How Do We Respond in Times of Tragedy, Again
**Half-written in Fall 2017, half-written in Fall 2020, shared with you today.**
My first semester of college, I was assigned to write a “New York Op-Ed” in my English 101 class. The week prior to the assignment, a man drove a rental truck into a bike lane in Tribeca, killing eight people in an incident later categorized as a pre-meditated terror attack. I chose to write my assignment around my thoughts that day, and how I thought we should respond in what I called “times of tragedy.” This is that essay:
I’m sitting on the phone with my mom in Tea Magic on the corner of W 112th and Broadway when I get a text from my roommate, Annabel.
“Hey, are you okay?” I assume she’s referring to the fact that I’m normally home by this point.
“Yeah. Sorry. I’m about to head back from work. I stopped to call my mom in a coffee shop.”
“No, that is TOTALLY fine. Just making sure you weren’t near the shooting or anything.”
My stomach drops. My mom continues to talk to me about their Halloween plans but I don’t hear. I text Annabel back.
“Wait, what?”
“There was a shooting by the Target near us. Be careful!”
It’s all too real. There was a shooting eight blocks away from my apartment, and I am lucky enough to be on the Upper West Side. This never would have happened back home in my quiet southern suburb. I interrupt my mom.
“Mom, wait. I got a text from Annabel. There’s been a shooting in Tribeca.”
My mom is oddly calm. I think she must be just as stunned as I am. She tells me to go on home. I reroute to avoid the area of the incident.
I was nineteen years old and on my own for the first time — and I was in New York City. I’ve tried to think about how I’d respond now, as a college senior three years later, if this were to happen again. I think I’d be saddened, of course, but not necessarily shocked. I describe my mother here as “stunned,” projecting my feelings on her. Now, I’d just describe that silence as “processing.” There’s another obstacle to get around. It’s sad, but we move on.
On the train, I can’t stop reading reports. The light blue bench beneath me feels cold on the back of my legs. A man ran a rental-truck through a bike path and into a school bus. The subway car screeches against the tracks. Eight people are dead. The fluorescent lights flicker. Eleven are injured. A smiley-face sticker stuck to the floor mocks my eyes pooling with tears. I wonder when all this madness will stop.
I was very proud of this paragraph. The professor praised it in the in-class workshop we did of my essay. I believe I saw the smiley-face sticker the day before or after the day of the incident, but it was a nice juxtaposition, so I used the image. I think this is one of the first essays I wrote where I got to use a story from my own life to paint a bigger picture. I liked the creative aspect and combining it with more critical thinking. This is an essay that I’ve gone back to as I’ve thought about what kinds of things I liked writing and might want to do more of.
But when I emerge from the Rector Street station, I appear to be alone in my questioning. Business men and women walk home with their normal chatter and cell phone calls. Families with young children dressed as superheroes and princesses go trick-or-treating. Does this little Elsa walking in front of me know what’s happened, or did everyone decide to pretend that everything is alright? Are they ignoring the two policemen stationed at the corner of Rector and Greenwich or the car that comes through with siren blaring and turns right onto West Street towards the incident?
In addition to the details mentioned here, I remember the streets being crowded. There were probably the usual tourists there to see Trinity Chapel, which had not yet closed its doors for the renovation that’s been going on for over two years at this point. Now there are no tourists and many of those business men and women work from home. I haven’t seen the Financial District filled with people like that in several months.
On Halloween night 2020, I didn’t have to wonder if the trick-or-treating children knew about what’s been going on. We haven’t had a one-time incident that affected 19 people. We’ve had an 8-month pandemic that has killed almost 750,000 people in the United States alone. And these are New York City kids. Whether they stayed in the city or escaped to an uncle’s house in the suburbs for the summer, they are keenly aware of how their lives have changed.
They do school on Zoom and wear masks when they meet up with their friends in the park. They haven’t seen their grandmother in months. But the lives of New York City kids haven’t just changed from the pandemic but from the civil rights movement stemming from the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. They see the BLM and Biden/Harris signs in their neighbor’s windows. They might have made a protest sign themselves and gone to see the marches with their parents.
I used to avoid the Wall St. 2/3 station when I was in a hurry because of the large international tourists groups always taking up space in front of Federal Hall. I don’t have to worry about that anymore. There are fewer briefcase swinging businessmen and no slow-walking tourists headed to the Statue of Liberty ferry. I haven’t been stopped on the sidewalk near Battery Park and asked if I wanted to see the Statue of Liberty in months. It was always kind of annoying, but I miss it now.
How should we respond in times of tragedy? Should we act as if nothing happened and go on with our day, or should we pay our respects and reflect on the event? I felt torn. I didn’t want to move on and ignore the tragedy, but I also didn’t want it to shut me down. As shocked as I was by the act of terrorism itself, I was shocked still more by the multitudes headed to the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, unfazed by what Mayor de Blasio called “a particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians.”
I think I’ve lost some of my ability to be shocked now. Part of me thinks it’s good that I no longer feel debilitating surprise when I hear about a rise in Covid cases or another shooting: that my feelings don’t take over leaving me unable to focus on anything else. It’s good to not be out of commission because of something out of my control.
But if I’m not shocked, what am I? Are apathy and numbness better alternatives? I want to argue that it is better to be in touch with your emotions than not, even if those emotions are unpleasant. But there has to be a balance. I felt the need for balance then, and I feel it even more strongly now. But I don’t know that I have any better answers.
