Two winters ago I was walking through the crowded downtown streets of Manhattan. It was cold out but, not bad. Tourists in town for the holiday season were brushing by me with their many shopping bags on their way to stare at the vast and still-empty site where the twin towers once stood. I heard a street vendor shouting out, "Traaaagedy snow globes, get 'em here!" Startled, I looked over. Did he really just say that? I wondered. There in front of me on a fold-out table were about a dozen snow globes with the twin towers featured prominently. "Only $20 a piece!" The vendor boomed, "They make great gifts for the folks back home!" "Traaagedy snow globes, get 'em here, get 'em now!"
"Is this evil? Is this wrong?" I wondered. Here was a guy on the edges of Wall Street practicing the favorite American pasttime of commerce. It's what all the tourists come here for: to witness sin and sex and capitalism all wrapped up in one knotty, snarly roller coaster of a city so they can go back home invigorated and yet, relieved that they don't live here. And yet, it isn't we New Yorkers who buy this stuff. It's the tourists. They love the over-priced designer monograms that tell their friends back home that they've got big-city sophistication. And they love the ticky-tacky, too.
But, because this is my home and not just a city I'm visiting, when I see something that crosses the line between the odd and the wrong, it always puts me in a weird state, as if my spinal fluid were replaced with neon and helium. I feel light headed and charged, sort of like Joan of Arc all dressed up in her armor with no place to go fight, "Is this something that I should somehow stop?"
I once wondered the same thing as I saw a woman having sex on the floor of a public bathroom stall in Penn Station while her ten year-old daughter waited by the sinks. But, the train was leaving and my husband insisted over my protests (that the child could be in danger and perhaps we should find a police officer) that we get on and so, we did.
No one wants to be unpopular, to be the biddy shaking her finger in some young man's face, "Shame on you!" So, on that day I saw the snow globe vendor, I did what we New Yorkers are known to do when we spot a celebrity, or see something distasteful: I thought about how I could turn it into an mildly interesting anecdote to tell friends about later; "You'll never guess who/what I saw today..." Letting myself be carried forward by the momentum and tide of people with brightly-colored shopping bags, I walked on.
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