walking on a dream

Election night and I want to regale you about the New York of my childhood, the covert conservatism and the ways it snuck into my psyche, like a chatty taxi driver on the midnight ride home from the airport. It always seems to shock those who are not from here – who ask how many years they’ll have to pay exorbitant rents before they can be considered a real New Yorker, as if there is an inefficient bureau at city hall bestowing Knicks fandom and the correct way to pronounce “cawfee” – that the city whose subway literally came to a standstill because the governor and mayor were feuding has never led by progressive example. I find local politics here endlessly fascinating; the light levels of corruption, nepotism, and red tape and the ways in ways in which they collide with the unrelenting challenge of ordering a city whose chaos is essential to its nature. To love New York, to live in New York, is to understand its flaws. To understand that our policy is made by those who court Prospect Heights progressives and Borough Park Hasidim and Staten Island cops with the same breath. That those who have dared to dream big enough have been disorganized, or stymied, by Wall Street and the money and ‘masters of the universe’ who reek off of it like baking garbage on sidewalks in the summer, by the impossibility of getting nine million people to fall in line on anything, by the government in Albany and in Washington and everywhere else that is not here.

As I’ve no doubt gushed about to you at some point in the past few months, Zohran Mamdani and I went to high school together, which means that he felt the same elation that shook the staid tile building when Obama got elected. That he bought dollar cup noodles from the truck parked on Paul Avenue and befriended first-generation immigrant kids who bussed in two hours from deep deep Queens. That he saw one of the best high schools in the city, located in a borough that is over 75% percent Black and Hispanic, serve only 8% of that population. He has seen the way this city marries adversity and hope and striving in ways that are both tantalizing and profoundly unjust. Those who have managed to sink their talons into the concrete see it as their right to rule it, at the direct expense of those who have not yet found their footing.

Power manufactures scarcity to sustain itself. We have spent our entire lives being told by our parents generation that the world we want is not possible, not feasible, not practical. And to those who hoard wealth and power, that is true. Michael Bloomberg dropped eight million dollars on this primary rather than see his taxes increase. The rich will spend money when it protects their interests without regard to everyone else’s. After growing up in Bloomberg’s New York, I let my high school socialist streak be beaten back by those who did not believe in radical social change, and then saw those same moderates lose all of our hard won incremental progress to fascists who curb stomped our rights in a day. The American electorate is adopting the fervent, cacophonous irrationality of New York’s heartbeat. The right and the left can agree that the center has failed us, and cannot hold. The country will either be remade in the image of the old or the image of the young, and I am not ready to cede more decades of my life waiting for those enjoying their Tribeca lofts and Hamptons homes to see the sidewalks as part of this city as well.

The joke goes, “what radicalized you?”. It’s not funny. I watched the mere idea of universal basic income be laughed off of a primary stage and then saw no-strings-attached checks be issued weeks later when the pandemic hit. Democratic mayors pass austerity budgets and we told that we cannot afford to pay for subway repairs or libraries or schools while the police budget grow every year and offshore billionaires buy new build apartments that sit empty and are called investments. Everything that challenges the status quo is impossible until the status quo is punctured; the twenty first century, for better or worse, belongs to the disruptors.

I’m tired of being told that the left must yield to the center to win. I want to raise my children in this city so that they can see where my great-grandfather’s paper goods store was on Orchard Street and know that their history is here, a part of this melting pot. I want to send them to well resourced public schools, like kids in the suburbs. I want reliable public transit and I want those who suffer in our subways to find the help they need. I want problems to be solved for everyone, not just for me. I want to dream, ripely and fully, and not have to temper that dream.