Saints Unbecoming

Two weeks ago, an article entitled "How Do I Know When It's Time To Leave A Church?" was the most-read article on Crosswalk.com.

At the time, I commented about how telling it must be that such discouraging subject matter - a strong dissatisfaction with one's church - would be the top article on one of Christianity's most popular websites.

So, it's been two weeks, which can be an eternity in Internet time.  Who knows how many topics, headlines, crises, opinions, and tweets have come and gone.  You'd think the article about leaving one's church would be long gone, too, wouldn't you?  At least, it wouldn't still be listed among Crosswalk's top ten.

But you'd be wrong.  Okay, so it's not number one today... it's number three.  After two other articles of similar subject matter.  Currently, the most-read article is "What You Are Wearing To Church," which has likely been a weekly debate in families across the Western world for centuries.  The second-most-read article currently is entitled "Seven Viruses That Infect the Church."

Ouch.

Isn't this "church" thing supposed to be helping us?  Isn't it supposed to be the place where our faith walk can find refuge from the sins of the world?  Judging by what people are choosing to read on Crosswalk, however, it looks more like church is a thorn in our side, or a cross we have to bear.

When Doing Church Becomes One's Undoing

Maybe I'm back on this topic of dissatisfaction with church because I've been interviewing somebody for an upcoming article of mine for Crosswalk.  After years of trying to act like a Christian, find a church where she can grow as a Christian, get involved in ministry with other Christians, develop Christian friendships, and plug her young son into a similarly God-focused faith community for his age level, she's thrown in the towel.

She walked out of church.  She's not really bitter, or even angry, although she's sad, and almost bemused at what the rest of us continue to tolerate in our faith communities.

Looking back on her conversion experience, she figures it must have been an emotional reaction to her failed marriage.  She was told she needed God in order to have peace.  And for a while, it all seemed to work... until she tried to assimilate into a large church that asks people to "come as they are."  So she did.

Things went downhill from there.

Early in her faith walk, a small-group leader chastised her in front of their home group for professing to enjoy a popular but mildly-raunchy television sitcom, but then she witnessed him in his own home watching something even raunchier on cable.

She found out by accident that malicious gossip was being spread around her church about her and her son.

Her son went on a couple of church youth outings and witnessed adult sponsors of the events getting tipsy on contraband liquor.

She herself attended events with fellow church-goers where alcoholic beverages were flowing.

It was as if everybody else was as wounded, anxious, and depressed as she was, and church had become simply another crutch, or a glorified passport to Heaven.  The church people she saw drinking weren't living under grace, they were addicted to the stuff to fill the void she thought churchy stuff was supposed to fill.  Preach hellfire and damnation for the world's gays, but adultery within the church is only wrong if you get caught.  None of it matters - your passports to Heaven have already been stamped.

When she started expressing her doubts on Facebook, church friends either ignored her, or de-friended her.  When she saw one of her pastors at their kids' mutual sporting event, he didn't want to talk to her.  She realized she was more wounded, anxious, and depressed now that she had gotten involved in church, than she was before "professing her faith."

So she relinquished her faith.  Returned it, even though she didn't get a refund for all she'd been through.  She didn't expect to find a bunch of holy-roller saints in church, but she didn't expect a bunch of sinners who self-righteously claimed to be holy-roller saints, either.

"Don't pray for me," she's asked me, "because that's so patronizing.  I have explored your faith option and found nothing that comforts me more than my own awareness of my own spirituality."

Preachers Missing a Teachable Moment

We evangelicals might be tempted to parse this woman's refutation of Christianity in order to find clues to its theological inadequacies, but before we do that, consider the haughtiness with which one of our celebrity preachers recently praised a fellow celebrity preacher friend of his.

Mark Dever, senior pastor at Washington, DC's wildly popular Capitol Hill Baptist Church, served as a guest preacher earlier this month in the pulpit of Sovereign Grace Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

Sovereign Grace Church is the new congregation established by C.J. Mahaney, the embattled former director of Sovereign Grace Ministries, which has come under fire for hiding allegations of child abuse.  However, Dever has come out not only in support of Mahaney, but veiled contempt towards those who have filed a lawsuit against his former ministry as its alleged child abuse victims.

In what appears to be an arrogant affirmation of the indicted despite a Biblical need to be sensitive to any harm that has befallen alleged victims, Dever offered Mahaney's congregation a heavy dose of hero worship.

"If you’re visiting or if you’re sort of new to Sovereign Grace," Dever said in his sermon, regarding Mahaney, "you have a privilege in having this man as your pastor that you don’t fully grasp..."

Not only does one celebrity pastor inadvertently chastise fellow Christians who dare question the integrity of another celebrity pastor, but he appears to display a degree of impunity that seems to defy the Gospel of Christ.  It's not that during a time of crisis in one's personal life or public ministry, a minister of the Gospel shouldn't be able to depend on his peers for comfort, friendship, and support.  But it almost appears as though Mahaney's friends have willfully ignored the facts in this case.  Indeed, the fact that we need to keep talking in abstract terms instead of facts betrays the fact that Mahaney and his friends have not broached the accusations with the seriousness the rest of us have accorded them.

Either way, their attitudes and actions don't seem to square with the Gospel they've built their careers preaching.

I don't personally know any of the people about whom I've written here today.  The woman who's returned to atheism was referred to me by a mutual friend, who thought I should hear her story.  Our mutual friend is saved, and the only church friend who remains in contact with this woman who's left the church.  I've never met either Dever or Mahaney, and only know of their disturbing, stubborn alliance through what I've learned about it online.

But hey - even if all the rest of this is anecdotal, don't we know how hard it is to do church?  We don't need to be told this by an atheist, or preachers pretending that accusations of child molestation don't exist.

Still, I believe that God is sovereign.  He knew from eternity past that these days would come for His North American church, when His people would be so cantankerous, malicious, hypocritical, self-righteous, and unlike Christ.  Yet still, the church is His invention.  He has purposes for it, even if we can't see them.  I believe that, because I believe God is sovereign.  We can't irrevocably screw up His church, even though it sure looks like we're giving it our best shot.

What am I to make about all of the feedback I've received from this atheist, who, frankly, seems almost freer now that she thinks she can cross "God" off of her list of things to make her happy?  I don't know.  After all, most of the world today sees religion as simply one of many means to an end, with the end being some sort of self-realization.  All the better to find those things that don't work earlier rather than later, right?

What our celebrity preachers are doing in the name of this God, however, truly unnerves me.  The God in Whom the Holy Spirit has given me faith is not a God to be mocked by elitist games of personal favorites during - of all things - sex abuse cases.  In their cloistered world of church plants, seminars, and doctrinal associations, it's almost as if the guys with the biggest bully pulpits win the day, while hapless sheep bleat in the fields.

Or go online in droves to Crosswalk.com, getting advice on evaluating how sick their church may be.

Sounds of Praise Worth the Effort

Was it worth it?

All that hard work.  The tedious practicing.  Hours of it.  Hours upon hours.  Those interviews with the press.  Time away from his fiance, family, and friends.

My musical friend, Alex McDonald, spent months in intensive preparation for the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition currently underway here in Fort Worth, Texas.  He has a day job as a piano instructor, both privately, and for a local college.  But in addition to that, Alex managed to squeeze in a full workweek's worth of practice to compete at the prestigious Cliburn.  And his fans were pleased when he survived the initial round of pressure-cooker tryouts - weeks before the actual competition - simply to win one of 30 coveted spots in the Cliburn's first official round.

When the Cliburn got under way last week, he played two different mini-concerts in the first round, and was warmly received by his audiences, if not his critics, who apparently weren't aware that Alex actually did some of his doctoral work at Julliard on the composers whose pieces he played.  I've always been skeptical of music critics - well, of critics who review most of the arts in our culture - because the ones who make a living doing so rarely seem to have the professional credentials they expect the artists they're reviewing to achieve.  Siskel and Ebert, for example, never produced a feature film in their lives.  Ada Louise Huxtable, the inimitable architecture critic for both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, was never a certified architect.  Although all three of these personalities were able to carve out good livings offering generally solid feedback on their preferred art forms, like another artist friend of mine advised me recently, when you're not the one having to design something for a client, it's easy to forget that it might not be the composer, director, or architect whose faults you're seeing, but the person who signed the check for it.

Suffice it to say that Alex did not get paid for competing in the Cliburn.  None of its contestants do.  In fact, there's a small army of volunteers that make sure it runs without a hitch during its quadrennial appearances on the music world's stage.  And it is a big international deal.  Musicians on the jury come from countries like Israel, France, and China, and many contestants come from Japan, Russia, and Italy.  It's been thirty years since this competition, always held in Fort Worth, had a contestant from anywhere in north Texas.

