Bouncing Back

I'm not predisposed to like New York. Let's face it; down in my heart, cultivated since birth, there is a deeply embedded bias against the city because it is home to a certain baseball team. As a result, fair or not, accurate or not, I've used that starting excuse to draft a mental tableau of ills that plague the city. Sure, maturity, personal experience and Big Papi have helped dissuade these irrational perceptions, but I'll confess that just a mere year ago I was saying, "there's no way I'd live in New York. It's too... big/dirty/dingy/self-centered/full of Yankee fans. Yet, here I am.

Off the bat, I'm pleased to report that most of my remaining prejudices have proven false as George Washington's teeth. In fact, my first weeks there have left me deeply impressed with numerous things, including it's resilience.

New York has seen terrorism, and I haven't. To be honest, I've always felt pretty secure because: (a) nobody is going to attack suburban Lexington because it's not an economic center, (b) nobody would dare attack Shanghai, let alone know how, and (c) nobody would attack Boston when New York is a more appealing target.

Then, one week into my New York Experiment, someone puts a car bomb in Times Square. Thankfully, we were spared disaster, but that doesn't alter the fact that 7 blocks from my office sat a terrifying weapon of destruction.

48 hours later, I walked through the area on my way home from work. I expected thin crowds, an aura of hesitancy, the unease of vigilance, people looking over their shoulders. There was none of that. The place was packed with tourists and suits. Nobody looked concerned, nobody looked upset. It was business as usual for all the bag sellers, professional sign holders and street cart hawkers. Taxis, buses and subways ran on time. The city seemed to have moved on from the attempt. What struck me even more was that week at work, it wasn't the hot button topic of conversation. People had other things to talk about - the Dow and Cinco de Mayo festivities.

Compare that to Boston, where a few years back the evening commute was disrupted when light-bright signs, in a guerrilla marketing campaign for the TV show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, were mistaken for possible explosives. Not only did the city come to a near screeching halt, but everyone was talking about it for days to come. I know the news is making a much bigger deal of the Times Square attempted bomb, and rightfully so, but I personally saw more public interest in Boston about a night-light attack, than in New York after a bomb scare.

I can't help but marvel at the contrast, and at New York's ability to bounce back. It's like the city, known for it's cynicism, is wrapped in a blanket of optimism about these things, focusing on the positives (the heroes of the day, nobody getting hurt) and glossing-over the obvious negatives (there was a bomb in Times Square). The city has seen much worse. I don't know what the city felt, what it went through, how it recovered, how it bonded in the fall of 2001, and I don't see how I could. I never properly realized exactly how important, how galvanizing those months were for the city. The result is a city far stronger, far more prepared, far more resilient than I expected. The type of city that can come back from after loosing the first 3 games of the playoffs to win the last 4... or something like that,