New York City is supposed to be a haven for people like me, and I am still getting my ass kicked by the same goons who were kicking my ass in high school. They probably want to kick my ass because they see what huge assholes we all are, with our cocaine and our cameras and our annoying music. I also wonder why it was that so many thousands of people wanted to stand for hours in the rain to get hot and filthy and have their pictures taken by strangers and probably get their asses kicked to boot. I was there too, and didn't want to leave despite any of these issues, and why? Because I am no better than anyone I despise and couldn't stop chasing the green monster. I degraded and debased myself for a few bucks, and yes, we all know where that money is going.
The whole thing is fucked... We are being choked and beaten and sexually assaulted, and all the while, my peers dance and snort cheap coke and photograph each other for the hundreth time. I scoff at it all now from atop my high horse, but I was there too, because I am poor and when people want to give me money to play my guitar, I can't ever say no.
Kids, we are blowing it. Everything they say about us is true.
~Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus, on their blog
I first noticed it in May, but didn't make much of it; three shots fired on Houston and A, which took out one of the windows at the Banco Popular and put more cops on the corner than I'd ever seen before. It seemed almost farcical at the time, like a couple rounds go off in what is now a nice neighborhood and the NYPD throws a parade. Look serious for the cameras, gents. Show the colors. City Hall has over 10,000 more armed men in the boroughs than the White House has in Afghanistan; what's putting forty or fifty on one corner?
But it is a big city, and what's one shooting? But I soon started to see a trend. People started beating up the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, and later that month, a twenty-six year old girl was beaten to death three blocks away. Summer came, and the wildings continued. In August, a kid got shot coming out of the bodega. A week later, Taz was killed over on Avenue A where he used to work.
I came to New York in time to see the end of the old East Village, the death by real estate that happened to the birthplace of punk. Remnants remain – the East Fourth Street Halfway House, the crustys in the park, the neighborhood gardens fought for by the squatters who reclaimed the land surrounded by what was once empty lots. But the old East Village, the place I first saw when Bryant's brother drove John and I here so he could buy heroin and left us with the car parked on 7th and B all those years ago has moved on. The scene moved to Williamsburg; the scenesters got married and moved to the West Village and Tribeca and Park Slope and the burbclaves beyond.
Maybe it has always been like this, the ugliness buried below the surface. Before I had the dog and was walking my neighborhood three times a day, I just didn't see it. But maybe there is something happening. Maybe something is growing that is as rotten as the half-finished condos lining Houston Street, their skeletons covered by long scraps of tarp hung by workers who have never been brought back to complete their job.
Mass shootings always bring out the cameras, and with them, the authors. We will talk forever about Virginia Tech, and Fort Hood, just like I have heard all about Charles Whitman killing fourteen people from a Texas clock tower a decade before I was born. What I remember and what never gets headlines and water coolers is the D.C. I grew up in, where in a town of less than 750,000 people there were 474 murders my freshman year of high school. They died in ones and twos. President Bush didn't go on television to talk about the tragedies of their deaths, just like Senator Schumer didn't go on television to talk about the tragedy of Taz's murder. No one puzzled in the op-ed pages about why he was killed; it wasn't much of a mystery, and mostly, no one cared very much. Just like no one cared vary much about all those bodies when I was a teenager.
And I can't shake the feeling that we know, largely, what the problems are. But like so many of our problems, we're not fixing them. For five years now, they've been repaving Houston Street. It never gets done; hell, over half the time, no one is working on it. The k-rails block off the same hole in the ground and traffic bottlenecks in the same place. We're either too lazy or too corrupt, and we can't bother to get anything done. Sixteen years since HillaryCare, and it is the same debate and the same bullshit. Seventeen years since Ross Perot and his fucking pie charts, and our deficit is worse than ever. Are we at the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day yet? Should I take the over on whether we'll get to that before we do anything about climate change?
I am so blessed. I live in the richest borough of the richest city in the richest country on earth. I am surrounded by so much plenty, so much knowledge and information and culture and power to do good.
And we're blowing it.