Times Square - the Latest Evacuation

If you were walking on West 45^th Street today, May 7, 2010, at midday, it felt like any other New York City spring afternoon.

It was typically overcrowded, with people bustling much faster than seemingly necessary. With the Music Box, Booth Theater, and Shubert Alley approaching, thoughts emerge about the scene six hours or so away...the impossible-to-negotiate congestion, people walking in the street through Times Square because there's simply no chance to shoehorn a position on the sidewalk, the inevitable but frequent minor pedestrian collisions, the feeling that Bangkok is less crowded.

And then suddenly, everybody's walking the other way.

It is always amazing to me the mindset of New Yorkers. Should accused bomber Faisal Shahzad and his badly constructed non-detonating explosives-laden SUV been on everyone's mind? Yes, of course, and by all first-hand accounts, it was. But not necessarily top of mind. Had Saturday, May 1, turned out another way, with a more experienced, skilled mass murderer at the helm, today's reaction would surely have been different. It's not enough to say people have been hardened to terrorism, that they've grudgingly accepted it as part of their lives. But go on, we all do. Persevere, we all must.

As it turns out, it didn't take long for word to shoot around that an abandoned cooler had been determined as the culprit of this latest scare. People muttered about the necessity to be over-zealous in light of recent events, but were tacitly annoyed at the inconvenience caused by so common an article as a left-behind cooler. After all, hundreds of such items, one indicated, might be innocently lost or misplaced each day in a space the size of Manhattan. Are we going to suspend life each time we find one?

Ultimately, though, people were more reserved than you'd think with terrorism lurking ominously in the air. Of course, there were the precious few, who in times of strife seem like a good deal more, that began to display frayed nerve endings. But most simply re-routed their path toward an unblocked side street just far enough from the potential "blast zone." They'll catch up with the reports via their blackberries, cell phones, or notebook size laptops...no sense in running late unless there is an absolutely good reason.

Most people who live and work in and around New York City remember all too well the 9/11 trauma and aftermath, which was replete with false alarms and the panic they caused. I remember an evacuation from an office building in midtown a week later. Armed officers with rifles and war gear sprinted through the lobby in the general direction of trouble, we thought. The very sight of these men, who we deemed to have enough inside information to be urgent, caused a wave of chaos and fear in the building. People felt light-headed. After all, funerals were still taking place all over the metropolitan area.

Perhaps not so amazingly, we are not nearly as sensitive to riot gear as we once were. The threat, the menace, has found a comfortable niche inside all of us where it can be corralled, like a wild animal in a safari park.

As I heard one person declare, "I hope this calms down over the next couple of weeks...I've got Billy Eliot tickets."