2/22/17

New York Dreams and the Trump Reality

Trump poster
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.

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