The Unending Unease

The afternoon performance at the Minskoff Theatre started regularly at three o’clock in the afternoon. The tourist families who had paid $214 per person to see The Lion King in the front row under the stage had only just struggled to enter.

A crowd of curious people was being photographed between 45th Street and Broadway. Since Saturday night, there has been another must-see on the guided tours organized in Manhattan — a newsstand with “I Love NY” shirts and the U.S. flag has already sprung up. Now is the moment to immortalize exactly where New York could have been transformed into Baghdad. They are the same tourists who take line 1 on the subway from the south, from what remains of Ground Zero — which is finally no longer a hole, but sees the heir of the Twin Towers growing — to the north, to the entrance of the elegant Dakota, the apartment building opposite Central Park, where, thirty years ago, John Lennon was assassinated. Two doormen in uniform were busy again yesterday morning moving curious onlookers who were even scaling the wall to take home a souvenir image.

Life and the show at Times Square were divided identically, after a surreal Saturday evening in which there was only silence and policemen in anti-terrorism outfits, who cordoned off a good twelve people. But if for the passing tourist this is just another sudden outburst, for New Yorkers the failed car bomb is the revival of an unease that has been living under their skin for almost nine years. From the day when they first felt vulnerable. Since 9/11, when the omnipotence of a city crashed along with the Twin Towers. On the walls of the subway and on the sides of buses a symbolic message has visibly remained: “If you see something, say something.” It’s been mocked a lot with this obsessively repeated message in English and Spanish, on these signs that invite one to denounce whatever and whoever might appear out of place.

But the hero of Saturday night, a T-shirt street vendor who served in Vietnam, acted accordingly, and today has been rewarded as an example. Even the America of Barack Obama seems unable to stand for less than the standards of fear and security dictated by Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush.

New York knows car bombs: In 1993 — when there was a kind of proof of Islamic terrorism on American soil — 680 kilograms of explosives were placed in the underground parking lot of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Then, there were only six people dead and thousands injured, and the Twin Towers remained in their places for eight more years. But the societies of the blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman — who is serving his life sentence in North Carolina — took revenge in 2001, changing history and the emotion of a city. But if the idea of the car bomb to us Europeans speaks about Baghdad today like Beirut meant in the past, in the United States it is associated with the more tragic undertaking of extremist and racist white militia, those who killed 168 people, among them 19 kindergarten children, with a truck bomb in 1995, crumbling the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

Who wanted to transform the tourist center of Manhattan, the house of musicals and entertainment for families, into a theater of destruction and blood? All tracks and hypotheses are open. From Islamic extremists who continue to hate America, to Aryan race groups that instead only hate the black president. We know that life goes on, but this New York unease remains intact because those three thousand dead from nine years ago are not forgotten, and because, since the start of the millennium, we have known that our world and our way of life have been changed forever.