God and Wall Street
Observations and reflections crossing America, late September, 2001

by Judd Kleinman

10.1.1

New York City

You have no idea. You just have no idea.

I spent a lot of this trip trying to compose an essay in my head, an attempt at understanding what happened here three weeks ago. But those thoughts have nothing to do with what I'm feeling right at this moment. Having just arrived to bear witness to the biggest, gaping wound I've ever seen in my life. The sheer size of it.

It's easy when you're on your motorcycle. Sun on your back, warm enough to ride with only a T-shirt. You've got sun tan lotion on for Christ sakes, and the mountains in Colorado are rising up around you, or Kansas is spread out before you for miles, or you're watching the first burnishing of the trees in the Ohio River Valley. You're able to make sense of things from there. You come up with lessons about how we're all going to be a better nation for this. A better people.

My stomach started getting tight when I crossed into Jersey. Approaching the inevitable idea that it wasn’t going to be as neat as all that. The flags on nearly every overpass were starting to blur together, pride with disbelief, and I suddenly felt a little embarrassed for all the crap I’d given this state in recent years. Especially given the fact I’d had such a blast there as a kid, spending summers at the Shore. I saw more flags and messages of support throughout New Jersey than anywhere else I’d been on my trip, and I made a pledge right then to cut back on the digs.

Eventually, flags gave way to signs explaining the new security measures: The Holland Tunnel, closed into New York, the Lincoln, restricted to a minimum of two passengers per vehicle. I wondered, going over the George Washington, if they would let me in, one person on one motorcycle. I distracted myself composing a little speech for the police about how I could barely be any more high occupying than I was and should be allowed in.

I only wish someone had stopped me. That some commotion had been made. Instead, I sped across the bridge, looked down at that skyline I'd been dreading to see for the past three weeks, and it was somehow worse than I imagined. An ordinariness seemed to have settled over the outlines of the buildings, rendering them surprisingly similar to the skylines of other cities I’d passed through. Even the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings looked adrift without their southern anchor. For the very first time New York City looked small to me, and I didn’t like it.

Coming off the bridge, racing along the Hudson, I felt none of the energy I always feel coming into the city, even if I’ve only been out of town for the day. It wasn't just the gray skies, although they certainly weren’t helping. It was far too calm, which seemed incongruent not only with the events of the past weeks, but with the nature of the city itself. Taking the advice of a Verizon repair-van driver I’d spoken with earlier, I cut off the West Side Highway early and headed across to 7^th Avenue, eventually coming in on 44^th Street. Times Square.

Could this be Times Square? Really, it was impossible what was happening. Rather, what was not happening. It was the fewest people I’d ever seen on that corner at almost any hour. even in the worst rain or snow or cold or wind. the billboards and flashing lights looked ridiculously out of place, liked they'd been plunked down in the middle of no where, scrolling news which no one was reading, advertising products no one who was buying. And there was one more thing. something that was making me sick inside but I just couldn't put my finger on it. and then, when a cabbie let me slip in front of him, I realized what it was. No one was honking. I mean no one. And I was now sitting in a sea of taxis on 42^nd street.

I'm sure this is old news to people who have been living with things here. And so I hesitate, at this point, to continue with this line of description. New Yorkers will henceforth be divided into those people who were here on September 11^th, and those who weren’t. I wasn’t. And so I try to remind myself of my own experience, the thoughts that got me here, even though they seem so distant to me now.

The Mountains to the Prairies:

It's been a real privilege to be able to travel across this country after the September 11^th attack. To experience the small gestures of solidarity, the extra helpings of kindness. To witness Americans thinking and talking about something besides the latest episode of a bad sitcom, or speculating as to how good a blow-job Monica Lewinsky must give. I've made this trip before, a dozen times in as many years, and I’ve always been struck with how such magnificently variated topography can manage to support both a provincialism and a fundamental goodness in the people that inhabit it. But there's been something different this time. People are not only smiling more, saying hello more, being more polite, but there is a simultaneous sense of gravity accompanying their gestures. A sense that things matter more. Most pointedly, there is a sense of a shared secret, except that everyone knows exactly what has happened.

