Oh, that?

New Yorkers are generally not people who take things in stride -- they honk like mad if someone impedes their travel on the roads, they are unabashed about calling someone out who cuts in line, forgets to put cheese on their sandwich or otherwise wrongs them, you hear them all over the city in the midst of impassioned cell phone conversations about some thing or other that cheesed them off.
In a city this densely populated, it seems you learn not speak up firmly and promptly if something chafes you, lest you get trampled upon.
That's the context that makes it so bizarre that New Yorkers seem so nonchalant about the prospect of terrorism.
Recently we had a fire drill at my office. Our department walked down 16 flights of stairs then blocked traffic with a few hundred other employees in a chaotic mess on the street. New York does not have the market locked up on fire drills -- we all did them in elementary school -- but there's something that is just unspoken about knowing you might be evacuating for reasons other than a garden variety electrical fire.
My office was completely empty on my first day -- not a single piece of paper in any filing cabinet, not one book on a shelf. What I did have was my standard issue respirator mask, which is issued to every employee. They're on desks all over the place, just sitting there in a box, with the same nonchalance as having a box of tissues.
Meanwhile, I've gotten involved in a committee that's called, innocuously enough, disaster recovery. The premise is to ensure that we have redundancy in our operations so that if our headquarters were ever, ahem, not around, the company could continue to function.
We're apparently late to this game. The financial services companies all have duplicate trading floors and such 50 or 100 miles outside the city so that if a bomb goes off in Manhattan, they can be up and running in a matter of minutes ... if they still have any traders left.
Is it just me, or doesn't it seem like if a bomb is dropped that wipes out a chunk of Manhattan, maybe society just might be in too much disarray to care whether they can short a stock that day or whether their weekly payment was on time to the AP?
Truth is disaster planning can also apply to much more mundane events like a power outage or a pipe bursting or computer system failing. That all makes sense.
But being blase about terrorism seems strange ... unless maybe you just happen to think that with two completed acts of terrorism on our soil in the last 11 years, maybe the danger is overhyped. Unless maybe you think that Americans take off their shoes and throw out their carry on lip gloss before getting on planes, but we get on subways, trains, bridges and highways without getting screened and we are willing to trade some security for ease of living. Unless you perhaps think that shopping malls and elementary schools and health clubs and hospitals are all places where lots of people are vulnerable every day, and we mostly do just fine.
I know that a lot of people think of New York as having a terrorist bullseye painted on it, but like many New Yorkers, I made a very conscious decision to live here anyway. If the terrorists really wanted to nuke NYC, maybe they would have already. Or maybe they will tomorrow. But we choose to live our lives the way we want to, and if that means dying young in New York instead of living to be 90 in North Dakota, well, that's just fine with me.