Welcome to Des Moines! Now Get Out!
New York City was everything I thought it would be! Empty. Post-Apocalyptic. The Sheep-Like people walking around waiting to get hit with an electronic shepherd’s staff for not practicing social distancing properly and wearing the useless masks.
I’m here in New York City, the dental appliance repaired. Collected the mail and packages for me and our neighbors who are hunkered down in Pennsylvania. Couldn’t wait to get out of the city fast enough.
If you are going to put up with the noise, expense, and crowds of New York City, you get the rewards. That’s the deal. Spend too much in restaurants. The close comfort of your friends. Go to the Met. See first run movies. Complain about tourists.
You put up with the grief the city inflicts, because the rewards are like no other place on the planet.
Until now.
The unilateral change of the city’s nickname (One of many) by Yours truly stands. New York is The City That Used To Know How. When you elect a schlub like Bill de Blasio, this is what you get.
When we lived here in the 80s, Ed Koch filled the role of the self-involved, do-nothing narcissist with his annoying question, “How’m I doin’?”
Gee, Ed, you’re not DOING a darned thing.
Same to you Bill de Blasio.
But lastly, same to you general population of New York City.
Maybe, it’s the generational turnover from The Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers to Millennials. Perhaps it’s easier to stand in front of the mirror and say, “Oh, I give up.”
Yes, it is EASIER, but you don’t move to New York City for EASY. You move to New York City because it’s hard. Because it’s harder than any other place in the world to be successful.
It’s not the hardest place to live. I have to assume a pavement dweller in Calcutta might be having a rougher go of it.
So why am I in Connecticut after only two years in The Big Apple?
Because New York City is not New York City. If the voting population of that town doesn’t find themselves a Giuliani somewhere, it’s going to be a long, slow, bureaucratic-laden slog back to being The City That Knows How.
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