I have just successfully navigated the security arrangements at LaGuardia Airport for the second time. LAGA hasn’t figured out how to combine concourses so you only go through security once. So, if you are sitting in Gate C-1 waiting on your flight back to the Heartland and American Airlines cancels your flight and puts you on “stand-by” on a flight three hours later leaving out of D-1, you have no choice but to go back through the cavity search process that modern air travel has become. Now the reasons for the cancellation are interesting enough…it is amazing how poorly equipment operates for American and Delta and United when they have less than a full flight. This mysterious defiance of the laws of physics (planes only appear to fly when full) and the laws of probability (odds are, if you’re sitting in a terminal with only a few friends, something on your Brazilian made Embraer is going to break) occur, despite billions in bail out subsidies from the U.S. taxpayer. It is this continuing involvement by the Feds in areas that are not sanctioned by our Constitution that bothers your humble scribbler as it does seem to be growing steadily despite Republican control of all three Houses. And it is a sharp contrast to the streetscape of New York City, where I have spent the last three days.
New York City, or more properly, Manhattan, is the world’s largest horizontal shopping mall. The unending string of Victoria’s Secrets, Gaps, Barnes & Nobles and Crate & Barrels is broken only occasionally by a restaurant or a small door leading to an elevator lobby and a studio apartment above. While this is jarring to an eye that is more accustomed to an occasional tree, it is raw, muscular capitalism at it’s best. Trends will change and the retail names and products will change, but the ultimate jury for those changes will be the people. Unfortunately, we have been unwilling to unleash that energy on the transportation sector. Southwest, which Redstater travels on regularly, does not cancel flights. Their flights are almost always full and the regulars have learned how to jockey for position to get the best seats, because, heaven forbid!, they do not have assigned seats. Oh, they are also comparatively cheap, efficient, fun to fly. God help American and United if Southwest gets a couple of gates here at LAGA! When left alone, people make good decisions for themselves. Freedom is an invigorating, if frightening, force.
This brings me to the cross. I flew over Manhattan on my way to Boston in late September, 2001 while the fires in the bowels of the World Trade Center still burned leaving a whitish-gray line that stretched across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Yesterday my oldest daughter and I rode the subway to Ground Zero and looked at it up close. Well, as close as they will let you get. The area has an enormous fence around it pushing pedestrians back off the sidewalk…it is hard to get a decent view of the symmetrical caverns that used to be WTC. A walkway to a neighboring building is shielded with corrugated sheet metal so you just can’t see it. By navigating the side streets and circumnavigating the site, you can start to get an appreciation for the physical magnitude of the area. I remember going to the roof of WTC I in 1982 and seeing a small private plane coming down the Hudson some 40 floors below. But the physical collapse of two quarter-mile high buildings into these two square footprints is hard to comprehend. The question that haunted me as I walked down Church Street was “why obscure this?” Why push the public back and not give them a clear vantage over this hallowed ground? Instead of the tired black and white pictures relating the “history of lower Manhattan,” why not have a video kiosk showing the attacks of 1993 and 9-11? What are we afraid of? My suspicion is that the muting is occurring to suppress our rage. But there is no need to… there is the cross. A silent sentinel on the edge of the abyss, the simple metal crossbeams, the ultimate symbol of love and forgiveness, fused in the fires of hatred. Unfortunately, it is behind the fence. Like so many of our religious principles, the cross at the World Trade Center is barricaded away from the public so it cannot be touched and interacted with. But it is still there, tapping gently on our visual interaction with this tragic site. For better or worse, the cross ameliorates our hatred and our rage. The cross has controlled us throughout our history and despite the best efforts of the ACLU will continue to do so. Set the information free and let the people decide. Allow the raw, muscular force of the truth to guide our consciences and our decisions just as we allow that same force of economic freedom to guide the cityscape of New York.