I Guess Until Now, the Subway was like Going to Mars

This is another one of those posts wherein I alienate myself from my twenty-first century peers and take on the persona of someone who is five decades older than I am, and can’t maneuver around the rapid changes of the thrilling modern world.

I understand that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just launched cell phone service inside of New York subway stations. What burns me is the thought that there was sufficient demand to carry forward the elaborate and expensive project of building an underground telecommunications network. I imagine that the MTA must have based their installation project on a well-established understanding of what their customers needed. That then would mean that there were hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who felt cheated that they had limited cell phone reception for as much as twenty minutes.

This is just one of those things, where there is an enormous contingent of people who share a particular sentiment and find it to be among the most natural things in the world, while I absolutely cannot wrap my head around it. I’m sure the positive responses to the announcement were perfectly matter-of-fact, since people have a tendency to take things for granted the day they first gain access to them. I’m sure the positive responses will also be fantastically melodramatic, since people also have a tendency to insist without a shade of intentional irony that they cannot live without things that they lived without for their entire lives up until that point.

My own response, on the other hand, was just to be utterly dumbfounded. I simply can’t comprehend why anyone would think it’s appropriate to spend God knows how many man-hours and material resources to construct something that benefits customers only in that it prevents them from having to wait thirty seconds and then walk halfway up a flight of stairs in order to receive the associated service. Is communications technology really that powerfully addictive that even in the midst of one’s amazingly convenient and rapid commute to work, it’s an act of painful sacrifice to not talk about bullshit or surf the web?

The project cost two hundred million damn dollars. I’m not the sort of person who usually complains about how New York City is a giant cash-sink for the rest of the state, into which all of our coffers drain. But if my city is falling apart to the extent that when I have to walk somewhere new I’m not sure whether there’s going to be rubble blocking my path, while New York City is able to spend two hundred million damn dollars on the lengthy process of designing and installing something that nobody anywhere could possibly fucking need, then I really have to rethink my perspective on the wealth disparity among localities.

I have to congratulate this news story both for giving me a perspective sympathetic to people I usually chastise for whining and for giving me a much needed and rarely accessible reason to be less desirous of returning to New York. Public transportation is one of the first things that come to mind when I am called upon to compare living in a decent city to living somewhere like where I am right now. First and foremost, the MTA actually gets you where you need to go, pretty much without fail. Secondly, though, it is, or always was, an exciting, engaging, sometimes poetic way to get around. With this new development, I am absolutely sure that when I finally make my way back there, the entire process of getting around will be transformed into something far more annoying than it had ever been before.

I used to commute for an hour each morning from Eastchester in the Bronx to Grand Central in Manhattan. The train was above ground for about half of that, and there were enough people yammering on their cell phones for that portion of the journey. It’s not that there conversations bothered me terribly, although they were almost always ridiculously mundane. But they were also the sort of dialogue you could get more out of if you had it with the stranger sitting next to you. I have had an awful lot of opportunities to observe cell phone addicts in their various unnatural settings, and I’ve found that in general, while people think that their devices connect them to the world wherever they are, the real effect is just that they take wherever the person is away from him. And nobody seems to notice or care.

What was most annoying about listening to people’s conversations while on my way to Manhattan was me, namely my unwillingness to forcibly hang up someone else’s phone, point out the window and shout, “It’s a beautiful fucking day; have a look!” Come the underground portion of the ride, it’s more a matter of compelling people to look at the human beings around them, but either way, it’s the same impulse that I have to deny, and if I had had to do it for a full hour every day, I probably would have eventually jumped on the tracks.

Doesn’t anybody think anymore? I mean, praise technology whatever ways you like, but no matter how intellectual one’s use of it, it is distraction from one’s own thinking. The potential for personal development that comes of ease of access to technology is kind of lost if there is never a time when we aren’t plugged in. Naturally, people can choose to turn off their phones, but what bothers me about this story is not that there will no longer be a place in New York City where that decision is made for them (sometimes – I often did get reception inside stations), but the implication that people never want to so much as entertain the concept of letting go and getting into their own heads. Is that such a scary place for everyone now, that having to either think for ourselves or interact with strangers is something we can’t even conceive of doing for as long as it takes to get from Greenwich Village to Central Park?