Indeed, the Cliburn is not the provincial talent show people outside of classical music's orbit may assume it to be.  When it first started, back in the early 1960's, some music teachers from what was then more of a small-town social club approached Van Cliburn - then one of the few fantastically-famous musical Texans who didn't strum or pluck a gee-tar - with the hopes that he would lend his name to their fledgling contest for young pianists.  Typical amateurish local-boy-makes-good publicity.  According to legend, Cliburn's fawning mother, Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn, encouraged her son, who was balking at the idea, to let the little people back in Texas use his name.  "It will only be a one-time contest," she's reputed to have dismissively advised.

So much for mother knowing best.  Today, that nice little contest in Cowtown has become one of the premiere classical music competitions on the planet.  According to the organization that runs the Cliburn, tens of thousands of people come from all over the globe to attend portions of the sprawling event, while over two million more watch online.  Not only does this add real cash to Fort Worth's tax coffers, but it provides the city with valuable publicity.  Dallas, Houston, and Austin - the other three arts capitals in the state - have nothing like it.

Okay.  So it's a big deal.  Even if classical piano music is more of a cultural niche than, say the Superbowl or the World Series.  But how did he do?

Well, last night, the names of those 12 contestants who will be advancing to the second round were released, and Alex's name wasn't on it.

Frankly, I can't imagine how disappointing that must have been for him.  I've never worked so hard for something so prestigious.  I've certainly never worked so hard and failed to gain something so prestigious!  In Alex's chosen profession, winning the Cliburn would have set his career on a trajectory of renown that only He and God could change.  The Cliburn's cash prize is a paltry $50,000, but it's the instant fame and professional booking services to manage that fame for which contestants are truly vying.  Having the Cliburn organization managing your new career in the classical music world can open a lifetime of coveted concert hall and recording studio doors.  That may not sound like much to many Americans, but classical musicians can gain iconic stature in places like Japan, China, and Russia.

Angling for all of that professional career management, however, soon came to trouble Alex.  He was a prodigy - hardly anybody can train themselves from scratch to compete at the Cliburn's level; you have to be born with the gift.  He's lived his whole life as a student of the craft that is part of his being.  As a follower of Christ, he knows he's been blessed with this ability, and he desires to use it primarily for God's glory, even if he has to commercialize it a bit to put food on the table.  Even there, he knows he's one of the fortunate ones:  somebody who knows what they do well and can earn a living at it.

So how much did he need the Cliburn?  Was trying out for - and winning a rare spot in - the Cliburn more an act of arrogance and blind ambition on his part?  Or was God in this, leading him, placing within him not only the ability, but the desire, and the tenacity?  As he pushed himself through his grueling practice regimen, he desired for God to be at the center of it all.  He didn't want to be like so many others of us who set a goal and try to drag God along for the ride, when He hasn't been the one opening those doors to begin with.

Anybody who has ever heard Alex play knows that if he didn't try for things like the Cliburn, it could almost be said that he risked suppressing the talent God has given him.  Such accusations are extremely dangerous to make, since few of us can get into the same wavelength of heart and mind between God and the individual to whom He's given such abilities.  But still, now many skills and proficiencies do we actually end up dishonoring God with by our ambivalence towards them?  This isn't about art necessarily, but maybe the gift of administration, or helps, or child-rearing, or evangelism, or writing computer code.  Maybe they won't earn us the type of money or privilege we think we want or need.  We can still honor God if we do something else, so that's what we do instead.  It's a tough call, especially with people to whom God has given such obvious expertise.

So I sent Alex a note today, and this is what I shared with him:

"From what I can tell, you've honored God with this effort, and that is the whole point. If success is doing what God wants us to do, you've been wonderfully successful! And you've treated us to some great music in the process. Thank you!"

For all practical purposes, as a professional pianist and music teacher, Alex will still be able to put on his resume that he made it through the first round of the Cliburn.  There's considerable prestige in simply being accepted into the competition.  He's not going to win the $50,000, or the instant-career-starter-kit promised by the Cliburn organization, but he's still a lot farther ahead than those who've never tried or never been accepted.

He also has now mastered - at least as far as the general public is concerned - an impressive repertoire of classical piano music that, besides making him Dallas' newest attraction at dinner parties, could help him with concert events that don't involve ticket prices topping out close to a monthly car payment.

Most importantly, however, remains the fact that Alex loves the Lord, sought His guidance and peace, and demonstrated well the gifting with which He has generously blessed him. 

So, was it worth it, even though he didn't make it to the second round?

Man looks at outward things, but God looks at the heart.  And while I would never intentionally put words in God's mouth, I can see no reason to doubt that God has seen Alex's heart all the way through this musical journey.  He was Alex's only true Audience.  Then, too, God not only knew Alex would "lose," as we mortals might say, but that even in losing, Alex would honor Him.  And that, as Alex has already done in front of those of us who've been following his musical journey, he would still give God glory.

Praise be to God!  And, bravo, Alex.

At Mount Olivet's Doughboy

That's me, just to the left of center (go figure!), in a light blue t-shirt, looking up to a nearby bridge,
where some Boy Scouts are preparing to toss a ceremonial wreath into the Trinity River
while a bagpiper plays.  This was during the maritime portion of yesterday's Memorial Day observance.

It gets shorter every year.

My friends and I guesstimate that we've been attending Fort Worth's annual Memorial Day observance at Mount Olivet Cemetery for fifteen years.  For 8 decades, Mount Olivet has hosted a traditional, no-frills commemoration of military servicemembers killed in the line of duty.  It's become the official Memorial Day event for both the city of Fort Worth and Tarrant County, usually attended by mayors, city councilmembers, county commissioners, and other local dignitaries. 

But unlike some ceremonies, this one has been getting shorter every year.

They've thrown in an extra speech - a speech to introduce the person who's giving the main speech.  This year, they added the sanctuary choir from one of the oldest congregations in Tarrant County, the politically and theologically liberal First Christian Church in downtown Fort Worth.  About 40 people dressed in red and black sang the National Anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and a choral benediction.  They sounded quite good, considering they had no amplification and it was a breezy evening.

Maybe the singing helped the service seem to fly by.  But, then again...

It's never been a pretentious affair.  An executive from a local veterans association runs the show, which includes proclamations from the city and county thanking the private cemetery for underwriting the evening.  Interspersed are some military flourishes, such as a Presentation of the Colors, the playing of "Taps," a 21-gun salute by handicapped veterans in wheelchairs, and the solemn Retiring of the Colors, during which we in the audience stand in utter silence.  It's very cool hearing how respectful, dignified, and patient people can be when they want to be.

There's also usually a bagpiper from the Fort Worth Fire Department who bleats out "Amazing Grace" while marching in full regalia along rows of big American flags.

One year, the soldiers got it wrong while folding up the Stars and Stripes during the Retiring of the Colors.  They didn't have enough of the flag left over to tuck inside and create the appropriately-stiff triangle of star-spangled hallowedness.  So, instead of fudging it, they slowly and methodically unwrapped what they'd done, and started folding it again.  The whole thing must have taken ten minutes, and that's a long time when all you're doing is watching two young men fold up a piece of cloth.  But we all waited, quietly, almost religiously, to make sure it was done properly.  Veterans in attendance kept their sharp salutes the whole time, and in the stifling May heat we usually have for these ceremonies, that's no small feat.

One year, it had been raining all day, and it was drizzling as we gathered at the cemetery for the ceremony, so officials moved it indoors to one of the chapels.  I remember that the air conditioning was turned down so low that I was actually freezing - the only time I've been cold during these Memorial Day services!  I think they made the bagpiper play in another room down the hall; the low-ceilinged chapel being too small for the sound.

Yes, we could all fit into a funeral home's chapel back then.  When my friends and I started attending, the crowds were definitely small, which was one of the reasons we decided to keep attending.  The theology is thin to non-existent at these services, which are designed to be ecumenical.  And most of the speeches are by either politicians or commanders at one of our local military installations, so their quality is decidedly hollow.  But we've felt a certain obligation to make this yearly service a part of our Memorial Day Mondays, not out of a punitive sense of compulsion, but as a necessary reminder of the fact that real people have fought in real wars and died real deaths for our country.

No, we don't all agree on the merits of certain political causes, or the decisions our elected officials have made regarding warfare and picking fights with other nations, but the fact remains that our military consists of men and women who willingly - and often enthusiastically - agree to put their life on the line for the honor of our country and the freedom for which it stands.  Surely there's some sort of gratitude we're to demonstrate for such self-sacrifice?  Before being executed by the British, colonist Nathan Hale reportedly proclaimed his regret that he had "only one life to give for my country."   Even being willing to give that one life, and managing to escape armed conflict to retire from the service, never having to make good on that pledge, as most servicemembers are able to do, is worth more than many lesser Americans pledge for the lifestyle we so often take for granted.