I got my usual pre-trip haircut before taking off. At Flo's, the local barber in Espanola, New Mexico, that serves out better gossip than the bar down the street, because the customers tend to be sober and put their words together more carefully. It was me, the six foot plus gringo, a couple of knee highs with their older brothers, a Downs-syndromed forty year old with his ma, a skinny cop. One kid was down on leave from his military base and Flo was asking him about the state of things, whether he expected to be going to the front. "Well, our birds won't land on those carrier ships, " he was saying, "so, no, we're not scheduled to go right now. A lot of the guys are trying to switch units so they can go though."

It was a little surreal, this talk of war. Nineteen forties barber shop banter updated for the new millennium with a terrorist spin. But at least it felt like a war. Not like in the Persian Gulf, where even though I’d had friend's who’d gone and gave all of themselves to the cause—some of them still sick today from the exposures they’d had—much of their efforts had been lost beneath the video-game like blow ups we’d all watched on CNN. Here, America had been told it was going to lose lives in a military effort, and even though the enemy hadn't been precisely defined, there was a clear sense that there was one. One that had crashed and killed on our soil and in this way had more reality than a country like Iraq, embroiled in a distant conflict that was affecting our oil supply.

In Salina, Kansas, at a pizza hut/gas station/general store, a small group of neighborhood kids was trying to figure out, along with the cashier, the identity of a doll that had just arrived for shelf display (it was actually Harry Potter). The cashier said maybe it looked like an Afghani. A sweet natured kid with a pocked face, he then laughed at the absurdity of his own comment. “No,” he said, “I think it's just a wizard of some sort early for Halloween.” Then he went on in a more serious tone: “You know I wish the media would stop telling us things about what we're not supposed to know about. Like, if there's been U.S. special squads sent over to kill bin Laden, I don't need to know about that. They can tell me, two weeks after it happened, ‘hey two weeks ago we got ‘em’. I wish they'd stop talking so much.”

In Indiana, flags stood in the middle of the highway, every mile or so, for the first few miles after you entered the state.

In Pennsylvania, hundreds of bikers were coming back west from a rally, almost every one of them with those tiny American flags whipping in the wind. I'd thought about getting one, but there was something in their size and quality that reminded me of the orange banners you flew from your window on route to a Clemson football game. And I couldn't get beyond the suspicion that, no matter what the label said, they were probably made in China. Still, it was something to see.

All across the country, the messages of support were written. On billboards, under store signs, on napkins in restaurants, even on the tiny screen of a cash register in Missouri scrolling across in neon green. The most popular phrases were: “United We Stand”, “In God We Trust”, and especially, “God bless America”. It was encouraging in a way, but also made me wonder. Where did God fit into all this?

In God we Trust?

Well, to be honest, I hated to see God dragged into the whole thing. Wasn't that what got us into this trouble in the first place, one group of people claiming God for their cause, for themselves. Isn't that the ultimate premise to be found not only at the root of Islam, but Christianity and Judaism as well. It is an understandably frightening claim, when you can flip open to just about any page in history and be reminded how this concept has never been more than a stone’s through away from murdering in the name of the divine.

Isn’t it about time that an educated country like ours, reputedly the most powerful on earth, and the one founded on the very premise of religious freedom and separation of church and state, finally make a clean break from this? With our tremendous variety of religious backgrounds, can we not be the ones to finally let religion settle into the proper place in our lives, as a deeply personal matter. Just this week in Louisiana, a district federal court had to remind the local elementary schools, courtesy of a lawsuit brought about by the family of a young Muslim girl, that handing out Bibles to students for the new school year was unconstitutional. This is hardly the time to be holding one group’s sacred texts in the air in an attempt to set the world right, although this will certainly be the temptation of a number of the world’s fundamentalist leaders.

I believe in God. I believe in a higher meaning to our existence. But I would never be so presumptuous as to claim I know what’s going on up there. And it’s truly not for a lack of confidence in my spiritual life. Faith cannot, by definition, ever be knowledge. As soon as you are sure you are right, there is no longer anything to believe in. So we can have our hunches, but let us assume, for the purposes of public discussion and policy, that God neither supported nor condemned these attacks. Do we really need to look to a higher power to make a stand and denounce these attacks as unacceptable? Can we not take the responsibility for fighting the cause of terrorism on our own, because we, as a people, have agreed on certain principles of liberty and justice that were deeply and irrevocably violated on September 11^th.

This is the 21^st century. A time when, via the internet and other resources, many people have not only the greatest access ever to understanding our common history, but to learning about each other in the present. We are aware of the variety of different ways people have tried to make sense of their life on earth, to reach out beyond themselves to something greater, and we have seen the similarities in many of these approaches. Furthermore, with increased accessibility to air travel, many of us have been fortunate enough to meet people from other cultures in their home environments, living lives we can appreciate and respect. As we open up our eyes to the world around us, it becomes more and more difficult to support talk of any one group as being God’s chosen.

