An Inauguration, Surrounded by Ghosts…

No matter if you’re a RED or a BLUE, George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States. He won by a clear majority, albeit on the slim side.

It was not a landslide nor was it the razor thin, contested victory of 2000. It was a genuine win; a majority of Americans who voted wanted George back.

Our apartment is in Battery Park City, a business and residential area nestled next to where the World Trade Towers stood; an area that was deserted for months after 9/11 and which has changed considerably in tenor and tone since then.

But haven’t we all? Changed in tone and tenor since then?

Before 9/11 my impression of BPC was of an area more transient than other parts of New York, a place of short term rentals for people doing a tour of duty on Wall Street.

Now it seems to me there are more permanent residents, more long termers than short termers, more owners than ever before.

I spent most of the past week working out of our apartment and walking a great deal around lower Manhattan. With the cold, grey weather and the impending inauguration of W., I found myself quiet and contemplative as we face the next four years of our political life.

Wednesday I walked up to Tribeca to meet a couple of producers.

Passing the Trade Center Hole, I noticed that there were still, despite the harsh wind and cold, tourists who were paying their respects to the emptiness. It did seem that more were having their pictures taken at the restored PATH train station than in front of the empty pit.

Seeing this, I felt encouraged; the shift in emphasis seemed healthy. And may be it was just the driving wind from the north but there were remarkably fewer vendors selling Trade Center memorabilia.

As it was bitter cold, I walked through the business buildings on my way back. I passed through the Winter Garden, a glassed-in atrium that is the site of many concerts, civic events and casual gatherings among stately palm trees. As I passed through, tourists strolled; workers took an afternoon break, sipping coffee and eating snacks from the surrounding shops.

Stopping there, I looked around and realized that for me, in that particular mood and time, I sensed around me the ghosts of 9/11. All I needed to do was to close my eyes and I could see the Winter Garden, covered in ash, a twisted mass of metal and smoked glass, a ruin.

It was rebuilt in record time with a determination born of defiance and love for the city of New York, by our famously contentious building trades, united in that moment by a fury against the forces that had destroyed the Trade Center.

Standing there this last week, I was amazed at the restoration. There was no hint anywhere that the building had been through a destructive act of war. But through the power of my mind I could see it as it was for a time, a shattered structure, a place where bodies had been found and dreams shattered.

The President who sat in the Oval Office when this catastrophe occurred has been kept by the American people in that office, to lead us as we march forward into the uncertain future.

As President Bush enters his second term, he started his first full day of that term with a prayer service at the National Cathedral in D.C. and I was pleased there were prayers as I fear we very much need them.

9/11 has given us our ghosts, both of the human lives which went away that day and of the lives that have been lost since then fighting “the war on terror.”

We are also faced with the ghost of a world that went away that day. And I find myself praying that we do not attempt, as we so often do as a country, to obliterate those ghosts with intellectual and material distractions.

Too much is at stake.