After the main speech every year, representatives from area veterans groups line up and place ceremonial wreaths at the "Doughboy Statue," Mount Olivet's version of the "Tomb of the Unknowns."  Lest you've forgotten, the term "doughboy" comes from the Mexican-American War in which soldiers would get covered in colorless dust, and ate flavorless dough as part of their rations.  "Doughboy" became particularly popular as an affectionate reference for American soldiers during World War I.  At Fort Worth's Mount Olivet Cemetery, the "Doughboy Statue," dedicated in the 1980's, helps to anchor a section were many veterans are buried.

The number of veterans groups that participated in this part of the service used to be considerable, and the time it took for everybody to present their wreaths and observe a moment of silence could stretch for what seemed like hours, even though it was probably twenty minutes or so.  Yesterday, they were finished in less than five.  Veterans still march towards the statue in their dress uniforms, their spouses wearing outfits in patriotic colors; a few military widows and mothers, some white-haired, all of them usually dressed to the nines; many of them escorted by members of the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternity of men who wear black tuxedos, sashes, and tall hats with plumes of feathers, holding long silver swords at attention.  Solemn and silent, they walk down, and their line tends to bunch up near the Doughboy as the ones in front of them linger a bit too long in their salutes.

Only there are far fewer of them than there used to be.

For a while, it seemed as though ever year, we could notice who wasn't there.  Particularly the older men, who would shuffle with a peculiar gait, or whose comb-over was exceptionally pronounced.  There was a Japanese woman who was a member of a Japanese wives auxiliary, but when she died, apparently so did that auxiliary.  And that's been the pattern over the past fifteen years we've been attending.

There's still one tall, elegant gentleman, always in a black suit and crisp white shirt, with a tie, no matter the heat or humidity.  His full head of thick white hair blows about whenever there's a breeze, and he never sits - he's constantly wandering the periphery of the event, tiny camera in hand, taking photos of everything and everybody.  Teetering about on long, thin legs that seem about to give out on him, but still, he makes his circuit, around and around, never even flinching during the ear-popping 21-gun salute.

Each year, although we have no idea who he is, my friends and I hope to see him, knowing that one of these years, we won't.

Afterwards, on the drive home last night, my friends and I joked about maybe having to form our own auxiliary and signing-up to present our own wreath during the Doughboy part of the ceremony.  My friends were dating when we started attending these, and now they have two elementary-school-aged kids they bring along for a lesson in patriotism.  Apparently, newer generations of GI's don't join veterans groups when they leave the service, and considering the rowdy, beer-swilling, vulgarity-laced reputation many of these VFW halls have had for decades, that's likely not a bad thing.  And since the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, the attendance at Mount Olivet has been climbing almost every year.  There were probably three hundred or so people in attendance yesterday, which my friends and I thought looked like the largest crowd yet.

But somebody's still gotta lay down the wreaths, right?

In remembrance of those who've laid down their lives for our country.

Apologizing to the Central Park Five

 
Did cops commit theft themselves?

Back in 1989, "New York's finest" responded swiftly and decisively upon learning that a white woman had been brutally raped and left for dead in a notoriously dangerous region of Central Park.  A ragtag group of teenaged scofflaws had just been brought in to the department's precinct house, a dilapidated outpost within Manhattan's legendary green space.  Might there be a connection between this savage crime and these teens' self-professed "wilding" that evening?

It had already been a violent night in Central Park.  A couple of hours earlier, a homeless vagrant had been assaulted, as well as several joggers and bicyclists.  All of the incidents had taken place in the northern reaches of the long park, far from the relatively safe and more heavily used recreational spaces clustered in Central Park's southern "white" zone, near many exclusive hotels and luxury apartment buildings.  Whereas few New Yorkers with common sense ventured into the park after dark, those who did had less to fear if they stayed close to its outside borders.  But a lone, young, white, female jogger took the risk of going deeper and further north.  She was a privileged stock broker from Pennsylvania who perhaps didn't truly appreciate the grim realities of 1980's New York City.

Not that what happened to her was her fault.  But plenty of idealistic young people coming to the big city to make money underestimate how some people without it live.

Darkness Deeper Than the Night

It was after 9:00 pm on April 20, 1989.  A darkness more pervasive than the nighttime sky had swallowed the socioeconomically distressed slums teeming in uncomfortable and paradoxical proximity to Manhattan's impressively elite neighborhoods.  For better or worse, stretching more than 50 blocks, Central Park can't help but link Manhattan's have's and have-not's.  And it does so with a seductive canopy of marvelous trees, romantic winding pathways, and a misleading atmosphere of tranquility.

Entering this realm was not only the successful Wall Street broker, jogging through for just another night of exercise, but five restless teenagers from a world completely opposite that of the accomplished Pennsylvanian.  Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise were kids, a mix of blacks and Hispanics, mostly from the projects, and of somewhat disreputable conduct, who decided to go out for a bit of adventure.  Neither hard-core criminals nor choir boys, they tagged along with a larger group of more hardened punks who caroused along and into Central Park looking for trouble.

And they found it.  McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana, and Wise would soon become known to New Yorkers as the "Central Park Five," but were they the hooligans cops assumed them to be?  Their group's pouncing on a disoriented homeless man disturbed these five boys, and they began to have second thoughts about those with whom they were associating.  As some of the others began targeting additional victims who had ventured too far north into Harlem's domain, these five kids started backing away.  But it was too late.  Before they knew it, cops were swarming over them, and the Central Park Five was formed as the boys were rounded up and dumped at the precinct house.

New York then wasn't the same New York most tourists know today.  New York then was a city of incessant muggings, murders, rapes, Crack cocaine, and pervasive fear.  And everyone wanted the cops to do something about it.  At first, when the five hapless teens were brought in, police were simply interested in getting a handle on that evening's crime spree.  Just another night of mild mayhem - by Big Apple standards, anyway.  However, when the rape report came in, everything changed.

Before long, cops who were either overzealous, or indifferent to justice - or both - had gotten the Central Park Five to individually confess to a crime they didn't know anything about.  Their videotaped confessions were not consistent, nor did they align with pertinent facts, but they were enough to help police officials convince New York's voracious media machine that the Central Park Jogger's rapists had been caught.  That the enraged city could relax.  Everything was under control.

Any rape is a heinous crime, of course.  But the rape of the Central Park Jogger came to represent an apex of the city's anger towards its criminal element.  The case also became a sort of rallying point for not only recognizing the depravity of its collective conscience, but a determination that New Yorkers could not allow things to get any worse.  Its symbolism and the arrest of the Central Park Five resonated throughout New York's spectrum of people groups:  rich whites were relieved by it, poor blacks were resigned to it, and everyone hoped it was a turning point in the right direction.

Blinded By Racism's Power

I wasn't living in New York in 1989, but I was by 1990, and I remember the brou-ha-ha in the media over the Central Park Jogger case and the much-hyped trials of the Central Park Five.  Not that I followed the trials very closely, however.  For one reason, I was preoccupied with the mechanics of working and living in one of America's most stressful environments.  But for another thing, I was young, naive, and apparently, more of a racist than I am today.

Late this past Friday evening, however, I was surfing television channels before going to bed, and I stumbled upon a Ken Burns documentary on our local PBS station here in north Texas.  It was about the Central Park Five, a case that this past Friday, I barely remembered.  But I quickly caught on, and recalled how the five punks had been found guilty and sent to prison.

"Ken Burns is doing a documentary on these guys?" I thought to myself.  "I wonder what his angle is?"

The show started with personal interviews of the Central Park Five, and they were admitting to being in the park, and to being a part of the pack of teens that beat up some innocent visitors to the park.  So I assumed that Burns wanted to explore how these thugs have been able to turn their lives around after serving their time for such wilding.

But Burns caught me completely by surprise.  As each of the boys - now, thirty-something-year-old men - kept insisting they didn't rape the Central Park Jogger, I was reliving the same "I'm not buying your sob story" mentality I had back when their trials were taking place.  Burns lined up the videotaped evidence each boy gave prosecutors so we viewers could see how they didn't match, but still, I was sold on their guilt.

It wasn't until Burns' show was more than half-way finished that he introduced Matias Reyes, a serial rapist in the city back then, and then the shocker:  Reyes did it.

