The Quick Aging of Gen X by Pete Hamill New York Daily News 9-17-2001 The statue of George Washington faced south, toward the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. From that high pedestal in Union Square, the first President looked angry and majestic. At the foot of the statue, on this day of brilliant sunshine, a vast improvised altar was growing by the hour. An altar of burning candles and fresh-cut flowers. And facing that altar, heads bowed, stood hundreds of human beings, here in the republic that Washington helped create. Each of them was very still, and silent, and dignified, joined in a spontaneous ceremony of human connection. They didn't posture or bellow. Instead, they reminded us that in the end, all mourning is private. Their backs were turned away from the distant ruins. The statue of Washington — made by H.K. Brown in 1856 when the republic was very young — was covered now with chalked words. The most common was a word that is so often elusive in human life. "Love love love love" could be seen high and low, left to right, a word that was both noun and verb. And spliced into that word was the phrase "Love one another." . 'We Can't Be Like Them' Some must have seen this message as a mushy leftover from the years of flower children, the pathetic slogan of some unreconstructed 1960s hippie. But it also had an odd dignity, reminding many visitors to this public square that our disfigured city would not be honored by the oratory of hatred and revenge. "Something's gotta be done," a middle-aged black man named Arnold Watkins said to me. "But we can't be like them." All of this had been caused by "them," the 19 men who boarded those four airliners and went off to kill and to die. There was no requirement to love "them" or the seething, vengeful people who sent them across the world to assault us. They had committed an unforgivable crime. And the unabsorbed enormity of what had happened — and the need to reply — was also a part of this New York shrine. That expression of steely will was expressed here by a large poster of the World Trade Center, made before 8:48 a.m. last Tuesday, now fastened to the neck of Washington's horse. Scribbled with a marker across the poster were the words "We Will Prevail." Our Faces in a Collage All around the park, among many thousands of milling people, there were smaller altars, with more flowers, more candles. And on all fences and trees you could see the collage of the missing. The names and faces of those human beings who went to work on Tuesday morning and never came back. The faces were our faces. The names were the names of New York, except that now they were no longer names on a list, or part of some statistic. They were individuals. The names had human faces. McDay. Taylor. Steiner. Milenski. Davidson. Garcia. Srinuan. DeSimone. Braginsky. We met them all at last. Every face smiled at us from some happy moment: a birthday party, a wedding, an office party, standing with an elephant in a zoo. They looked like people we had known all our lives. Mixed with the faces of the missing, and the pleas for information from their wives, husbands, children, you could see pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, posted by the wrecked families of missing Mexican busboys, and the Virgin of Altagracia, from distraught Dominicans. Someone had fashioned sheets of colored squares into blank memorial billboards, and people scribbled on them with markers: We will never forget. You are our best. God bless you all. A visitor noticed a leaf detached from a tree, its long rich summer of life now over. Then you could see other leaves, tinged with orange, fluttering to the grass. One at a time. With a kind of exhausted sigh. Those dying leaves, of course, were falling upon living human beings. And here, since this is Union Square, the American version of London's Hyde Park, a place for debate from a time beyond memory, you first began hearing voices of countercurrents. Of dissent from the prevailing certainties. Of passionate people arguing about the form of the American response. "What, you want to carpet-bomb Afghanistan?" "Right into the stone age, baby." "A lot of these guys came from Florida. You want to carpet bomb Florida, too?" And in another part of the crowded park: "You wanna go in with vengeance? Just kill them all." "Exactly. We gotta show the world that if they f--- with us, they die." "But the leaders won't die. Bin Laden won't die. Some woman trying to get to a market, she'll die. Her babies will die." "Good. That's five less terrorists." Sound and fury. I heard the sneering word "peacenik" for the first time in 20 years. I saw a guy grab his crotch and say, "I got your love right here, baby." But most of the debate was reasonably well-mannered. This wasn't about Vietnam or Iraq, events on the far side of the planet. It wasn't about Sacco and Vanzetti or the Rosenbergs or any of the other proper nouns that had once permeated the air of Union Square. This was about what happened right down there, past George Washington, in downtown Manhattan. Everyone seemed to know somebody who was lost. "My friend's sister ..." Or, "my cousin, he was a fireman ..." Or "two people I know, they were engaged and ..." And so even the most passionate debater tempered the republic's freedom to speak with a respect for his opponent. "I'm sorry, I respectfully disagree. Flag-waving isn't my thing, but if it's yours, I respect that. It's just that ..." Or, "Hey, man, I disagree. But we're in this together, man — we're here together, man. This is f------ America, man." What's Important vs. What's Trivial In Union Square, as in all parts of the city, the calamity was supplying a sense of proportion, a way of measuring the important against the trivial. Who again could ever make a judgment of another about the absurd accident of race? Look at those faces: black, white, Asian, bound together in the democracy of death. How could anyone embrace blind nationalism when human beings from 40 nations died together in the twin towers? Or succumb to the petty irritations of daily life? The lesson was perhaps most important to the young. Americans under 30 have had blessed lives. They have lived a big hunk of their lives without the Cold War threat of mutual assured destruction. They have lived through eight years of the most sustained, dizzying economic boom in a century. Not one of them has been drafted to die in foreign fields. But after the destruction of the twin towers, how could they ever again sneer at a waiter and send back the wine? How could they get furious if the subway is four minutes late, or the exercise machine is broken in the gym, or a wheel is snapped off a roller blade by a crack in the sidewalk? It was no accident that of the silent mourners at the wax-and-flower altar in Union Square, those that seemed most moved were young. Live Every Day as if It's Our Last The sudden death of others should always remind us to live every day as if it's the last one of our lives. I had a great editor once named Paul Sann who said to me when I was young: "If you die at your goddamned typewriter, pal, make sure you're not writing a sentence you'd be ashamed of." I have not always abided by that commandment, because of stupidity or haste. But in Union Square some form of that demand, spoken or unspoken, must also have been in the air. George Washington was not always a picture on a dollar bill or a statue in the park. Here, on this schist and granite island, he was a living human being, tall and tough and brave, commanding his amateur soldiers in the Battle of Harlem Heights, the first victory of the Revolution. He knew retreat, too, and defeat, and despair, and saw too many of his men dead and maimed. But when he returned to Manhattan in November 1783, the British were sailing out of our harbor forever. He waited until the last ship sailed. Then he took his place on horseback at the head of his small army — many of the men battered, bandaged, limping and injured — and he marched downtown. All the way to the town that had been ruined by fire and malice. All the way to those streets that have been known for a week now as Ground Zero.