yes, yes, i know, too many updates today.
this’ll be the last one. i promise. unless something else inane pops into my head that i feel compelled to share with the world…
so today i went for a walk and decided to drown my sins in a bag of veggie-booty and the new yorker.
so i sat and ate my veggie-booty and read my new yorker and drank my fresh samanthas (oh, by the way, if you look up ‘downtown new york vegan cliche’ in the dictionary there’s a big color picture of me looking smug) and then kept on walking. and i was in a haze. a numb, soul-shattered haze. but it felt good to be walking, so i just strolled around looking at other new yorkers in their numb, soul-shattered hazes.
and then i saw a rather angry looking woman in a shirt that said ‘new york fuckin city’ and i just started laughing. she looked so sour and like such a new yorker. and in that minute i was so proud to live here.
sounds strange, i know.
but i have a feeling that people who live in new york or who have visited will understand, somehow.
and i realized that new yorkers are responding to this tragedy in many ways. some with sadness, some with introspection, some with hedonism, some with gallows-humour.
but this woman just looked annoyed. annoyed that history and politics and insane terrorists had dared to interrupt her week. and for some reason her toughness and her annoyance were really refreshing.
for one thing that new yorkers have mastered is the art of insulting someone and making them feeling foolish for ever bothering them. a true new yorker would never scream at someone who annoyed them or was bothering them, they’d just give them a dismissive wave of the hand and say, ‘oh, fuck you’ as if the person annoying or bothering them was just completely beneath their contempt. which, if you’ll forgive me for saying, the terrorists are. new york is an international city. there are no fundamentalists here, or if there are they’re really frustrated.
new york is a city of great tolerance and acceptance. where else can you see drag queens buying green tea from islamic deli owners who are talking about sports scores with vietnamese cab drivers?
new york is diversity incarnate. sure, people get annoyed with each other here. but there is such an undercurrent of civility and acceptance in new york city that it makes perfect sense that the terrorists decided to attack us here, for civility and acceptance and diversity and tolerance are anaethma to fundamentalists.
of course there are exceptions to this civility and acceptance, but they’re a lot more rare than you’d imagine. just ride the subway on a sunday night from manhattan to brooklyn. you’ll see people from every country and every gender (there are more than two, you know) and every religion and every orientation riding quietly and civilly all packed in next to each other.
new york is the least fundamentalist city in the world. there are no majorities here. everyone’s basically a minority in new york city. it’s not a christian city. it’s not an islamic city. it’s not a jewish or hindu or sufi or sikh or zoroastrian or etc city. it’s an international city that’s founded upon the priniciples of tolerance and acceptance. ok, my lighthearted little update about the woman in the ‘new york fuckin city’ t-shirt has gotten a little bit long, so i’ll stop writing and go and read my book before i go to sleep. i love new york. it’s the city of my birth and it’s where i live and it’s where i eat and where i listen to the radio (hot97, thank you very much).
and unless i’m mistaken, new york also has the largest population of muslims in the united states.
so, mr. annoying terrorist, if you attack new york, in addition to attacking innocent people (which the q’uaran doesn’t seem to hold in very high regard) you’re attacking your own.
-moby