New York needs us strong

Radical Society, Jul 2002

born, cordell, stroffolino, and rosenblum on staying strong

"These are difficult times. But despite our losses, and despite our fears, there is much that New Yorkers can do to help ourselves recover and keep ourselves strong.

-New York Needs Us Strong Campaign

john born, copywriter. In defense of advertising, this odd little nugget is not advertising. Rather it's related to it as it's part of the public education campaign "New York needs us strong." This campaign was designed by the New York City Department of Health and is a component of a New York State Office of Mental Health disaster-recovery program, devoted to helping New Yorkers cope after September 11. So what is its purpose? I'm not really sure, but I am certain its intended audience is people who live in New York. This begs the question. Why do the words "New Yorkers" appear in the middle of a sentence where "we" would be a less awkward choice. Someone's confidence failed at a crucial point in the production campaign, and in advertising that someone is usually the one paying for the campaign, an entity known as "the client." The client's desires are fueled by one single, implacable fear: "What if they [an entity often known as 'the audience'] don't get it?" Second-guessing ultimately leads to second-rate communication. So, in a piece of writing about something experienced by the collective we of New York and directed at the collective we of New York - which is part of a public education campaign launched in New York ostensibly for us -"we" is nowhere to be found. If New York needs us strong, New York needs to have a little more confidence in us when it's talking to us.

doug cordell, author. A banal enough sentiment, seemingly devoid of almost any content whatever, sort of in the vein of those "Successories" products marketed to personnel departments for employee morale: posters, coffee mugs, and warm-up jackets emblazoned with stirring, often contradictory observations like, "Eagles don't fly in flocks," "There is no I in TEAM," and "If you see a man on the top of a mountain, he didn't just land there." But, like all New Age corporate-speak, the campaign's message is also a subtly coercive exhortation, one that betrays an EST-like contempt for weakness and "negative thinking." "These are difficult times," it concedes. Well, thank you very much. I was beginning to think it was me. "But...there is much that New Yorkers can do to...keep ourselves strong." In other words, don't dwell on it. We know how you like to complain about everything: Oh, the air smells toxic; Oh, my apartment is covered with pulverized asbestos; Oh, they're shredding the Constitution. Of course, it's not specified exactly what we can do to keep ourselves strong (though we are assured, "there is much"). Sit-ups, perhaps. Therapy, no doubt. Heavy drinking? It doesn't really matter. The point is: get past it. We've got a city to run, and money to make, and we can't do it with a lot of sniveling malcontents sitting around gumming up the works.

chris stroffolino, poet. Any individual or collective strength that crumbles in the face of losses and fears is ultimately not a strength. (To go further, I could say that in general what is called "weakness" is in many instances no weaker than what is called strength.) So why should we wish to see it recovered, especially when we keep in mind the etymological relationship between recovering and concealing? There is something worthwhile in admitting that we can become strong in spite of our fears, but what if we said it would be even better to be strong, not in spite of, but because of our fears? That the awareness of fears and losses and weakness is precisely our strength? That these "difficult times" present an opportunity not just for recovery or return to the life we previously "knew" before the bombing, but for something much healthier - and that from the ruins of this tragedy can come an awareness of the interrelatedness - not only of U.S. foreign policy with the climate that breeds anti-American terrorists, but also with the ways we may have been deluding ourselves that we all equally benefited from the business-as-usual attitude of the city. The most disturbing implication of this quote for me, then, is that it seems to want to smooth over the potentially revolutionary character of awareness of losses and fears, pain and suffering, felt by many who may have previously felt themselves invulnerable.

amalia rosenblum, psychologist, m.a. This statement mystifies me. There's something very elusive about it, in a distinctly American way. On the one hand, "difficult," "losses," "fears," "help," "recover," and "strong" are universally understood words. On the other hand, they are infinitely abstract and personal. The idea that one can be proactive about one's emotions draws on Ego psychology and the American adaptation of Freud. In this quote, one can hear resonance of the idea that the Ego can save us. Yet from a psychoanalytic perspective, many would be inclined to say that the Ego is a liar and a crook. If we use the Ego's words to understand trauma, we are - as the fool in the familiar joke - looking for what we lost under the streetlight instead of where we lost it.