Several years after the trials, Reyes not only confessed to raping the Central Park Jogger, but DNA evidence proved it.  No DNA evidence from any of the Central Park Five was found at the rape crime scene.  Reyes was able to corroborate details about his crime that cops had never released to the media, and which none of the Central Park Five could confirm.  Reyes' infamy was also already known to the cops before the infamous rape in Central Park.  However, as Burns tells it, New York's district attorney's office and police department appear to have intentionally stolen the youth of these five boys.

In order to avoid an embarrassing, public-confidence-busting, and legal-Pandora's-box backtrack from that fateful night in the Central Park precinct house, city officials pressed forward with their original yet utterly contrived version of what happened to the Central Park Jogger.  Officials did not want to publicly second-guess the cops.  The district attorney's office refused to admit that, aside from those videotaped confessions, extracted through duress and outright lies told by cops to the teens, they had a flimsy case. Instead, city officials placed their trust in the public's reliable racism and the jury's likelihood of rendering a verdict based solely on whatever videotaped evidence is presented to them.  Apparently, it's well-known in legal circles that juries will place greater weight on anything they see and hear on a videotape, even if it contradicts hard facts in a case.

Compounding matters, remember, was the city's boiling-point anger against roving gangs of minority boys and men, and the impunity with which people with threatening demeanors could terrorize neighborhoods.

Granted, it didn't help anything that activists like Al Sharpton were organizing protests against the trial, the district attorney's office, and the police.  Parents of the Central Park Five had appealed to anybody who would listen to them - and that consisted only of people like Sharpton - because of how the evidence had been so egregiously compiled against their sons.  For all the rest of us, even other impoverished minorities in the city, it proved far easier to assume the cop's case against these teenagers was as true as it seemed.  And we were content to let them be found guilty and go to prison.

For something for which, I learned Friday night, however, they weren't guilty.

Oh. No.

I'm So Sorry

The Central Park Five today:  From left, Antron McCray,
Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise

Of course, I'm leaving out a lot of details from this story, and for those, you'll have to watch Burns' special.  After all, I'm not here to steal Burns' storytelling thunder.  My purpose in this essay is to do something that is uncomfortable, and sad, but something that is also rather freeing.  Freeing, at least, for me.  Ironic, since it's the Central Park Five who should have gone free on the rape charges.

For what it's worth, to Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise, I respectfully apologize for being one of those people who automatically assumed you were guilty because of your race, your family's economic situation, and the stereotypes I held - and still hold - about how kids like you behave.  You were not innocent until proven guilty.  I figured that since the cops said you did it, and since you seemed to be the type of kids who would do it, you had done it.  I am so very sorry, and ashamed.

I don't pretend to be the most righteous person out there, and like most of us, I struggle with varying degrees of racism.  But it was too easy for me to let the pieces of this case fall together against you based more on my own racism than the facts - or lack of them.  Granted, I was not on your jury, and I didn't hear all of the evidence, nor did I know then what I know now about what the police knew - but didn't tell the public.  And there's nothing I can do now - or could have done then - that would have made any difference in how your case turned out.

Yet I was a member of the New York City community during those years when your parents wanted somebody to listen, and hardly any of us did.  One of the reasons why New York's media did not stop and listen to your families was because people like me thought putting people like you in prison would help the city's crushing crime problem go away.

Instead, you were put away, along with your youth, and whatever potential you might have been able to build upon without the psychological stigma both you and society hold about prison time.

You'll probably never hear me make this confession, and offer this apology, but hopefully, as Burns' film lends credence and publicity to you, your ordeal can stand as a testament to the ugly power of racism.

Indeed, there were five more victims than cops realized in Central Park that night.  Six, if you count justice as one of racism's casualties.
_____

Update 6/19/14:  The exonerated Central Park Five settled their claim of false imprisonment by the City of New York for approximately $40 million, to be split amongst them.

What Would You Do With $2 Billion?

You're not gonna believe this.

If you attend a church, take a guesstimate at how much it's worth.  If you don't attend a church, pick the biggest one in your community, and go a little wild with how much you'd guess it's worth.  Go ahead:  add it all up.  Property, buildings, vehicles, cash-on-hand, parsonages, religious icons and custom artwork, sound equipment, musical equipment... throw it all in and add it up.

Does it add up to $2 billion?

Billion.  With a "B."  Actually, does it add up to MORE than $2 billion?  Because that's how much New York City's mainline Episcopal Trinity Church estimates its worth to be.

Incredible, huh?  I'm laughing out loud as I type "Manhattan Church Worth Over $2 Billion."

Liz, Phil, and Anne

Now, granted, it's hard to put a pricetag on the church's historic worship spaces.  These include St. Paul's Chapel, one of the oldest continuously-used religious buildings in the United States, plus the congregation's flagship space, an elegant jewelbox of a miniature Gothic cathedral built in 1846, anchoring the head of Wall Street.  What its main sanctuary lacks in size - compared to its massive European cousins - it more than makes up for in lush hallowedness and hushed venerability.  You can practically smell its ancient auspiciousness as you enter off of cacophonous Broadway, walking right over the threshold embellished with a plaque commemorating Queen Elizabeth II's royal visit in 1976, during America's Bicentennial.

The Queen, of course, is the figurehead of the Church of England, from which Trinity's Episcopalian denomination is an offshoot.  So even though I've always thought it unusual in multiple ways for a church to have a brass plaque in honor of Her Royal Highness, perhaps what's genuinely goofy about it is what's immortalized on it:

"ON THIS SPOT

STOOD

HER MAJESTY

QUEEN ELIZABETH II

ON THE OCCASION OF

HER GRACIOUS VISIT

9 JULY 1976

HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

THE PRINCE PHILIP

STOOD NEARBY"

Again, I find myself laughing as I type this out, even though I'm glad having the Queen's husband in such close proximity to her hallowed ground was worth being acknowledged in such grand fashion.  He's certainly played second fiddle all his married life.  Considering how theologically and socially liberal Trinity has been for years, perhaps referencing a royal spouse this way was a bold - albeit contrived - form of gender equality.

Indeed, since Trinity has a legacy of liberalism, doesn't it seem odd for the church to be one of Manhattan's largest landowners?  All of that $2 billion isn't tied up in their sanctuary, chapel, and cemeteries along Broadway.  Trinity owns 14 acres of land in Manhattan, which is some of the world's priciest real estate, regardless of what's built on it.

When it comes to money and wealth, however, everything is relative, isn't it?  Although Trinity owns 14 acres of highly-coveted city property, it used to own a whopping 215 acres, mostly farmland north of what is now the Financial District.  England's Queen Anne donated the land in 1705, back when Trinity was part of the Church of England.  Imagine the church's worth today if it still held even half of those 215 acres!  In a way, Trinity could be considered poor by comparison.

Putting On Airs

It's not even as though Trinity is the only church with extraordinary finances in New York City.  Several churches, particularly those on Manhattan Island, have been able to parlay their real estate portfolio - as meager as most are - to their financial advantage.

The new St. Peter's Lutheran Church (in red circle)
sits underneath a corner of the Citicorp Center tower

St. Peter's Lutheran Church, for example, used to be housed in a grand old Gothic edifice at the corner of 54th Street and Lexington Avenue.  In the late 1960's, when Citicorp Bank was putting together parcels of land to construct its new skyscraper east of Lexington, in what used to be a residential part of Midtown, the congregation decided it couldn't fight change.  Rapidly shrinking in size from white flight to the suburbs and Midtown's rapid conversion to high-rise office space, the church sold out to the bank in exchange for a smaller, modernist, yet opulent facility tucked underneath the new "floating" skyscraper.

Just this past February, the legendary Zeckendorf family of developers paid over $40 million to Christ Church, a Methodist congregation, for the air rights over its prime Park Avenue sanctuary.  In New York City, air rights refer to the volume of space that exists between the amount of construction the city's zoning laws allow, and what is currently built on the site.  In other words, if you own a parcel of land in Manhattan, and it's about five stories high, but zoning for that parcel of land allows something of up to 30 stories, you could sell the air rights for 25 stories to a developer to use on another project that needs air rights.  So Christ Church sold the air over its sanctuary for $40 million to developers who plan on using those air rights to increase the allowable size of a residential skyscraper they're building next door.

And if you think $40 million for empty air is a hefty price for the church to charge, consider that the Zeckendorf family plans on charging up to $48 million per apartment in their new tower.  Prices are that crazy in New York.

But, even so:  a church holding a portfolio worth two billion dollars?

Some say such an eye-popping amount is really only due to the city's unprecedented explosion in real estate values.  Trinity Church didn't set out to amass such a windfall, even if they have administered their properties adroitly.  If the church truly was money-hungry, would they have allowed their real estate holdings to dwindle so significantly over the centuries?  Plus, it's not Trinity's fault that Manhattan property values are ridiculously high.  Neither is it like the church has been on a buying spree, snapping up properties for profit.

