The way we thought we were

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Almost all of the ground zero workers I talked to after the attack said our lives would be different from now on. Nobody really knew how, but they were sure it was true. As I write this more than two months later, I'm sitting in a library in a Boston suburb, on a day in which the only conversation I've had with a stranger was when a young guy from a group home showed me a picture of Helen Hunt and said, "She's cute." Our lives different? I'm wondering what I was thinking when I believed them.

Immediately following the attack, after a few days in lower Manhattan, it was easy to believe that everything had changed. A new country seemed to have opened up, one where people cared about each other and said hello and looked each other in the eye. We didn't know where the hell we were, but we knew we had come to this place together.

I'd driven from Boston to New York on Sept. 13 to see how I could help. I stayed on friends' couches in Manhattan, then rented a room for $100 a week in a Bedford-Stuyvesant slum. I started making plans to move to New York. I did not want to leave.

Confessions of a Florida poll worker

Sat, 11 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000

I couldn't believe no one was watching over us. I paused from separating the ballots, a Bush vote in my right hand and a "secrecy envelope" in my left, and looked around the church auditorium to make sure. My head was wobbly from 14 hours of work, with only a couple of 10-minute breaks. Yes, the inspectors were gone. It was 7:30 p.m., half an hour after the polls had closed, and the only one watching over us, besides each other, was the clerk, who was frantically occupied with straightening up a mess on a nearby table.

It would have been so easy to trash a couple of hundred Bush votes. I was already making two stacks of ballots, just to keep the piles neat. I was already glancing at each ballot to see who was doing better, and to find quirks, like the person who voted for both Bush and Gore, or for Gore and Nader, or for four presidential candidates, or the one who wrote in Bill Clinton for Congress.

I could have just made a pile each for Gore and Bush. I could then have put a stack of envelopes on top of the Bush pile and picked it up and stood up, as if I had a question for the clerk, then slipped out the kitchen door, about 10 feet away, and into my car and tossed them in the trunk. It was a pleasant fantasy, just a little less fleeting than the one I'd had earlier in the day in which I clobbered one of the clerks with a collapsible chair.

Salon.com > Brendan Cooney

The way we thought we were

Confessions of a Florida poll worker