Last Saturday night in Brooklyn, ... I joined few old friends, who used to get together in TriBeCa. It was a small group of people who live close to the WTC affected area. We shared our stories, gave details about our lives since: for some, no power, no land-line phones, cell, PCS phones, broadcast TV, and without our favorite radio stations. We travel out of the area to get food and other supplies when local stores are sold out and were not getting deliveries. We all know people who died and we all know some who are unable to return to the area because of fear. We have all been through a number of encounters with police and military lines, had access to our homes or businesses refused by confused authorities who don't know the area. We observed that everyone seems overly polite, like we are all afraid of unexpected behavior. We have not been able to tell people our eye witness accounts. A common experience is for us to be cut off when we mention something about being close to the attack or the destroyed area. We have often listened to people telling their story of seeing the event from a distance. But those same people often are not able to hear our stories. 22 days after the attack, the damn pile is still smoking, we have a strong smell of wet ash and smoke still, 10 blocks away in Little Italy, and those of us working in the area smell it all day long. We still wear masks on the street and sometimes in our offices. When we go out, we are blocked by tourists, news crews, religious recruiters, police and military lines. Authorities report elevated levels of asbestos, fiberglass and BONE DUST in the air. When we look down from the upper floors of our office building, we see the huge amount of destruction. We know we are lucky, but we are not back to normal. We are actually mourning still. It's the small things that seem to matter most. My local Starbucks is for police and rescue workers only. "West Wing" will be on tomorrow night doing a reaction piece and we don't get NBC anymore. You don't want this in your town. And, as the gathering of friends agreed, we don't want this in anybody's town. Since I started working downtown 3 years ago, there have been barricades around the City and County buildings and extra police standing guard, put there after the American Embassies in Africa were car bombed. We used to call it "Fort Guiliani", but this fort had no defense against suicide plane attacks. These enemies used the freedoms of our society as their weapons. We deprive would-be attackers of their weapons by depriving ourselves of our freedoms. By declaring this war, it is lost. I now return you to regularly scheduled programming. ----------- Anon.