A Thought to Close the Day

Since I neglected to write about the experience at the time, I thought I would take this evening to reflect on having seen the 9-11 memorial exhibit last month when it was visiting the Erie County Fair. However, I can’t quite think of what there is to say other than that it was a powerful experience. The sense of human loss was very much present to the space, and the scale of devastation was more apparent from looking over the wreckage of a jet and the collected pieces of office equipment pulled from the site than it ever was from seeing ground zero when it was two, three, and four years after the fact. It was astonishing to still be able to smell the smoke on the items in the exhibit, even ten years later.

But what affected me on levels that went far beyond pure emotion was finding myself in lines of people pouring over the photographs, and video footage, and lists of names, and artifacts, with children beside me in that line who were infants when the attacks occurred, and others who were not born until the years following it. I was only in high school during 2001, but 9-11 remains such a fresh memory, and yet there I was ten years later among children who were already looking back on this as a part of history that has only affected their lives distantly, in ways that they could not directly experience. As I watched the video of the plane striking the second tower and confirmed that it matched up frame for frame with what I could still see in my mind, I heard a father behind me explaining to his children, who were seven or eight years old, about what happened on the day that was being commemorated there. He told them about the attack in the briefest of terms and then added, “You weren’t even born yet.” His child then asked him, “Were you?”

The enormity of this thing is almost unimaginable to those of us who witnessed it, but on the scale of human history it is so small. Children were born on the afternoon of 9-11 and every day thereafter, and most of them have never had to try to imagine that suffering or loss.

It is an ego-centric perspective, but what the memorial did for me above all else was give me a unique sense of place within my own life. I saw my first pictures of the attack as I was walking into American History class. I attached much significance to that fact even at the time, knowing that what was unfolding would someday have a chapter of its own in those same textbooks that I carried into the classroom. The exhibit and the ten year anniversary mark the fulfillment of that notion. At twenty-six years old, unlike at sixteen, I am now every bit as much a bearer of prior history as I am a witness to its continued unfolding. Over ten years I have seen so much strife and discourse and change grow out of the events of September 11, 2001. But the end result of all of that is, for the children who stood beside me at the memorial, simply the way their world is and always has been.

One might think that children seem especially small viewed through the prism of recent history, but in my experience it’s really the other way around. Looking back on 9-11 in their presence dwarfed the event. For some people much older than I, the attacks may seem like yesterday. For me it is a fresh memory, yet also a distant one. But for those born in the last ten years, it is literally a lifetime ago. That thought affects me much the same way I was affected when I watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary series and first glimpsed the timeline of the universe condensed into the scale of one year. On that calendar, all of human history has taken place within the last minute of the last day of the year. No doubt some people find that thought unsettling, but in the past couple of actual years, it has given me the greatest comfort I’ve ever known. With such a diminished sense of my own significance, none of my problems can seem much worth worrying about, and not even historic tragedy has the permanence to weigh very heavy for very long. Children are born into a new world, all but untouched by former pain. Time moves steadily forward. And while for some of us the wound may never heal, even never is not so long.

Cigarettes: The Most Illegal Legal Substance!

I heard a radio interview yesterday in which vivid descriptions were given of the new warning labels that will be required of all cigarette packages in the United States as of September 2012. This entire government anti-smoking campaign is beginning to look truly absurd to me. The FDA has described these images of diseased lungs, dying cancer patients, and the like as “the most significant advancement in communicating the dangers of smoking.” Is that really what this is? Is that even a reasonable goal at this point? I mean, do we really expect anyone, anywhere to pick up a pack of cigarettes, look at the graphic image declaring that “cigarettes cause stroke and heart disease,” and then exclaim, “I didn’t know that!”? Perhaps I am giving my fellow citizens too much credit, but I don’t think anyone is that ignorant.

I can’t help but think of the climax of the film “Thank You For Smoking,” in which Aaron Eckhart’s character, a tobacco lobbyist, is asked point blank by a Congressional panel whether he thinks cigarettes are dangerous and he stuns everyone by plainly answering “yes.” He proceeds to rhetorically ask whether anyone in the room isn’t sure whether cigarettes are dangerous, and makes his pro-tobacco argument on the basis of freedom of choice even when we know something is bad for us.

I think that does well to describe the situation we’re facing. The public has been thoroughly informed about the dangers of smoking. I don’t think anyone is left with doubt about the harm it can do. The question we’re left with is just whether people have the freedom to choose to smoke in spite of that. The answer very well may be no. That’s the answer when it comes to any of a multitude of illicit drugs. Thus far, though, tobacco has been a legal substance, which people are free to consume and the government is free to tax. These ongoing efforts at “public education” push the conflict into the realm of absurdity because the duty for public education has already been fulfilled, and the rest is just an attempt at discouraging certain legal behaviors.

