So we New Yorkers are a bad lot. We're accused of indifference to the human condition and an inability to choose our own leaders. We are being duped and don't even know it.
So what if we hold tight to our sense of space in a very dense city. We want to sit on the subway or bus and use the next seat for our bags pretending we don’t see the person standing over us may want to sit too. We want to hail a cab whenever and it better be air conditioned in the summer. We expect to walk for hours on end and never really have to talk to anyone. Wear red lipstick at noon, black in July and white shoes in February. It’s an inalienable right available to everyone. There maybe a Starbucks on every corner but some of us still search for that singular coffee place owned by that one person pursuing an idea for something different. Yet another person wants that diner coffee in the turquoise and white paper cup, lattes, soy milk ,grande and tall be gone.
In short we want it all and expect to find it if not around the block at least an Uber drive away. And all that may sound self involved and snobbish it’s true. We are maybe a strange lot living in a world within a world. We are also those who help the woman with the impossible stroller make it up the subway steps and the tourist asking where Shake Shack is even when we don’t know the neighborhood ourselves. We answer brusquely. Two blocks down. Two over. At the corner on the left. We love our city and love sharing it. It may not show when we are ready to jump ahead in line no matter who was there first. Diversity is our normal. And because it is we can be who we are even when we don’t even know who that is yet. Being the city of many it offers us the opportunity to be a ghost or a superstar. We can blend in or stick out. Sometimes even on the same day.
We choose to be here. In an election year when choice is the issue and politicians rave on about it and how diversity is our new blueprint there are still some who think the city is anything but. If diversity is the new blueprint it is one that has for the most part worked successfully here. It's a city always on the make, always changing. Yet at it's core it is a city that answers dreams or at least let's you dream them. And by the way we and our chosen leaders are doing just fine thank you.