In addition, this two billion dollars could be considered a form of endowment to help hedge the church against lean economic times.  Granted, two billion dollars represents a veritable concrete fortress instead of a lush hedge, especially for an organization whose enterprise is generally believed to be a break-even charity.  And considering the wealth and prestige many of its well-heeled members individually enjoy, it seems most unlikely that Trinity's collection coffers are going to run dry anytime soon, necessitating a run on the parish's rainy day fund.

A Billion Here, A Billion There...

The question has arisen, however, as to what the church plans on doing with its wealth.  It's been the type of question most congregations never get to ask, or if they do, the amount of money they're bickering over totals far less than two billion dollars.  But New York City is anything but normal, average, or conventional.  Except in one aspect:  at Trinity, the question has sparked what's turning into a good-old church split of sorts, and so far, one lawsuit.

Who says money can't buy happiness?  Many people in Trinity's membership, apparently.  They're not pleased that out of the church's $38 million operating budget for 2011 - yes, I'll let that sink in:  2011's annual budget was $38 million - less than 10% was spent on philanthropy.  True, Trinity funds the usual social programs expected of liberal churches, such as an AIDS walk, letter-writing to prisoners, an anti-racism campaign, and a community center, but these are mostly low-budget initiatives churches much smaller and poorer than Trinity also run all over the country.

And that's what galls an increasing number of Trinity congregants.  Most of Trinity's budget gets put back in the bank.  Shouldn't that money be out in the community, working on whatever churches traditionally are expected to do - but on a grand New York scale?  We evangelicals wouldn't expect a church with the type of theology as Trinity's to develop evangelistic programs and church planting efforts around the world.   But Trinity already spends some money helping Anglican churches in Africa, and some of Trinity's members think they could do far more of that.

Then there's New York's grinding poverty that Mayor Bloomberg may have been able to conveniently hide during his extraordinary three terms, but still stubbornly exists.  What two billion dollars couldn't do to help provide affordable apartments for indigent senior citizens!  Or run comprehensive transitional shelters for abused women and children, or fund scholarships at private schools in neighborhoods with sub-standard public schools, or even help subsidize late-night mass transit routes so the working poor can get safely home from their off-hours jobs in a reasonable amount of time.

It's not rocket science:  money talks in New York City.  It talks louder there than anyplace else in America - other than Washington, DC, of course!  In fact, it's the very same loud money that has helped Trinity to realize the stunning valuation of its 14 acres.  Fourteen measly acres - how many mega-churches across suburbia sprawl over so much more land that's worth a fraction of Trinity's two billion dollars?

Meanwhile,  Trinity is facing a revolt within its membership over whether hoarding money is helping to serve its community.  What about "the least of these," the folks for which limousine liberals usually sympathize?

Are they quietly standing nearby, negligible, an afterthought, just like the Queen's husband?

What The Carpenter Said

"At the appointed time."

It's a phrase that appears numerous times throughout the Old and New Testaments in various contexts.  Yet, since it's a prepositional phrase, it's easy for us to gloss over it and concentrate on what actually happened upon the "appointed time."

However, in that natural and innocent process, we likely forget to realize that in these instances, the timing itself represents some measure of significance.  After all, God uses time for His plans and purposes, even if we tend to take it for granted.  "In the fullness of time" may have a poetic ring to it, and we assume to understand what it means, but it also holds some poweful theology in and of itself that may not be immediately apparent.

Because God is the God of order, doesn't it make sense that schedules matter to Him?  He ordains that certain things take place at certain times - and not before, or even after!  We say we know that intellectually, but don't we normally conduct our affairs as though we're the ones charting our own future?

We often forget that this world in which we live isn't for our benefit exclusively, but for His benefit - exclusively.  True, we share in the benefits of His grace towards us, but we are the created, and He is the Creator.  The freedoms we enjoy in Christ carry a responsibility, while God is not obligated to us for anything.  It is through His providential care and sovereign grace that we can enjoy anything, or participate in any way in His Kingdom work here on Earth.

And that includes the plans we think we're making unilaterally.  Or maybe with a group of people.  And, hopefully, even in consultation with God.

Meanwhile, His timing remains in ultimate control over our universe.  Sometimes, through the mysterious allowances of free will, we appear to have a certain level of control over the things we schedule and the activities in which we participate.  I suspect these times are not so much to "liberate" us from the bondage of time and, as Charles Hummel says, the "tyranny of the urgent," since mostly, we have only ourselves to blame for the crushing demands we allow to commandeer our days.  Instead, I think these vast stretches of "free time," if you will, are given to us by God so that we can demonstrate our reliance upon Him in the way we prayerfully seek His will for our lives and the way we spend the time He gives us.  To the extent that we allow worldly preoccupations to clutter our schedules, whose fault is that?

According to the rich history of our world documented for us in God's Word, however, there are precise, fixed, definitive, ordained, "appointed" times in which God planned before His creation of our world to exercise specific events for and to each one of us.  He placed Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden at a specific time.  He provided miracles at specific times.  Many things are recorded for us that appear to be the result of mankind's free will, but how many of those events really were?  Conception and birth, for example, are two profound miracles that parents think they control, but are actually provisions of God's life-giving power.  This is the main reason why believers in Christ so passionately advocate for the unborn.  Life - and its timing - is not ours to deny.

Speaking of life, Christ's death, burial, and resurrection took place at the precise moment and time across history at which God ordained it to happen.  Some have speculated about why God waited so long after the Garden of Eden, or why He didn't wait several thousand years after the point at which humankind began recording time as "anno domini."  Yet this singular, pivotal event took place exactly when God decreed it would.
  
"For while we were still weak, at the right ('appointed') time Christ died for the ungodly."  - Romans 5:6 ESV

I was reminded of all of this yesterday at church, but it wasn't from any of our ministers.  After the third service, an usher who works the doorway I normally use each Sunday came over and chatted with me for a bit.  We don't know each other well - we don't even know each other's names - but in a large church, it's understood that always being on a first-name basis is a bit unrealistic.

Still, despite our relative ignorance of who each of us are, our conversation managed to effortlessly branch out to a variety of topics.  I learned he went to seminary, but ran out of money, and never graduated.  He's now a carpenter, and the Lord has blessed him with a good career.

"I think a lot of it is professional courtesy," he joked, since Christ's vocation was carpentry as well.

Suddenly, he made a comment that echoed something my Mom had been discussing with me only last week.  I've been particularly anxious about some unresolved situations in my life, and to have this brother in Christ who barely knew me affirm what a parent of mine had been encouraging me with really struck home to me.

"Think about all of the moments in Scripture when God waited until the appointed time," my new friend mused.  "We're to wait on Him, and sometimes, His timing seems so wrong.  But it never is, is it?  He appoints the time, and whatever it is won't happen until then."

I can't tell you how much I needed to hear that.  And how encouraged I was to hear that!

Church has become such a drag lately, I wasn't even intending on going at my usual time.  I'm in the chancel choir, and we sing at the two later services, at 9:30 and 11:00am.  But yesterday, I figured the 11:00am service would be enough.  I didn't even set my bedside alarm Saturday night.  Yet I got up, had breakfast, and finished my ablutions with enough time to get to the choir's rehearsal hall before the 9:30 service.  That's quite a feat for me, even when I wake up on time.  I figured the Lord might be telling me He wanted me at both services.  So I went.

If I had just gone to the last service, I would have been sitting in the sanctuary, listening to the morning sermon, during the time I had my conversation with the carpenter.  As it was, I sat through the sermon during the 9:30 hour, and was biding my time in one of our church's parlor areas before our organist played the last postlude for the day - a particular favorite of mine, Louis Vierne's "Carillon de Westminster."

Now, perhaps you'll think me foolish for supposing this, but I believe God got me out of bed, even though, in my "free will," I wasn't planning on doing so.  He got me to the 9:30 service and had me in place for His messenger, the carpenter, to share with me this word of encouragement towards the end of the morning.

At the appointed time, wouldn't you say? 

From one Carpenter, through another. 
_____

"Wait on the LORD: be of good courage , and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait , I say, on the LORD."  - Psalm 27:14 (KJV)

Deception, Thy Name Is Nostalgia

Ahh, nostalgia!

It sure can be deceptive.

Looking back over our memories tends to create the illusion that things were better then than they really were.  Such selective memory gets particularly bad if something today really bothers us, and we imagine that previous generations must have been far more proficient than the bozos running things today are.

Take, for example, the standard many Americans use for our country's glory years:  the post-war 1950's, during our epic baby boom.  Life seemed so much more vibrant then.  Opportunity was in the air.  We were inventing and growing and exploring and rocking and rolling and driving and building.  You didn't even have to be rich to enjoy the bounty in lifestyle advancements that have become a hallmark of that unique period of time.

