Was it REALLY Worth it?

A complete day of tourism was at hand today. We went to Ellis Island. Worth the trip, especially if you have relatives who came through. You can look them up in their screening system, find out what the boat looked like and the time of arrival of your traveling ancestors. Pretty amazing. I’ve been there before, and Adam, my Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner, is an old WASP with lineage from way back when, so it didn’t hit him as deeply as it hits me, however, he did think it was very cool.

And, after drinking with the after-work-Wall-Street-crowd in a bar in Tribeca on Laight Street, we ended up at

PO

Highly recommend it. The Po River Valley is in Northern Italy. The restaurant is in Greenwich Village. Extremely lively and delicious. Followed by cannoli and such at Caffe Dante.

But what sticks with me, more than anything, was the sight when we got off the E Train downtown to go to the ferry for Ellis Island. The E Train ends at the PATH Station to New Jersey under the former World Trade Center. One of the things that has been completed at Ground Zero is this Station. However, since there are no buildings, the station is not underground, but actually floats in the middle of the construction site. The cement floor is completely new. The roof is made of metal. And the entire cement platform is surrounded by a cage of fence, so there is no way you could run into the pit to try to find a cell of your former dead lover/hero.

But what I thought, while standing there on that odd, caged platform in the middle of what was once The World Trade Center over a well groomed pile of dirt is, “Okay, this is sad and all, but we could have gotten over it without all this fucking war.”



I said to Adam, “You know, Predatory Capitalism is a form of terrorism, right? Doesn’t it make sense that someone would get back at us?”

And Adam, so astutely said, “And it’s so interesting, because it wasn’t governments against governments. It was some corporations and some people.”