Skinny, soft-spoken pre-teen boys with artistic proclivities
often envision themselves in faraway places, real or imagined, reborn as
accepted versions of their best, truest selves. Believing they’ll somehow make
it to their desired shores allows them to carry forward. Hope is powerful fuel
for any escape attempt.
When I was growing up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, WI, my
faraway place to which I hoped to flee was New York. Anything that featured New
York was unassailable magic: the intro to Saturday
Night Live, the song “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson, the exterior shots
in Ghostbusters. The Midwestern suburbs
where I spent my youth felt like endless plateaus of wearisome expansion devoid
of expression—beige graveyards for the living. I imagined New York to be a spring
of life: endless rows of buildings reaching skyward, subways forever rumbling
below, and all of the city’s occupants clawing their way toward greatness at
the center of the world.
My parents instilled in me a classic Midwestern, “small ‘r’
Republican” work ethic and belief in personal responsibility. While other kids
were saving money for a car, I was working as a cook—occasionally full time—to
pay my private high school tuition. I then put myself through college. Upon
graduation, I moved to New York. My first year was typical of new
twenty-something transplants with Bachelors degrees and parents without the
financial means to help subsidize the adventure: I lived with two other people
in a tiny apartment (ours had no common living space), which was over-priced
and in a relatively undesirable location. We usually had no money by the end of
the month, so until payday we survived on dollar hotdogs and very cheap pizza
without toppings. However, we were surrounded by discovery and history. Every
day I walked through Grand Central Station; every day I heard someone speaking
a language I didn’t speak, or I noticed someone reading a newspaper in a
language I didn’t understand; every day I travelled underground, sandwiched
between people who were poorer than I’ve ever been and richer than I will ever
be. It was beautiful and it was brutal.
For many, the brutality of the city eventually overpowers
the beauty. The pace is too fast, the competition is too fierce, and the
literal cost is too high. After a year or two or three, the grind becomes too
much and they move away. New York is many things, but it is not sympathetic. An
early mentor of mine once said, “To succeed in New York means surviving New
York.”
I eventually moved to Staten Island to a cheap apartment I
could afford on my own. For almost a year, I took the Staten Island Ferry to
and from work every day. I would sit outside so I could watch the Manhattan skyline
advance on approach and recede on departure. One morning as the Ferry was
approaching Manhattan, I was sitting against one of the poles on the front of
the Ferry, reading the latest issue of The
Nation, and I heard a pop. I stood up and saw that the North Tower of the
World Trade Center was on fire. Black smoke billowed upward in giant plumes, and
I imagined those dark clouds carrying hundreds of souls to heaven. I knew the
Towers had been attacked before, but why would terrorists put a bomb near the
top of the tower? A gas explosion seemed like the most logical possibility. The
Ferry continued to drift toward Manhattan, and I found myself surrounded by
people looking up at the Towers in silence. The woman next to me was clutching
something attached to the end of a thin gold necklace. I assumed it was a
crucifix, but I didn’t ask. After we docked, everyone spilled out of the Ferry
just like every other day, except after leaving the Whitehall Terminal and
scattering to wherever we were headed next, we walked through a mass of people
screaming into their phones over the sounds of sirens from police cars and fire
trucks. I kept my head down and walked to the subway. Best to stay out of the
way and let the professionals do their jobs. I ducked into the subway station
and got on a train. A few minutes after we left the station, the second plane
struck the South Tower.
The days that followed 9/11 were ones of intense emotion: anger,
grief, confusion. And there was the fear that more attacks were imminent. We
became acquainted with new terminology, such as “dirty bombs,” and there was talk
about possible large-scale chemical or nuclear attacks. Many people spoke
openly about picking up and leaving.
New York had always been my dream. I had worked constantly
for almost a decade of my young life simply for the chance to make a home for
myself there, to be a speck in its mythology; and even if I was never to
contribute something significant to its greatness, then at least I’d be there to
witness the greatness that others contributed. New York was my safe harbor,
where a freak among freaks was normal, instead of Midwestern suburbia where a
freak among normals was freakish. New York was my spring of life, and suddenly
it felt like a tomb whose lid was closing.
A few weeks later, I packed up my clothes and the few pieces
of second-hand, third-rate furniture I had, and I moved. But rather than
retreat from the city, I moved closer to it. I found a little apartment in Park
Slope, Brooklyn, the neighborhood I have called home ever since. If there was
to be another attack, one more massive than the last, I wanted to be closer so
I could help its people or at least die with them. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t
leave New York; I couldn’t leave it. For all its flaws, I loved it too much to
let it go.
When he announced his recent Muslim ban, President Trump
said, “We will never forget the lessons of 9/11 . . .” I for one never did.
I will never forget the softening of a city that had
previously felt so callous, the kindness people showed one another, and the immense
gratitude we felt for the first responders. I will never forget how the whole
world, including Muslim-majority countries, mourned with us. I will never
forget how my boss’s daughter, whom I barely knew, let me sleep on her couch
the night of the attack because I couldn’t get home and I had nowhere else to
go. I will never forget how politicians from both sides of the aisle spoke of
unity and the need to not condemn an entire people, an entire faith, for the horrific
acts of a perverted few. I will never forget that we held together and bound
our wounds and continued forward. I will never forget that New York, the
gateway to America, remained open.
When he announced the Muslim ban, President Trump slammed
that gateway, and, in so doing, he tore American families apart, he kept people
from receiving life-saving surgery, and he punished those who had played by the
rules—people who had spent years being vetted in order to start their new lives
here. With his ban, Donald Trump, a New Yorker, ripped open the wound those
nineteen hijackers inflicted, exposing America’s worst exclusionary instincts. By
weaponizing fear, he attempted to finish what the terrorists started.
Those of us who move to New York often move with nothing
other than our wits and our determination. We live in cramped, expensive, crappy
spaces; and if we’re lucky and we work our fingers to the bone for many years,
we’re able to afford a cramped, expensive space that isn’t as crappy. We move
here to find belonging. We move here to carve out a future in a city with a
rich American legacy. We work ever-increasing hours for less and less
money—just like everyone else in America—amidst skyrocketing prices simply for
the honor of calling this city home. Yet we’re tarred as “coastal elites” (whatever
that means) by the same powerful people who invoke “the tragedy of 9/11” to
enact discriminatory policies, such as the Muslim ban, that most New Yorkers
loathe and that puts our city in greater danger by acting as a recruitment tool
for terrorist groups.
Donald Trump is the embodiment of New York’s brutality: its materialism,
casual apathy, and narcissistic tendencies. If President Trump is a physical
manifestation of New York’s brutality, New York’s protesters, activists, and
their supporters represent its beauty: its unrelenting commitment to the idea that
all should be welcomed into the city’s embrace and its fearless defense of all
of New York’s people, regardless of immigration status, creed, color, sex,
orientation, or socio-economic status.
My mentor was right: to succeed in New York means surviving
New York. And no one can do that alone—not in New York, not anywhere. Not
anymore.