But you did have to be white.

And indeed, it was, as we're soberly discovering, simply a unique period of time.  A period of time that, despite being as productive as it was, probably wasn't as great overall as we like to imagine it was.

What A Ride

Still, even for those of us who were born much later, the 20th Century's middle decade represents a quintessential period of socioeconomic exuberance and optimism.  Consider all of the measures by which the 1950's are fondly - if not entirely accurately - referred:

• Designs of the American automobile, such as the Cadillac fin, the '57 Chevrolets, and the Ford Thunderbird
• Epic cinematic spectaculars and iconic TV shows, such as Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, I Love Lucy, and Superman
• Big cities were still economic engines, even as suburbia was gaining momentum
• Public education was considered safe, efficient, and admirable
• Rock and roll was still in its infancy, and its audience almost as naive
• Dads went to work, moms stayed home, and their kids were wholesome (or, so Leave it to Beaver says)
• Interstate highways were brand-new and uncongested
• Passenger train service was then what air travel is today, only more pleasant
• Only the Army had annoying government regulations
• The incredible shrinking nuclear family was early in its evolution; extended family still lived close by, not across the country
• Divorce was rare
• Sundays were for church
• Baseball was America's game
• ... and on and on...

It Wasn't All Fabulous

In retrospect, however, despite how nice it all may sound to you - and, yes, some of it sounds nice to me, too - I have to admit:  I wouldn't want to go back and live in the 1950's.

For one thing, medical care was woefully inferior to the standards we expect today.  Think of how far we've come in the fight against cancer, the repair - and replacement - of broken bones and malfunctioning organs, and basic life expectancy.  Would you want to relinquish the advancements in health science that have been made in the past 60 years?

We also didn't know much about how badly we were corrupting our ecosystems with the massive amounts of pollution our economic engine was belching into the air, water, and landscape.  Unfortunately, it took about three decades for us to realize the amount of toxic residue "progress" creates.  Even today, much of the pollution we think we've removed from our society we've simply relocated to poorer and less politically powerful parts of our world, where people who can't complain as loudly about environmental degradation suffer from the byproducts of our plastic universe.

Plastic universe, indeed.  Our economy was rebuilding itself by becoming a consumer-driven one.  Driven to consume a lot of cheaply-made stuff we really don't need.  Instead of farming, the manufacture of basic utensils and equipment, and other industries we'd consider primitive by today's standards, our version of capitalism flopped into dependency mode after World War II, a mode in which products needed to be designed, sold, and purchased in a pattern that sustained companies that otherwise provided little upon which human life is based.  Things like striped toothpaste, Wiffle balls, hairspray, powdered milk, Frisbees and hula hoops, frozen French fries, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  In terms of raw economics, as long as you have customers willing to pay market price, all of these commodities can only help improve a society's economy.  But people of faith should know that contentment is not based on acquiring or consuming things; those are two lifestyle patterns a consumer-based economy wantonly encourages.

Then there's the whole crisis with racial segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism that raged just beneath the surface of the 1950's, finally to erupt in the 1960's.  Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing "separate but equal," came in 1954.  The ugly Little Rock Integration Crisis at that Arkansas city's main high school took place in 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education had been decided.

I still remember the first time I saw a photo of one of the black female students being taunted by a crowd of white kids outside Little Rock High School (photo at right).  I was reading a textbook in Mrs. Wolf's sixth grade class in upstate New York, where the only black family in town lived in one of the nicest homes in town, and I had no idea why anybody would dislike black people.  I looked behind the tall, dignified black girl in the white dress and sunglasses, to the short white girl with the short hair directly behind her.  Her mouth galvanized into a loud snarl, her eyes dark with vitriol... had this black girl done something to inflict physical pain on her?  The leering law enforcement men in the background, the other white woman clucking her tongue; none of it made sense to me then.  I'm glad I didn't have to live through it - either as a black person, or a white one.

Can We Move Forward By Selectively Idolizing the Past?

Turns out, that evil episode in Little Rock back in 1957 served as a stepping stone upon which race relations in America made its way across a sea change in how blacks participate in modern, 21st Century life.  Things still aren't perfect, just as they aren't perfect in our economy, which, although vastly expanded from even its 1950's robustness, has been struggling for years to accommodate swings and trends in the buying patterns of consumers.  Healthcare, too, has become so complex, its costs have exploded, and we've yet to determine how the overwhelming majority of us can afford to pay for it.

At least the Cold War is over.  Or is it?  During the 1950's, Americans lived in increasing degrees of fear, a mindset that helped precipitate the vase military-industrial complex that the decade's signature president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned an otherwise cavalier country against.  While diplomatic relations with Russia and China may now be on a low boil, and as Communism has petered out virtually everyplace else - with bothersome last-gasps from North Korea and Cuba, the international politics of the Cold War may be history.  Meanwhile, however, our country is grappling with staggering responsibilities for all of that redundant weaponry whose nuclear components won't evaporate like political dogma.  Then there are the millions of private sector jobs created by a misguided patriotic zeal from Cold War arms race industrialists, and sustained today by hawkish advocates for unparalleled military superiority.

As Britain's Lord Acton wrote in 1887, "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Have we become so dependant on a taxpayer-funded military-industrial complex that we're like frogs placed in a pot of cold water?  As the heat from our military's demands on our Treasury gets turned up, we acclimate to the rising costs until we're boiled to death.  All in the cause of protecting ourselves more extensively than any other society in history.

Which, actually, is where this whole infatuation with the 1950's comes full circle.  "Sure, we had the Cold War then," we allow, "but look at how much else in our country was going so well."

I suspect that part of our national commitment to Eisenhower's dreaded military-industrial complex comes from a desire to live in a simpler time, when we knew who our enemies were, and what it took to at least keep them in checkmate.  The USSR had as much to lose from a nuclear holocaust as we did, and we both pretty much used the same playbook when it came to securing our respective nation's interests.

These days, our fiercest enemy isn't a state as much as it is an ideology.  An ideology with capricious splinter factions within it.  They don't want the same things we want.  They don't live like we do.  Our cultures have little in common.  In the face of such contentious unconventionality, it can be enticing to try and revert to the 1950's and somehow capture its mojo in a bottle, à la Back to the Future.  But not only can we not go back, it's really only in nostalgic retrospect - and only if you're Caucasian - that the 50's were idyllic.

Charles Dickens says it best in A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

With selective perception, we can still relish through nostalgia the good things our country experienced during the 1950's.

But not only can we not go back, how does it help our nation's current woes to try?

Twenty Years Later, I Can Still Hear It

The First World Trade Center Attack: Friday, February 26, 1993

I can still remember it.

I was at work, in an aging Art Deco building a couple of blocks south of the World Trade Center.  Suddenly:  A shudder, and a muffled explosion, jolting our office on the 25th floor.

Twenty years ago this morning.

My desk faced north, and it was as if a sonic boom had rolled our building backwards, and then forwards. Just for the briefest of moments.  I can still hear it.  In a city full of noise and distraction, this was utterly unique.

Our office's lights went out.  Down the hall, cables clanged in the elevator shafts, like somebody was trying to ring old church bells in a steeple.  Computers went dead.

It all happened so fast, we didn’t have time to be scared. Our desktops clicked and beeped back to life, florescent ceiling lights flickered back on, fax machines that had been in mid-transmission began squawking error messages, and alarm bells from the elevators started ringing.

And of course, a chorus of muttered expletives erupted from co-workers who, like me, did not welcome this disconcerting setback. It was lunchtime. It was also Friday, invoice day, and billables needed to go out the door. Crashed computers and jammed fax machines were even less tolerated than on a normal day.

As we rebooted our computers and somebody reset the fax machines, we wondered aloud at what had happened. Did something blow up in our building, a 30-story pre-war tower perched along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan? Maybe there was a massive wreck at the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which snaked by the entrance to our building? Nah, it was probably stupid Con-Ed’s fault, New York’s problem-prone power provider; one of their steam pipes probably blew.

And being New York City, where one worries little about what you can’t see, and even less about why it might be important, we went back to work. As I’ve said before, New York life is lived in inches. Your power's coming back on? Then get a move on!

So we were only marginally curious when the office manager in the next-door law firm came over, and invited us to come take a look out their north-facing windows.

“All this black smoke is coming out of the Trade Center garage,” she informed us.

Located four blocks south of the World Trade Center (WTC), our office building's north face gazed up West Street, straight towards the Twin Towers.

Sure enough, from the law firm's office, looking due north as the street below us curved slightly, we saw thick, sooty smoke billowing out of the entrance to the Trade Center's parking garage. Not just puffs of gray, but heavy, charcoal-colored plumes.

