Pepper Spray and the NYPD/ Jim Dwyer/NY Times

To get the feel of the streets of New York the best route is often to search the Times website for Jim Dwyer to see what he has to report.  So it is with the now notorious pepper spraying of a group of young women at the Occupy Wall Street protests.  - GWC

by Jim Dwyer

As a leading expert in government management,Raymond W. Kelly did not disappoint on Wednesday when he was asked about the actions of a senior police commander who pepper-sprayed four protesters standing on a sidewalk, then walked away without a glance as they rolled on the ground, screaming in pain.

Stephen Chernin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Raymond W. Kelly

Related

• About New York: A Spray Like a Punch in the Face(September 28, 2011)

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Mr. Kelly, showing the deftness of a man who has served as police commissioner for 12 years, drop-kicked the matter of the commander, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, and his use of pepper spray as far and as fast as humanly possible.

The 9/11 Decade - Falling in Love With Death - Jim Dwyer - NYTimes.com

Remembering 9/11 is something I would rather not do, rather not recall my first vision - smoke just beginning to rise from the second tower to meet that of the first, the shock when the south tower collapsed, the realization of awful incalculable loss, the futility and loss of the rescuers, walking past firehouses displaying the names and photos of the men lost. Hard to know how to remember it when misguided revenge inflicted such suffering in Iraq, satisfied with the execution of Osama Bin Laden, the day is almost past. But as so often for me a writer with an Irishman's ear strikes the note I long for. - GWC

The 9/11 Decade - Falling in Love With Death - NYTimes.com:
by Jim Dwyer

William Butler Yeats wrote of an earlier, bloody era in "Meditations in Time of Civil War.”
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love

At vast cost in human capital, we carved 9/11 into the history of loss in other places, the enmities of a decade rising from the horrors of the day. But the majesty of that day does not belong to the chronicles of war. It lives in truths the size of atoms, nearly invisible and — one hopes — indestructible.

That morning, Raffaele Cava, age 80, was working on the 90th floor of the north tower. After the plane hit, no one could open the exits, so he went to another office and sat with Dianne DeFontes and Tirsa Moya. The hall floors were melting. Suddenly, two men in the stairwell pried open the door, walked in and ordered everyone to go. They were Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz, Port Authority employees who worked one flight down, and who took it on themselves to climb up and down 14 floors, getting scores of people out. They never left.
Tirsa Moya walked Raffaele Cava down all 90 floors.

You could ask no more of human beings.

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