packages, unable to even hold on, I was startled when someone tapped me on the back. Braced for a New York style confrontation, I whipped around, ready to apologize. It was a woman seated near where I had achieved my precarious balance for the ride. She just wanted to let me know she was getting off soon.

Maybe the villains still are far, far away, in a place very unfamiliar. We know it’s not true, but it’s the way we keep going.