And true to the New Yorkness of the moment, cars continued to plow through the smoke as it blew across West Street. Pedestrians still plied the sidewalks and crosswalks, more concerned about dodging traffic than the smoke which must have been making their eyes water. We could hear sirens, though, and within moments, a couple of police cars rolled up the street.

They were the first of what we'd later learn would be a massive turnout of first responders to the first terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.

Lunch Brake

With a brownout imposed by Con-Ed across the Financial District taking away our computers, my co-workers and I decided to take an early lunch.  Maybe full power would be back in an hour or so.  Since it was a bitter, snowy day, they ordered lunch from a greasy diner down the block and had it delivered, but I wanted to see what was going on at the WTC.  I strolled up to the two-story Burger King on Liberty Street, across from the WTC, which is still in business.  Eerily enough, this same Burger King where I had lunch twenty years ago today would narrowly miss being destroyed on 9/11.  The police turned its ashen dining rooms into their temporary command post on that fateful day.

Liberty Street's Burger King after 9/11

Although the streets outside were choked with emergency vehicles by the time I arrived for lunch, everything seemed normal inside the Burger King, until after I started to eat.  I looked around the dining room, and at the next table, I noticed several young women huddled over hot teas and coffees. They had no coats on this frigid day, and their blouses were dingy gray. Their hair had fine soot on it, and their faces looked like they had been hastily washed, maybe in the Burger King's bathroom?

Turns out, they had been evacuated from one of the towers, with not even enough time to go and get their coats from a nearby closet. They had broken into a sweat while trudging down what seemed like miles of emergency stairs, they had frozen when hustling across the open plaza at the base of the towers, and they were coughing from all of the soot they’d inhaled both inside and outside the buildings.

Something really bad was taking place right across the street!

After lunch, and wishing the Damsels in Distress success in finding a way back to their homes in New Jersey, I still had some time before trying back at the office to see if our computers were working again.  I walked down to the Bankers Trust tower, a black steel skyscraper that, having been rechristened the Deutsche Bank building by 9/11, was irreparably damaged during the second attack on the WTC.

On this February afternoon, throngs of people had gathered on an outdoor mezzanine along that charmless bank headquarters, looking quietly to the Trade Center, their chilled faces marked by bewilderment and pensiveness.

I turned to follow their gaze.

Snow, Smoke, and Soot

And there I saw them. 

Long, shuffling lines of gray and black, some people wearing coats, others coatless, but all covered to varying degrees in soot. Coughing, but otherwise silent, without expression or vigor.

These were the evacuees from the Twin Towers, thousands of them. About 50,000 people worked in or visited the WTC daily. Take the entire population of Biloxi, or Ames, or Sheboygan, and funnel them out of two 110-story towers, four shorter buildings, and a shopping mall, one by one. And you have the miserable, sooty lines of evacuees that February Friday.

I was taken aback. Talking to the Damsels in Distress at Burger King, it hadn’t occurred to me that a massive evacuation was taking place at the WTC.  I still didn't realize that both towers had become two giant smokestacks.  Later, we would learn that police helicopters plucked over 100 people from the tower roofs that day, including a pregnant woman who gave birth soon after being rescued.

Evacuation can be a great equalizer. At least from skyscrapers. When you’re emptying such enormous buildings, executives, managers, secretaries, clerks, and custodians suddenly become one human mass facing the same predicament. There isn’t one emergency stairwell for million-dollar CEOs, and another one for hourly employees. It’s sheer physical fitness, not your job title, that spells the difference between getting out with enough energy to make it home, or just getting out.

Indeed, all ages, body types, and physical conditions were represented in the grim, sooty lines of WTC tenants shuffling out of the towers. Some were walking arm-in-arm for mutual support, some were almost being carried by others.

None were talking; many were coughing.

I vividly remember one tall woman with what we Texans call "big hair" that was dusted with soot. She was wearing a plush, knee-length mink coat – obviously having taken the time to retrieve her valuable fur before vacating her office – and still had on her high heels. After all, even in an emergency, some New Yorkers wouldn’t dare forgo their fashion sense. She walked towards me, patting the sleeves of her thick mink, and each time she did, soot puffed out of her coat.

Undaunted, or perhaps simply resigned to reality, she strode past me and into the throngs of people milling about emergency vehicles, on into the bizarre afternoon.

Try Again?

Part of the bomb crater in the WTC parking garage in 1993

By the end of that weekend, we would learn it wasn’t Con-Ed’s fault at all. Instead, Muslim terrorists had rented a yellow Ryder truck in New Jersey, loaded it with explosives, and detonated it in the WTC’s underground parking garage.

Apparently, their plan was to topple Tower One with their bomb, and that as it fell, Tower One would destroy Tower Two.

I remember our office staff laughing out loud when we heard on the radio days later that the FBI had closed the case. A couple of the terrorists, upon learning that their plan hadn't worked, reported the Ryder truck stolen, and went back to Ryder to claim their deposit, where the FBI was waiting for them. With idiots like that trying to blow up New York landmarks, we quickly assumed that while the city might be plagued with other crises in the future, we had little else to fear for the Twin Towers.

In fact, after the WTC was cleaned, repaired, remodeled, and reopened, I was standing in line in the lobby of Tower Two, waiting to get a photo identification badge that would give me open access to the complex, since I often ran errands for the company there. I remember chatting with a couple of other guys in line, also waiting for their badges, and we got to joking about the foiled destruction of the very building we were in.

Like typical civilians who mock government bureaucracy, we saw the I.D. procurement process as useless red tape meant to pacify building tenants who might be leery about moving back into the towers. Just another hoop to jump through; just a veneer of security to try and show that the Port Authority is serious about protecting their trophy property.

After all, nobody would be insane enough to attempt the destruction of the Twin Towers ever again!

I so wish we were right.
_____

(Condensed from four essays I'd previously written in memory of the six people who were killed on that tragic day.)

And a Child Shall Advise Them

It's one of those ubiquitous questions most enthusiastic grandparents ask.

"Can I tell you about my grandkids?"

Well, I don't have any grandkids, or any kids, for that matter, even though it sobers me to realize I'm probably now old enough for not only the latter, but the former as well.  So I'm gonna have to tell you about my neighbors' kids instead.  And specifically, their precocious, blond-haired son, who just turned the wise old age of seven last week.

Yes, seven.  His extreme youth is vital to this story.

This is the kid who, two summers ago, when he was five, corrected me by saying a cicada's shell is called an "exoskeleton."  I can still remember the look on his face, as if he was thinking, "You're an adult.  You should know this."  Which I did, but I didn't think HE did!

I keep telling that story to other neighbors who may not have yet heard it, and it always gets a good laugh.  Last fall, he overheard me.

"Are you telling that story again?!"  I couldn't tell if he was embarrassed, or trying to figure out if I was infringing upon some copyright he might hold on that anecdote.  Seriously - I wouldn't doubt he knows something about intellectual property rights.

Just before Christmas, a section of the wood part of the fence separating our two backyards had blown over - again - in high winds, and I was trying to fix it, cheaply, by myself.  And he was watching me, supervising the whole operation from his treehouse right next to the fence, even offering me the use of his "contraptions," if they'd help.

"I've got a ton of 'em," he explained of his contraptions.

At one point, things weren't working the way I'd expected them to, and I hung my head in a moment of frustration.  "Oh, dear..." I sighed to myself.

"Yes," my wise little neighbor offered sympathetically, "sometimes that's all you can say."

Then last evening, at dusk, I took advantage of our unseasonably pleasant weather to go outside and putter about the backyard for a few minutes. Up in his treehouse, my next door neighbor saw me, and greeted me.

"What are you doing?" he asked, watching me do nothing in particular.

"Oh, just goofing off," I replied. "It's what I do best."

Without missing a beat, he affirmed: "Well, if it's what you do best, it's what you should be doing!"

I started laughing so hard at his uncanny sophistry, I had to come inside for fear he would assume I was making fun of him.

Quite to the contrary!  I'm telling you - with a neighbor like him, I don't need grandkids, do I?!
_____

Hizzoner's Last Subway Ride

I took this photo in 1988 at New York's annual India Day parade.  Ed Koch, a Bronx-born Jew with no Indian blood in him at all,
owned the crowd, even the ones booing him and giving him a double-thumbs-down (see background).

hiz-ZON-er; a colloquial contraction of the words "his" and "honor," in reference to the mayor of New York City, sparsely used before and more widely developed during the three-term administration of former mayor Ed Koch, and now used for any of the city's mayors.


