Taking a Moment to Pause and Reflect 2023

Try to remember the kind of September

When life was slow and oh, so mellow.

Try to remember the kind of September

When grass was green and grain was yellow.

“Try to Remember,” from The Fantasticks.

Time passes. I find myself disliking the mantra “Never Forget,” because I’m more concerned about what we learned from remembering. If September 11, 2001, was a nightmare, we somehow came together on September 12, 2001, if my memory isn’t so hazy to recall the attempts to help each other.

Have we kept at it? Have we developed resilience and overcome hate and whatever else? Have we made a better world for everyone yet?

Or am I asking for too much with my entirely rhetorical questions? Well, yeah, I am asking for too much…

22 years ago, I was trying to figure out how to make any use of my last year in law school, and then that Tuesday happened, the horrors marring the perfect blue sky. I didn’t imagine the entirely different landscape that we’ve had since. I never imagined that all the crises and calamities we’d be through.

Photo I had taken some years ago, at the Brooklyn Promenade.

Photo of the WTC Memorial, from however many years ago now.

Another photo that I had taken at the Brooklyn Promenade from some many years ago.

In 2021, FC shared this over on Facebook, so I’m passing it along again: “Wake Me Up When September Ends” – Green Day (Cover by First to Eleven):

See here for last year’s post of September 11, 2022. I wish you all a peaceful and thoughtful day. Thanks again for being here. — ssw15

AAPI Heritage Month 2023

Somehow, May 2023 flew by so fast. Some stuff for consideration.

Per this May 2, 2023, Associated Press piece by Terry Tang: Mattel released an Anna May Wong doll for AAPI Heritage Month.

Eyewitness News’s CeFaan Kim reported on the story, “1st Asian American NYPD pilot shares journey of soaring through glass ceiling,” May 12, 2023 (https://abc7ny.com/nypd-asian-american-pilot-sgt-jenda-wu/13238431/) – someone who had been a lawyer before he became a police officer:

“‘As an attorney, my God, you bring your work home, your work like lives in your head over the weekend for weeks on end and months on end, [Sgt. Jenda] Wu said. ‘As a police officer, helping people in that way had a finality to it.'”

Wu’s not wrong about how being a lawyer means your brain’s stuck on work at perpetual times. But, it’s pretty cool that Wu didn’t give up the dream to be a pilot, even if it meant a winding path to get there. I hope that he didn’t give up that law license either; there really can’t be very many Asian American police officers with law licenses (after getting law degrees). Plus, since he’s reportedly with NYPD for a long time, it even looks like he has a pension out of this. Good for him.

Eyewitness News’s CeFaan Kim also reported on “Columbia students create card game in honor of AAPI month,” May 16, 2023: Master degree graduate students developing ways to teach AAPI history (https://abc7ny.com/aapi-card-game-columbia-university-masters-students/13255488/). Strategy and application of ideas in a fun way? Hey, why not?

I didn’t get to go to the 2nd annual AAPI Cultural Heritage Parade on May 21, 2023 (see a report on Eyewitness News here – https://abc7ny.com/aapi-cultural-heritage-parade-month-2023-pride/13278945/), but FC and a contingent our very own Asian American Bar Association of NY (AABANY) marched in the parade!

There’s a lot to unpack with the end of AAPI Heritage Month, which was also Mental Health Awareness Month. Consider: “‘Perfect storm’ of anti-Asian violence, bias in NY fuels mental health crisis” by Arya Sundaram, Gothamist, May 29, 2023 (https://gothamist.com/news/perfect-storm-of-anti-asian-violence-bias-in-ny-fuels-mental-health-crisis).

It’s hard for people of AAPI heritage to get mental health resources that they need, when there isn’t much funding and there’s not enough mental health providers who are culturally competent, let alone serving populations of Limited English Proficiency.

There’s also real need for interpreters for medical health treatment, not just mental health, as reported in this PBS NewsHour report, “For many Asian Americans, medical interpreters are a vital but scarce resource” by Ali Rogin, May 28, 2023 (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/for-many-asian-americans-medical-interpreters-are-a-vital-but-scarce-resource).

Frankly, it’s not just Asian immigrant populations, but also other Limited English Proficiency populations. We need to attract, train, and retain qualified interpreters for medical and legal needs; if only we’re willing to invest in this type of work.

Separate from AAPI Heritage Month 2023, it was the 140th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24, 2023. I think that we can enjoy this for the whole year!

Photo that I took in 2007? Sometime before 2012, for sure. There is no bad photo of the Brooklyn Bridge…!

10 Years since Hurricane/Super Storm Sandy and Other Stuff

Past:

10 years since Hurricane/Super Storm Sandy (10/29/12-10/30/12).

Time flies. It strikes me as both sad and almost trivial as to how I now think of Sandy as the storm that ruined Halloween 2012, when it was much more than just that. I don’t know if we as the American society – we as New Yorkers – have fully processed lessons from it. Apparently, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped delayed much efforts to keep rebuilding and becoming more resilient from such storms.

Otherwise, Facebook Memories reminded me of those eerie times when we had extensive subway system damage and other consequences.

See here for what I posted here on triscribe on the eve of Sandy. Here for FC’s posts on the local gas station and the return of the subway. Here for my post on the Days After Sandy. Here’s the link to my post on the One Year After Sandy. I really don’t know if any or all of the links within the posts are still valid, but you can let us know.

The dead tree edition of Sunday’s NY Daily News (October 30, 2022) reminded me of how we had half of Manhattan as an electrical dead zone during the immediate recovery from Sandy. (I’d link to an e-version of the NY Daily News piece, but it appears to be behind a paywall, and it’s not nearly as accessible as, say, the NY Times’s website.)

But, eerie recollections. I’m sure looking at my posts on Facebook and tumblr from that October 2012 period will remind me how much we had to rely on community in November 2012 to keep going.

Back then, as much as we were divided by partisanship, at least NJ’s own Chris Christie had the sense to cooperate with the Obama administration, and the Republican candidate of those days, Mitt Romney, wasn’t (and still isn’t) insane. We cancelled the NYC Marathon, but we couldn’t – and didn’t – cancel Election Day in 2012.

Past, Present, and Future?

See here for a link to the NY Times’s own look at an individual recovery from Sandy, and the myriad of questions of whether we’re prepared for the future. Considering the storms since Sandy and the worsening of climate change, I don’t think we’re close to figuring out anything. Certainly, our mass transit is still figuring this out, and the storm of September 2021 did not help at all.

See here for some illuminating posts over at Gothamist about: memories from Sandy and a photographic look at now and then. There are lots to think about regarding the past, the present, and the future. Let’s keep at making things better, somehow.

Well, More of the Present and Future:

Anyway, Halloween 2022 is on a Monday, which is weird, but it does give a whole Halloween weekend an excuse.

On Friday night, I saw a guy dressed as Cat in the Hat (how cute).

Saturday afternoon: I did see some people trying to dress as something or other, but the person dressed as the Halloween movie franchise’s Michael Myers was too freaky. He had a knife in his hand, and I hoped that it was a plastic cheap kind (it did look cheap). That was a freaky sight. Outside of Halloween, this person would have been stopped by the police. I hope… I think? (sorry, I took no photos…!).

Anyway, Election Day 2022 is coming. That’s scary in its own way. But, Vote! And, don’t vote stupidly… but perhaps it’s best that I leave it at that.