Carro Bomba En La Plaza Del Tiempo

Image Source: Lone Star Custom Builders

"No more New York," said Crysta Salinas. The 28-year-old Houston woman was stuck waiting in a deli until 2 a.m. because part of a Marriott hotel was evacuated because of the bomb.

It's too bad some Texans won't be visiting our great city again. Unfortunately, as is the general description of the social fabric of Texas, these folks are over-reliant on comfort, convenience, and complacency. Many Texans live one hundred years as if it were one day, where as many New Yorkers live one day as if it were one hundred years. I lived in Houston for 5 years, from age 10 to 15. I know a little bit about Texan culture.

Don't get me wrong, the Lone Star state will always have a tender place in my heart. Its dirt roads are where I learned to drive, at the beginning of a long road to NYC cabbie-hood. It's where my most beloved cousins, aunts, and uncles reside. It's where I migrated as a snowbird for a handful of weeks this past winter. It's where I'll be this upcoming December and January, along with the beautiful Rhode Islander I'm sweet on. She's set to have an entire section of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, to display her creations.

But no place, at least out of everywhere I've been, compares with my great city. Once a Gothamite, always a Gothamite. To get back on the subject of car bombs, I'm grateful that whoever loaded up and left that Pathfinder there didn't exactly have all the right ingredients for chaos. I admire the vigilant street vendors who realized the SUV was out of place, for having a sense of ownership and responsibility toward the public space around them. These are the true New Yorkers.

A proud salute to the cabdrivers who sat patiently through nightmarish jams caused by abrupt and massive street closures on Saturday night. We have many blessings to count. Let's be thankful the image below wasn't actualized. Let's be mindful of how good we have it, and how emotionally tiring it must be to live in cities like Baghdad, Kabul, Lebanese and Colombian cities in the 1980s, etc.

In this day and age, car bombs are primarily a Middle-Eastern experience. A curious and unknown fact though, is that they were first introduced to the region by the Stern Gang, a Zionist group trying to kick Britain out of Palestine in the 1940s. Did you also know that in 1920 an Italian member of the Galleanists left a horse-drawn wagon carrying explosives and shrapnel in the Financial District of Manhattan, killing 38 and wounding 400?

Photo Source: http://www.sabbah.biz