I'd already begun writing this essay yesterday, but when word came this morning of Hizzoner's passing at the ripe old age of 88 from congestive heart failure, I immediately decided to switch gears a little.

I didn't embrace all of Mayor Ed Koch's politics, but by many accounts, he was the most straight-shooting, unapologetically blunt, charmingly opinionated, and blatantly in love with his constituency as any politician can - and should - be.  Nobody can deny that Koch was one of America's rare big city mayors who's left his city profoundly improved for their investment in it.

It's easy to forget how truly remarkable a feat that represents, especially considering the times in which Koch served.  Big cities all across the country were in turmoil, but none more so than New York, having stared bankruptcy in the face, reeling from white flight, whipped by the steady exodus of corporate headquarters, struggling with unprecedented crime and death associated with drug abuse, and buckling under the disarray of its rapidly decaying infrastructure.

Then along came Koch, a gregarious bachelor of relatively modest means, who refused to run away from the city's problems, or his critics.  In fact, he embraced them.  He'd famously barge into a crowd of New Yorkers on the street and pump them with questions he expected them to answer on the spot about his results as mayor.  "How'm I doin'?" became his slogan, his performance review, and his give-it-to-me-straight-I-can-take-it feedback form.

How a Liberal Became New York's Conservator

Although a staunch Democrat - and a Greenwich Village liberal one at that - Koch didn't hold rigidly to any party line.  Indeed, in one of his mayoral campaigns, he ran as both a Democrat and a Republican, and crushed his main opponent, who was running, ironically, for the Unity party.  Koch resisted affirmative action, reasoning it was unfair to minority workers whose job performance was equal to or better than that of whites.  He supported the death penalty, and worked to reduce the welfare rolls, but engineered one of the biggest public housing programs in the city's history. A Jew more socially than theologically, he strongly criticized Jesse Jackson for his anti-semitism, even though doing so cost him political clout among New York's black voters.

Unfortunately, his last term in office was tainted by corruption among his staff.  His successful efforts at weeding out complacency in the city's welfare department caused civic leaders in minority neighborhoods to question his Democratic credentials.  Gay rights activists bitterly accused him of being a closet homosexual as he dragged his feet during the AIDS crisis.  When it came time for his fourth mayoral primary race, left-wingers and the city's blacks overwhelmingly switched their allegiance to David Dinkins, an elegant tennis aficionado who became New York's next mayor, and first black in that office.

I remember seeing Koch at an India Day parade in the late 1980's, after scandals in his administration had taken a hit on his popularity. Some people in the crowds lining Fifth Avenue were booing him, and in a photo I took (above), you can see somebody giving him a double-thumbs-down.  Still, Koch was soaking it all in, and, with his arms high in the air, waving at them like he was a victorious conqueror!  He even loved it when his constituents felt comfortable booing him.

Once he was no longer "Hizzoner," Koch became a partner in a Manhattan law firm, wrote movie reviews, taught some college classes, and replaced the retired Judge Wapner on two seasons of The Peoples Court.  Impolite journalists occasionally floated questions about his sexuality, but Koch, who would freely share his opinion on everything else, kept that part of his life fiercely hidden.  Several years ago, he announced he'd bought a burial plot in Washington Heights' Trinity Cemetery, Manhattan island's last remaining active graveyard, saying that when he died, "the thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me."

Mayor of Eight Million Stories in the Naked City

The New York I remember most is the New York of graffiti-splattered subways, trash piled high on the curbs, taxi cabs so dented they looked like yellowed wads of aluminum foil clattering down avenues, and pristine black Cadillacs prowling the seediest neighborhoods.  I remember the jarring juxtaposition of sleek steel skyscrapers next to rickety brick walk-ups, back before so much of Midtown and Downtown recovered its Fortune 100 mojo.

Friends called you up and let the phone ring just once so you'd know they'd gotten home safely from a dinner party.  It was a New York of Benzi boxes (for your car radio), Brownies (Department of Transportation officers in brown sedans chiding rubberneckers through bumper-to-bumper traffic), leaks in tunnels, rusty bridges, and putting on your jewelry after you got to the office.

Brownstones were what upwardly-mobile white people were selling for a pittance so they could escape to the bucolic suburbs.  Homeowners literally couldn't give away burned-out shells of row houses in Harlem.  Brooklyn was considered no-man's land, as were what's now the hip enclaves of SoHo, Chelsea, the East Village, and TriBeCa.

This was also the New York City of Ed Koch's mayoral tenure.  But it wasn't the city he wanted to leave to posterity, so he set in motion an approach that was equal parts haphazard, unrealistic, painful, conceited, expensive, and in-your-face for resuscitating the wounded warrior his hometown had become.

Being the irascibly belligerent place it's always been, perhaps New York City would have somehow managed to pick itself up from the brink of insolvency and reinvent itself into the wildly popular place it has once again become.  Perhaps if another person had been mayor instead of Koch, the Big Apple would have been able to reclaim its status as the world's capital in an even shorter period of time.  After all, Koch would have been the first person to tell you he wasn't perfect.

But Ed Koch is the person who won three consecutive elections during one of the most pivotal times in the city's history.  It was his love for his hometown, combined with his independent spirit and his plucky - some would say goofy - tenacity, that either egged on his detractors to prove their own worth, or championed his supporters to ignore naysayers and keep forging ahead towards the light at the end of the tunnel.  Even if it might turn out to be an oncoming subway.

Disagree with his politics if you must, and I do disagree with some of them, but Koch's ability to convince New Yorkers that they were exceptional and resilient speaks volumes to the impact one person's personality and charisma can have in turning around a sinking ship.  Granted, New York's renaissance isn't entirely due to Hizzoner, but if anybody else had done anything less than what he did, the city it seems everybody now wants to visit - if not live in - would be a far lesser place.

The Race to Replace?

Perhaps fittingly, then, the year in which Koch died is also a mayoral election year in New York, and it's shaping up to have some real fireworks that Koch would have probably relished.

First, you've got your left-wingers like Christine Quinn, a married lesbian, who worked her way up the non-profit ladder, and today exhibits a firm grasp on how New York's socially liberal apparatus runs.

Then there's a mish-mash of lesser liberals like John Liu, the city's comptroller, whose campaign has been caught up in corruption charges.  Bill DeBlasio, the city's public advocate, is a tall white guy married to a short black woman, whose son sports a head of hair - a tall, wide, round, stunning afro - the likes of which we haven't seen since the early Koch era.

Thanks to Rudy Giuliani, and now Michael Bloomberg, Republicans in the Big Apple feel comfortable in thinking they have some skin in this mayoral race yet again.  And it's not like they don't have at least two high-profile candidates that could put up strong numbers against any liberal opponent.

First is Joseph Lhota, who just resigned as chairman of the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority for his mayoral run, and who acquired significant name and facial recognition during and after Hurricane Sandy's flooding of the city's subways.

Then there's grocery store magnate John Catsimatidis, who earned his billions in the energy industry, but portrays himself as a folksy, hometown New York businessman trying to make a profit in the notoriously expensive and regulation-heavy city.  So far, he's the most unlikely person to win the race, considering the substantial girth of his that he proudly swaddles in cheap suits, his utter lack of political experience, and his penchant for schmoozing more with fellow Greeks at ethnic events than with the city's vainglorious power brokers.

Surprisingly, however, Catsimatidis is a licensed jet pilot, and his bleached-blond daughter is married to a grandson of the late President Nixon.

It's unknown who Koch would have ended up officially endorsing for this year's mayoral race, but my guess is it would probably have been Quinn, not so much for her liberal credentials, but because she likely has the most bona-fides for City Hall's extreme rough-and-tumble politics.

But I would not have been at all surprised if Koch gave Catsimatidis some consideration, at least if the Greek tycoon managed to squeak through the Republican primary.  Although Catsimatidis is a lot of things Koch never was - stupendously wealthy, married with kids, one of whom is hitched to a Republican icon, and - oh yeah - a Republican himself - Koch once supported New York's current billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, when he was still running as a Republican.  And Catsimatidis has the same affable bluster and chutzpah that endeared Koch to so many New Yorkers during those grim years a generation ago.

Indeed, no matter how unattractive or odd they may be, genuine people seem to bring out the best in New Yorkers, and that's what Koch was.  A genuine person who hid almost nothing.

That's why, even though he was a liberal, conservatives like me can still look back on the guy with a fair degree of admiration and respect.  If I was then the person I am today, I probably wouldn't have voted for him, at least in his first mayoral run.  But for the time, and the place, he proved himself to be somebody the city truly needed.  And nobody can deny him that legacy now.

If New York can possibly be epitomized by one person, I can't think of anybody more appropriate to be that person than Ed Koch.

"Ya done good, Yerroner."
_____