This is not to say that people cannot draw comfort from sharing their beliefs together, at home or in a traditional place of worship. Certainly, each of the world’s religions has provided us with insight and comfort during this difficult time. But if we are inclined to take these thousands of year old stories as something to inform our lives in a significant way, can we not at least do so in the quietest manner possible. True teaching has always been more about example than preaching anyway.

Right before leaving New Mexico, I had a long talk with my mechanic about some of these issues. He thinks the United States should use what has happened as a basis for supporting the proclamation of Jerusalem as an open city—international and multi-faithed. He said this looking me straight in the eye, and then asked, in a way that can only be described as beyond ironic, “Do you think I’m being na�ve?”

The Tao of Wall Street

There’s a gigantic, warehouse like building in the heart of Kansas City marked with big block letters you can see from the highway: The Kansas City Live Stock Exchange. Passing by, I was thinking how many miles there were between the cattle trading here, and the paper trading on Wall Street where I was headed.

It’s been hard not to think about Wall Street during these last few weeks, seeing as it was our financial center that was struck so viciously. It was only January, 2000, when the Dow closed near 12,000 points. March of that same year when the NASDAQ capped 5000. Although the percentage of people who owned the high majority of stocks remained small, suddenly more than half of all Americans had an interest in stocks, whether it be directly or through a retirement program. With unemployment down and the economy’s expansion seemingly endless, it seemed America was on top of the world, and New York was at the top of America.

Well, the thing is, I really don’t remember people being commensurately happier during this period. Of course, for those who were able to put a decent meal on the table for the first time as a result of this “new economy”, my comment will ring hollow. But there were other statistics to be measured in addition to the gains in portfolios. Our average work week had increased, 21% in the last 20 years, while our leisure time had correspondingly diminished, our already thin vacation time becoming even thinner. We slept less and stressed more. There was also a lot more envy than wealth spread around, as people watched young dot com entrepreneurs become instantly rich, watched their neighbor get in on the ground floor of a hot stock. And even for those who saw their own wealth grow, there didn’t seem to be that accompanying sense of financial security and well being you would have expected. Sure, there was plenty of smiling and backslapping, but this had all the substance of euphoria, exuberant and fleeting. People I knew, having just received a huge bonus for a dedicated year’s work, were already worried if next year’s bonus would be as big. Or they wondered if they just spend too much on that new apartment downtown.

There were, however, reasons to be nervous, as ultimately the stock prices of the companies being bought and sold were becoming over inflated beyond recognition. That is, they no longer seemed to be primarily related to the most legitimate reason for buying into a company in the first place: to help it get its feet off the ground, or for specific capitalization purposes to help it expand and grow.

There is something strong to be said for putting your money into a company that you believe in. You are excited with what they are doing, you want to see them succeed. Of course, you would like to see a nice return on your investment as well. But it seems to me that by the end of the 90’s, the essence of the stock market, especially the NASDAQ, had become nothing more than a sophisticated version of that old chain letter game where you are encouraged to send out hundreds of dollars to persons on a list, with the anticipation that thousands will be sent back to you. This last year in Scotland, there was a bit of hype over a scheme like this where housewives ended up semi-swindling their neighbors out of their last bits of savings. The pyramid scheme quickly ran out of players, and someone got caught holding the empty bag.

Every once in a while you will find a company, through some combination of perseverance and being in the right place at the right time, that can do phenomenally well. But this is and always will be the exception. Companies, like the rest of us, must follow simple rules of physics. And economics. Americans in the 90’s worked their asses off, but you can only work so hard. If you find you have maximized your work force’s ability, your next options for producing more profit become increasingly questionable. You start moving jobs to other countries, where pollution control laws are less stringent or non-existent, where wages are lower, where labor laws, child labor laws, are less humanitarian. You look to merge with, or take over other companies. You lower the quality of your product as much as you can get away with.

It is time to re-examine our business models. We are a society that has demonstrated the power of capitalism, but we have yet to harness the free market’s power to direct more than just dollars. Every purchase we make, whether it be a stock or a pair of running shoes from the mall, represents a nod in support of something. What is the nature of the companies that we are supporting? How do they treat their employees, the environment, the country as a whole? Socially responsible funds became increasingly popular during the 90’s, but they need to become the rule, not the exception.

