New York Is a Friendly Town

In the Student Service Center at Columbia, black and white pictures of New York line the walls. At one end, a high-contrast shot of Grand Central depicts the calm in the station before rush hour. At the other end, the columns and statues of the New York Stock Exchange loom over students awaiting transcripts, the processing of a request to drop a class, and other administrative steps that build and categorize their education here. How many of these students were once destined to hallow the halls of these New York giants? How many of them were to be passing through the terminal to a hedge fund or a bank, or turning a close eye to the trade floor with each day's opening bell?

As this New York crumbles, what are their destines now? Will courses in Greek civilization and Western humanities equip them with alternate paths? Will they put their heads together and, moving full-force through the gates of their alma mater, begin something that is thus far undefined?

After September 11th, this city thought nothing would be the same. Together, we acknowledged a crisis and we began to pick up the pieces, to re-build our homes, and to fight to make it to a better time. We took pride in being a city that accepts difference and used the irony of the attack as an opportunity for empowerment and for return to the comraderie that defines this city. For two years this city felt shell-shocked, but over time we began to put a new face forward, storing that frightful day in our permanent memory banks and continuing onward as soldiers in the most powerful metropolis.

This time in New York's history is different. After months of newspaper headlines screaming crisis and failure, I am surprised at how much we continue to operate as if business is usual, as if nothing has changed. I can feel it when I turn any Manhattan corner that this is a farce, that we are players in a game that has surely run amok. When outsiders imposed tragedy on our city we embraced it and joined together to fight it, facing it head on as our truth. Yet now, when we impose it on ourselves, we are less willing to confront it. When will we acknowledge a new chapter in our history? When will we begin to re-imagine our destinies? When will we take all this to heart?