I really don't think so. I mean, as I've already told you, I was very surprised at how the day just came and went here. Aside from the requisite headlines, I honestly did not hear one single person reference it in the least (of course, Hanna Roman '06, who lives down the street and is a native New Yorker, did tell me today that she was sick of the anniversary being fetishized). At one point my roommate asked me what the date was, and I said "September 11" with this kind of "Um, duh" tone, expecting him to say "Oh right, of course" but he just said "Thank you" and kept working.
And you can't really draw a line for "New Yorker." What about people who live in the city but were vacationing that day, or tourists from, say, New Mexico who were visiting New York for the first time in their lives? (That would actually be an interesting group to look at--the tourists who were there that day). Everyone would have a radically different experience. New Yorkers certainly felt it more deeply than others did, but any attempt at trying to break something this massive and publicly-consumed into degrees of "participation" would be pretty fruitless.
Well, that was a less than cohesive post, but short answer: No.
Bah! I just realized that in editing my comment down to make it short enough for your comments I deleted the part that tied it all together-- I don't remember exactly what I said, but basically I think the reason that New Yorkers get so upset when people across the country make a big deal about September 11 (from my vantage point of being in Texas when it happened, Texas and Iowa for the first four anniversaries, and now in New York for the fifth) is that they all seem to be recognizing the holiday very quietly and solemnly... and in Texas, for example, people just put their flags everywhere and wear yellow ribbons, and I think it it strikes New Yorkers as disrespectful or at the very least ridiculous because they (non-New Yorkers) weren't actually there and didn't have as visceral a feeling as having their lives threatened... but am I going to tell some of the people I knew from Texas who were extremely upset over September 11 that their grief is not valid because they weren't there? Of course not.
And you can't really draw a line for "New Yorker." What about people who live in the city but were vacationing that day, or tourists from, say, New Mexico who were visiting New York for the first time in their lives? (That would actually be an interesting group to look at--the tourists who were there that day). Everyone would have a radically different experience. New Yorkers certainly felt it more deeply than others did, but any attempt at trying to break something this massive and publicly-consumed into degrees of "participation" would be pretty fruitless.
Well, that was a less than cohesive post, but short answer: No.
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