Anger and Tribute

I had the oddest (most odd?) experience yesterday. I mean, the day itself was pretty okay, but on three separate subway trains yesterday I was witness to three instances of people nearly coming to blows. And each time it was because one of the parties was upset that another person had allegedly pushed them. It was weird and unsettling, because it's the first time I've seen that sort of repressed anger popping out since I've moved to New York.

I mean, I know that New Yorkers are an angry lot. I find myself pissed off a lot here, too. It's a hard city, and a hard city to live in - unless of course, you're rich and don't need to ride subways. But I suspect that even the rich people have their own peculiar brand of New York Hardships, which frankly I wouldn't mind being in position to sample. Just for contrast and comparison reasons, mind you.

But despite what you might see on TV or read in the aftermath of September 11th, it can still be a cold, uncaring place. I've described the city on more than one occasion as a cold-hearted bitch who would happily chew you up and spit you out with nary a second thought (with apologies to you feminists out there - I don't really think of the city as exclusively feminine). And while it's true that many of New York's (and New Yorkers') best sides have been on display since the attacks - and I should point out too that these good traits were on display before all this happened... they just didn't get as much press - the common folk here tend to go around focused on the act of survival, which can be pretty hard, here. So I suppose I shouldn't have been upset or disturbed to see that frustration and anger come to the surface.

But I was. The result is that I stayed up too late contemplating the state of the world, finding no comfort, and looking like shit. See photo to the right.

All I could think about was the fact that 25,000 people die around the world each day for stupid reasons - of starvation, in conflicts, of disease that might have been cured. Twenty-five thousand. If I had a dollar for each one of the people in a single day, it would totally eliminate my debt and leave me spending money. That number is astounding to me. And yet, instead of thinking about that, and spending a little energy contemplating a solution for that, people would rather spend their energy threatening violence over a perceived slight when some poor schmoe tries to crowd onto a subway car when it would in the long run be more comfortable and convenient for others if he waited two minutes for the next train to arrive.

I'm generally an optimist, I think. But I see shit like that and I despair that we'll ever be anything more than a barbaric race of animals. I don't see the worth in splitting the atom when we can't treat each other with a little compassion.

So I stopped of on the way home last night (and amazingly enough, the third pushing incident happened on a train at 7:30 at night, when the evening commute on a Friday should have been mostly over), and stopped off at The Brooklyn Promenade in the hopes of getting a shot or two of the "Tribute in Light."

I discovered two things.

First, from the angle of the Promenade, you can really only see one of the shafts of light. And second, I'm not very good at using my camera to capture images in low light with no flash. It's the curse of the point-and-shoot generation. I need to take a photography class when I'm rich. Anyway, here are some of the images.

As a post-script, I should also note that I've been experimenting with the "Save for Web" option in Adobe's Photoshop, so let me know if you can see a difference in the quality of these images... supposedly (if I'm using it right), they should be faster loading and not lose too much of their quality. [Fingers crossed.]