A friend of mine in New York City sent me this tonight.
We have safely escaped the city this evening. By the time we left, around 8 pm, Manhattan was a virtual ghost town. Most of the residents and even the tourists had fled by this afternoon. The restaurants and outdoor cafes of our usually busy neighborhood were half-empty. We only saw police and some arrested demonstrators. We both had problems riding home from work via subway – the police had the trains bypass several stations – and had to walk home part of the way. There were police cars and ambulances with sirens racing past, and helicopters hovering above. They will probably be there all night.
Unfortunately, we’ll have to return Monday night as I have to teach on Tuesday.
It’s going to be a hellish week, but I still welcome the demonstrators. Reuters reports that most bystanders applauded these cyclists. Their headquarters is in our neighborhood, and we are familiar with them. Some run a local bike shop. This is what I love about NYC.
My reply:
I’m certainly certainly glad that there’s the dissent … and at the same time it seems all so hopelessly stupid and unevolved to me.
I remember having similar, but more immediate, thoughts and feelings this past April when I was in Paris. I had just left a nice breakfast with my ex-girlfriend Veronique and was walking to meet a guy I knew to have a coffee and a talk. It was about a half hour walk from the Place de la Bastille over to a cafe in Boulevard St. Germain, so involved going over to the Rive Gauche across a bridge. Just before the bridge, I got to a street corner and there were a bunch of police motor cycles that swooped in – they stationed themselves at all the street corners of the intersection and began directing traffic to ensure that there was no traffic on the main avenue.
I remembered that the Queen of England was in Paris for a couple of days for a couple of ceremonial actvities. I stopped there and waited, as did probably about fifty other people – pedestrians, shopkeepers, other tourists like me, etc. We waited for half an hour and then down on the avenues roared two motorcycles, followed by two more, and then a burgundy -coloured Bentley carrying the Queen and another woman. They passed by, within five yards of me.
I remember thinking how absurd I felt it was to disrupt so much of the normal activity for just one person, another human being like you and I, who had acquired such “status” just by being that particular combination of sperm-and-egg that landed her in the lineage of the Royal Family, and how anachronistic that seemed to me in our modern era.
Same thing here – a city brought to a standstill because of one unexceptional-in-so-many-ways person who just happens to have a father and grandfather who had lots and lots of money and connections, and so ended up being able to steal his status and, what’s worse, have so much power over so many people in the world.
It’s a fucking cartoon, and I don’t understand why “we the people” tolerate this any longer.
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