A New York Times article referred to the events of October 31, 2017 as “the deadliest terrorist attack on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.” So why does nobody seem to care? People are treating terror attacks as they would a commonplace car accident. They might hear about it, it’s bad, but it doesn’t affect them. And yet, this is the tenth terrorist attack in New York City since 9/11. These attacks are not and should never become normal. They become normalized when we push them aside. The fact that my friends back home had no clue that the second largest terrorist attack in New York City had occurred is disturbing. Silence only perpetrates the problem.
His name is Sayfullo Saipov. I never mentioned that in the original essay. The man who drove a truck into the bike path and killed 8 people has a name. It is Sayfullo Saipov.
I don’t know why I didn’t think to mention that the first time. I guess I didn’t think it was important. I was also so appalled by what happened that I didn’t want to think about the person who had rationalized it. Thinking about Saipov humanizes the incident. An immigrant from Uzbek, he was married and had three children. He was 29 years old the day of the attack. A Muslim and member of ISIS, he had been planning the attack for weeks. After the crash, he jumped out of the truck and yelled the Arabic phrase for “God is great,” “Allahu akbar,” and was shot by a police officer in the abdomen. He was hospitalized and later given a life sentence.
I have become much more aware of the people behind the incidents these past few months. Perpetrator or perpetrated, they are all human. While I am saddened by the act that Saipov committed, I am glad he didn’t die from the gunshot inflicted on him by a police officer.
I’m not going to pretend that I know all the answers. Or really any of the answers. But one thing that I know for sure is that we can’t pretend it didn’t happen. New Yorkers are ambitious. Everyone who moves to New York City has some desire in them to be successful. We’re also resilient. When bad things happen, we don’t want it to get in the way of our goals, so we simply move on. It’s a New York trademark. When confronted with subway car beggars on a daily basis, you feel like you have to develop some sort of emotional wall to keep out the tragedy of others. It’s selfish, but in this city, it’s also kind of necessary. The question of how to respond to tragedy doesn’t stop after the next big attack, for we’re faced with tragedy every day. We’ve already subconsciously decided how to deal with the hardship of others, and this “it doesn’t affect me so I don’t have to think about it” mentality produces a culture of people who deal with their problems by themselves and discourages vulnerability.
Ok, I have a confession to make. This is not the exact essay that I turned in to my professor on November 3rd, 2017. This is actually the version that I edited after I received comments on it and, according to my computer, it was last changed on January 8th, 2018. I liked the piece enough to keep working on it even when it wasn’t for a grade anymore, and I wanted to get the sentiment right. The above paragraph and the two that follow were written based on the comments I got during the in-class workshop in an effort to be more nuanced and less conclusive.
The last paragraph of the original essay ended here with a call to action to send letters to your representatives, create community, and fight for what you believe in. I had no idea what I was talking about. I felt the pull to make a change in myself, and, even though I honestly have never sent a letter to my representative, it seemed like the thing to do. That’s what you’re supposed to say, right?
And even though what I ended up with is still the naive musings of someone who had lived in NYC for two and a half months talking about it like it’d been two and a half years, I like this version a lot more. I didn’t know that you don’t have to have all the answers in order to have something worthy of sharing. I didn’t know that, in fact, there is more power in admitting that you don’t have it all figured out than in trying to wrap your problems up in a trite little bow.
Something really big, much worse than the events of October 31, 2017, has to happen in order for parents to tell their children that they can’t go trick-or-treating or to keep college students from attending the Halloween parade. For myself, I went on with my plans and attended an academic panel at my school. But when I went home, I contemplated the proceedings of the day both with a friend and by myself, complete with coffee ice cream, the cure to all sadness.
This year something really big and much worse than the events of October 31, 2017 did happen, but it still didn’t keep children from trick-or-treating: because we needed a sense of normalcy to keep going. I didn’t dress up, but I sat on my Brooklyn stoop with my roommates and watched the trick-or-treaters go by. It was a last-minute decision so we hadn’t bought candy to give out, and we felt guilty as we sent children on to the next stoop where our neighbors had set up a candy slide on their rail made out of PVC pipe to abide by social distancing measures while giving out treats.
I saw many princesses and a few little lions. One child had on a blow-up dinosaur costume and his mom led him down the street by pulling on the nose of the costume. We smiled behind our masks and hoped our eyes would show that we were thankful families had come out for the evening.
So maybe we should go on with our day. Maybe we should go out and have fun and forget about the world for even just a moment. Maybe we should eat our favorite ice cream and cry because it feels like the end of innocence. Maybe we should grab a trusted friend and share the burdens of our hearts. And maybe, we shouldn’t use our signature American resiliency to suppress feelings and block ourselves from the world around us. Maybe we should use it to develop an emotional stability that will allow us to see our world in all of its brokenness.
I recently bought a red t-shirt with the words “ETERNAL OPTIMIST” printed in white across the front. I get a variety of comments on it every time I wear it to school. Some people ask if that’s how I actually feel or just how I want to feel, to which the answer is both. I get a few sarcastic comments like “optimism, what’s that?” to which I normally respond with a shrug and a “you should try it sometime.” Others just say “oh, that’s nice,” with a look that makes me think they wish they could have some optimism right now.
I’m not perfect at it, but I’ve had some practice at seeking optimism this year. And I don’t think it’s about putting on a good face when you feel like crying or ignoring life’s problems and only focusing on the good. I think optimism is crying when you need to cry, and then picking yourself up and moving forward. It’s about seeking and believing that something good is just around the corner. It’s about a hope for tomorrow rather than a false happiness for today.
I don’t know exactly what 2021 will bring: but there will be times of tragedy, and there will be times of joy, and it will require some optimism. And I’ll look back at it in another three years and realize how naive I am being even now.
No matter how many times we’re faced with tragedy, the fact remains that this world isn’t perfect, but that’s okay. Good can be found where we least expect it, and it’s by being broken that we are made whole.