Similarly, companies have a right to expect more from us as stockholders and consumers. We cannot continue to have outlandish expectations of the businesses we invest in or purchase from. Instead, we may have to learn to accept a smaller return or to pay a higher price for an item than we would like, in exchange for supporting a high quality product that was made in a way we would not be ashamed of. We do not have to lose sight of the bottom line in our checkbook, to keep an eye on the bottom line health of our society.

It would be wise, also, if the politicians we vote for would invest our tax dollars more carefully. Who are we sending money and weapons too? What are these countries’ policies? And what about this war on drugs, a war that is ultimately directed by America against it’s own citizenry for crimes people primarily commit against themselves. Every year, we continue to spend an incredible fortune on this losing battle, without any major re-examination of our strategy except to throw even more money in the same direction. Under the auspices of a “drought relief” program, 43 million of those dollars went to the Taliban government this past year in order to have them stop local farmers from growing the poppy plant from which opium is derived.

There may well be reasons for all of us, both individually and collectively, to put our money in less than ideal places. But if we are going to proceed ahead in this manner, let us at least raise our level of consciousness, so that we are clear about exactly what we’re doing.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

To the person I read about who had to attend seventeen memorial services as a result of these attacks. To the person who attended one memorial service, the idea of trying to learn something from this loss must seem misguided at best. Particularly at its inception, grief tends to allow little in the way of analysis. If it finds within itself an instinct to attribute meaning, it is often overridden by a more powerful impulse to reject it. Which is why it is the responsibility of those of us who ended up on the periphery of this tragedy to try not only to understand what has happened, but try to offset some of its horror by returning to our lives with an increased sense of purpose and priority. With a greater sense of awareness. We know full well we will never be ever to justify these events, nor would we look to do this. But, there remains an impetus to think and to act. Out of respect for those who were lost. And for the survivors, so that as they try to make that difficult transition from grieving to healing, there will be a better planet waiting for them.

10.6.1

That first night back in New York, walking home from an empty Angelika theater, through a deserted NYU campus to, incredibly, a deserted Washington Square Park, I wanted to shake the lone figure standing in the shadows of one of the trees, a cop, and demand, “Come on, man, where is everyone?!” But people have been coming back out. Increasingly, with their cell phones and a little bit of attitude. The weather turned that night, resulting in one of the most beautiful October weeks you could ask for, and it didn’t go unappreciated.

Yesterday, walking along 9^th Avenue, I witnessed an all out honking war among some of the cabs and a car which couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether to let off its passenger or not. I was grateful for the noise, hoping that it wouldn’t be too long before those annoying, stimulating sounds became commonplace again.

Afterwards, I spoke about the incident with Grace, the patient woman who is perpetually trying to repair an old pocket watch of mine at her shop in the West Village: “Yes,” she agreed, “Things are slowly starting to get back to normal. I have to take the train now, and every time it comes to stop in between stations, we think, ‘Oh no, what is it’, but it is getting better.”

Normal is a goal New York never aimed for anyway, but the idea of things returning completely to the way they were is, of course, impossible. For the families of the victims. For the firefighters walking into their stations in the morning, missing so many familiar faces, there can’t be any illusion that things will ever be the same. And as for the rest of us, there is a hole in lower Manhattan that isn’t going away anytime soon. Even if leaser Larry Silverstein, in conjunction with the Port Authority, is able to rebuild the towers, it will be a challenge not to look at the new buildings and experience something like the unsettled reaction that you have now, wincing as you stare at the empty space.

When I get depressed about this. When I’ve read through, as best I can, the latest page of obituaries in the Times, I try to remember this same time last year. I was driving up 3^rd Avenue with my grandparents. They were both born here, grew up here, had kids here. And though they eventually left the city for Connecticut, the city never quite left them. My grandmother was in the back seat, half singing along with an old Sinatra song, reminding us how she’d seen old Blue Eyes at the Paramount when she was a teenager. Reminding us how gorgeous he’d looked. She was looking out the window, at the lights and buildings and people, and she said, for at least the thousandth time since I’d known her, “You know, there’s nothing like New York.”

There’s nothing like New York. I’ve been repeating this little phrase a lot this week. Whispering it to myself, over and over. It feels less like an observation than a prayer now. But there is room enough here to pray.

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