Certainly, it can be argued that an appropriate role of government is to promote the public welfare by advocating some lifestyles and outlawing others. Public awareness campaigns like the food pyramid, now just the dinner plate, are examples of the former. Making drugs and prostitution illegal are examples of the other side of that government function. But anything that falls in between, I think, is an attempt at controlling behavior, and something unbecoming of a free society. After we’ve decided that something is damaging to the general well-being, there comes a time when the government has to make a decision about whether to make it illegal or to simply let people have their vice, health and longevity be damned. To do anything else is to make the potentially dangerous claim that there is a role to be found for the government in attempting to control private behavior even when that behavior is not illegal and its consequences are understood.

New York State and particularly New York City are way ahead with this mentality. New York City has just banned smoking in public parks, pushing cigarettes still farther towards a status of being made illegal through a series of decrees about their use without the item actually being legislatively outlawed. The city, state, and federal governments may feel very good about themselves for measures like this, but the fact is that if they feel so strongly that, for their own good, no one should be smoking, by allowing the production and consumption of cigarettes to remain a legal activity, they are not doing all they can to discourage it, and they are thus complicit in the ill effects wrought on those not reached by shocking visual warning labels.

Meanwhile, the government continues to collect taxes on cigarette sales, making their role in the tobacco conflict severely duplicitous. When your campaign against something you deem awful is comprised of a series of half-measures, that is questionable, but when you’re actually profiting off of the evil you preach against, it’s time to seriously reevaluate your morals. New York State has even gone so far as to violate Native American treaties in order to begin collecting taxes on cigarette sales on reservation lands. To my mind, that sends the message that while the use of cigarettes by private individuals is unconscionable, they are not so bad as to be restricted by the government, and in fact they are not so bad that it’s not worth violating other ethical principles for the sake of securing their revenue.

This is the moral and logical tangle that results when an establishment tries with all its might to avoid breaking points. That breaking point might sway society to either side of this issue, prompting government to reconcile to the fact that some people are just going to smoke no matter what, or else to decide that it can no longer be accepted at all, and that it is time for cigarettes to go the way of cocaine and other drugs. But to go on trying to play both sides serves no one and only encourages some dark trends in government.

Got Any Change?

I was leafing through the New Yorker at the cafe, when I turned with interest to an article subtitled "A Frank Gehry apartment tower," about a new structure that's been built at 8 Spruce Street in downtown Manhattan. I was unprepared for the photograph taking up the entire second page of the article, which depicted a beautiful high-rise building with twisting patterns of steel climbing up its side, giving the entire structure a sense of motion and fluidity. And standing just to the left of and behind this thing that was completely alien to me was the once-familiar Woolworth building.

I'd like very much to be able to comment on the historical significance of this new Frank Gehry work, the tallest residential apartment complex in the Western Hemisphere. I'd like to talk about it as the mark of a breaking point in the usual tendency of developers to eschew form for the sake of function and short-term profit. I'd like to talk about my admiration for Gehry's goal in design this to revive the bay window. But when I look at that picture, all I can think about is the fact that I left New York only three and a half years ago, and in that time, this has sprung up to make a profound and distinct impact on the city skyline.

And meanwhile, where I am nothing much has changed. Not my life and not my so-called home. Very little has changed in Buffalo since I was a little boy, save for the gradual changes of job loss and population decline. And there have been salutary changes, as well. I doubt I could ever be convinced that they outweigh the negative ones, but that's neither here nor there. What is of issue for me is that there have been no changes of dramatic stature, and that reminds me not that I'm living in a terrible place, but that I'm living in a fundamentally insignificant place. Not only with regard to region, but with regard to station in life, nothing changes enough to have an impact on me. I feel as though I'm in limbo, and though I'd most like to see a marvelous work of art ascend from the streets of my town and paint the sky with its radiance, I'd rather see a portion of the city fall down than have nothing change at all.

So despite my intent to focus on the social, political, and cultural, the breaking point that I'm looking forward to right now is purely personal. I'm wondering when the time will come that my too-long pent up affection for a metropolis of bustle and constant alteration and dynamic purpose will swell my heart so that it breaks its cage of reason, and I get myself free from where I am, regardless of the cost. And that is the way it will be, if it comes. I will either stay here, dying by stages, or I will disregard the cost of leaving, which may be my life.