Glad We Left New York, Part Deux (For the Commenters)

For those of you just tuning in, yesterday we wrote a little piece about the steam pipe that burst in New York. Apparently it pissed a bunch of people off, and we have to concur that actual true (non-sensationalist) details have been slow to trickle in over here. Everything we've read the last couple of days focuses on a "geyser of steam and debris," which seemed like an overblown fearmongering catchphrase at first, but is now starting to sound like that may be exactly what it is.

We never claimed we wouldn't have run away screaming. We totally would have fled any explosion, because we're a big pansy hippie chick who just wants peace, y'all. But reading the comment from Guest 23 on yesterday's post was really nice and reassuring. It's so nice to hear about people stopping to help each other--one of the best things we witnessed on 9/11, and one of the things that made us love New Yorkers so much: they help each other out. But we definitely didn't think it was a small leak in a pipe, and we never said that in that posting.

We really are sorry for inspiring so much rage and disgust just by commenting that we're glad we left New York. We really are glad we left. We miss a lot of things about living in NYC--even right down to our ghetto-ass neighborhood in Bed-Stuy. But we also really love our quiet, tree-lined Seattle neighborhood with the park across the street, being able to hear the wind in the trees at night, to smell the honeysuckle someone at the end of the block is growing. We're not deluded enough to think Seattle's safe from anything, certainly not a volcano or earthquake. We don't really think anyone anywhere is safe from anything, and that's so unfortunate that we live in a world where none of us are really safe from danger and fear.

We also think it's terrible that our infrastructure is in such gross disrepair, that people in one of the greatest cities in the world have to flee in fear one mid-week afternoon because it's hard to immediately assess if that explosion was the result of governmental negligence in the infrastructure of the city, or if it was the result of people who hate us more now because of the misled war on terror. We think there are a ton of places money is being spent when it could be focused on fixing nearly century-old infrastructure in cities with as much import and influence as New York and Chicago. We also feel a little skeptical about the claim that the asbestos that was wrapped around that pipe and was then thrust into the air, is not now circulating in midtown Manhattan. Again, going back to the 9/11 parallels, we breathed that stank-ass shit for months because we worked on Canal Street and the window-unit a/c brought it into the building and blew it around. It was such a foul smell that we knew it wasn't safe to breathe, but our city was telling us everything was fine. Of course now we know otherwise.

Our point, and there is one here somewhere, is that, as we so clumsily tried to say yesterday, we're getting more and more tired of the media sensationalism of events. We wish they'd employ some fact checkers before they go telling us an explosion brought a building down in New York. We wish the government would fund infrastructure overhaul--a topic we were very concerned about in the 2004 election cycle, but which got completely overlooked so that people could spout homophobia and war on terror agendas. Let's hope it doesn't get overlooked in the upcoming cycle. Why has the senator from New York not commented yet (or are we just not looking in the right places for her comments)? And finally, yes, we love Seattle a little more than we do New York, and we don't think that's a character flaw. We do love our coffee and our tree-hugger neighbors. We also love that our best friend still lives in NYC and we have a free place to stay there anytime we need to get our fix.