New York Diary

Oh, brilliant

It's Fleet Week here in the city, which means everywhere you look there are uniformed men and women overrunning the city. Truth is, it's kind of nice to see them mingled in with the crowds. An awful lot of people are out there serving our country militarily these days (whether they want to or not, given our lovely stop-loss programs), but it's easy to never see them if you live on the Upper East Side and work in Times Square; the New York Times reported a few months ago that ONE PERSON enlisted from my zip code in the past year (enlistment = different from joining the officer corps, fyi). A little mingling is a decidedly good thing, if you ask me.

All this mingling is bringing out some interesting behavior from New Yorkers, however:

Interesting Behavior Exhibit A
Random man on subway to uniformed sailor from the USS Kearsarge: Hey son, I was on the Kearsarge in 95 and 96.
Sailor: Um, yep.
Random man: And I served on X, Y, and Z other ships, too.
Sailor: I've only served on the Kearsarge.
Man: How long've you been in the service?
Sailor: Uh, two months.
Man: Let me take you out for a drink, son.
(Man moves over to sailor, and they fall to talking and laughing as opposed to shouting at one another from opposite sides of the train.)

Interesting Behavior Exhibit B
Iz and I were climbing rocks in Central Park and considering throwing a frisbee when a man approached and asked us for change. Turns out he was a military man on active duty, on leave for the week. He and a bunch of others were spending their leave collecting change in New York, "to help out a bunch of vets in the city," he said. "The government's not doing it, so we're doing it ourselves."

We both gave the guy what we had--more than just a few pennies, too. You can argue broadly against the amount we Americans spend on the military, but you have to admit that this fellow has a good point about veterans' affairs and about how little we spend on, say, VA hospitals. Considerations of this sort always lead to me to sad reflections about military spending and the way we allocate our (substantial) DoD money.

At any rate, the guy sat down and talked to us briefly, and he was quite cool, really pounding the pavement for a cause he believed in. Begging for quarters is not, generally, how I picture the members of our armed forces. It was an interesting sight.

Interesting Behavior Exhibit C
New Yorkers flooded the 311 lines yesterday. (311 is a brilliant New York-only phenomenon, a line you can call when you need help of a non-emergency kind--when you have a city question, when a pothole needs to be filled or you want to know where to find a local hospital or hardware store, when your building has rats or the people outside are too loud or you want to know what voting district you're in.) The cause? Supersonic jets buzzing Manhattan landmarks. Oops. Someone forgot to tell New Yorkers that the Blue Angels were planning on a couple of Fleet Week flyovers. Um, hello? Post-9/11 world? Paranoid citizens? Tight aerial formations past important city landmarks? For goodness's sakes. Could you be more brilliant? Perhaps somebody could have reported on this before the fact. (As it is, newspapers and TV stations are treating it as news that people called them to ask what was up. "Frightened New Yorkers called this newspaper to figure out what is going on!" "Our news show reassured New Yorkers worried about supersonic jets from Harlem!" "We didn't know what was going on either, but we went to find out and now we are reporting on it for you!" And so on and so forth.)

posted by Skay @ 9:09 PM