I was first turned on to the music of Bruce Cockburn by a Canadian roommate in college who functioned as a cultural ambassador for all things Canadian (he also introduce me to Doug and the Slugs, Natalie McMasters, and Moxy Fruvous).
Bruce Cockburn is pretty out-there left wing, further than I am, but his music and lyrics have always appealed to me. One lyric, however, has always grated:
Let's hear a laugh for the man of the world
Who thinks he can make things work
Tried to build the New Jerusalem
And ended up with New York
more. . .
It's not hard to guess from my moniker that I am, in fact, from New York. New Yorkers are always willing to share our own opinions of what's wrong with the city, but we generally don't take kindly to criticism of our city from outsiders. Mr. Cockburn's implied criticism of New York has always rankled.
The "New Jerusalem" is a slippery sort of concept. Probably everyone reads his or her own ideas of the ideal society into it. For my part, and I'm guessing also to some extent to Bruce Cockburn, it signifies a state where all people live together in peace.
And, if you're really looking for the New Jerusalem, you could do a heck of a lot worse than New York.
I'm a Jew with predominantly black neighbors. We go to the Christmas tree lighting in the little pocket park across the street from us every year where my next door neighbor, an AME minister, often says the blessing. At our Hanukkah parties we light the candles and all the kids, black, white, Jewish, and hispanic dance to Dayenu. Most years we go out to Brooklyn for a traditional carolling Wasail through the streets.
And the most popular trick or treating stop in our neighborhood is the house of two guys who transform the entire first floor of their brownstone into a haunted house, or a graveyard, or a hidden treasure crypt, using two or three live actors playing mummies and ghouls. Children line up and go through in groups of ten or twenty. At 43, I'm old enough to know that the spectacle of parents urging their children into the house of two gay men with the promise of candy means that redemption is possible for the sins of society.
In my daughter's school, where there are black, brown, and white children born in New York as well as immigrants from Africa, Peru, Panama, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Japan, the Middle East, and all over the United States, our school-wide sing along last week was a celebration of Rosa Parks -- the kids already knew all about her from having grown up with the song:
If you miss me at the back of the bus
And can't find me nowhere
Come on up to the front of the bus
I'll be riding up there.
If you miss me at the Mississippi River
And can't find me nowhere
Come on down to the swimming pool
I'll be swimming right there.
And then the retired granddad of one of my daughter's classmates, who volunteers almost his entire week in the classroom, can tell the kids about his experiences sneaking into segregated swimming pools in West Virginia in the fifties. Just this last week, several Mexican mothers brought the Dia de los Muertos into the classroom, two weeks before that it was my wife who celebrated Rosh Hashonna.
I get my coffee in the morning from an Arab deli on the corner, or sometimes from a Dominican or Cuban place. This is a city where twice in the last five years (on 9/11 and a two years later in the blackout) I had to hitchike on major Avenues without having to wait more than a few minutes in either case.
Listen, is New York perfect? No place is. Bad stuff happens here, as it does everywhere. Still, our local NPR affiliate, WNYC, originates a show called The Next Big Thing which begins with this clip from a WNYC broadcast from the thirties or fourties: "New York's own station, WNYC, in the city where more than seven million people live in peace and enjoy the benefits of democracy."
Really, is that such a bad definition of the New Jerusalem?