The weekend I stopped in at Zuccotti (nee Liberty) Park in lower Manhattan for Occupy Wall Street, the weather was quite lovely. Not for the middle of October, or for Indian Summer, or for any other qualifying turn of phrase you might want to append to that. It was quite nice. Period.
The buzz in downtown a couple of weeks back, fueled by media morons who'd call a shark a 'fish' even as it bit them in half, was speculation on what the Occupy Together movement would do when it got cold and nasty. It did one, if not both, of those things over the weekend, and the people who said they'd be there until hell freezes over are still there.
They're wearing gloves and skates, but they're still there and the Capital of the World, with a few slightly frayed nerve endings, has made its peace with yet another wave of settlers. Since Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch, New Amsterdam and everything else it's ever been called, has rolled with the punches, taking the best of all that any immigrant wave has to offer, be it art, music, culture, politics and just added it to the pot and let the simmer just shimmer.
There's a reason why today when anyone, anywhere in the world says "New York" we think of the Empire State Building and not the Empire State Plaza. And why no place else on earth inspires the raptures and tributes associated with that plot, sometimes at the expense of the neighboring boroughs and environs.
It's in interesting contrast to where Oakland and San Francisco share a bay, but not a frame of mind about their guests. Instead of the NYPD doing all that fugeddaboutit shoving we outlanders think of , it's broken barricades and media opportunists as Oakland rumbles towards a called General Strike for tomorrow.
A call and a strike that will settle nothing either way. If it's successful, we'll argue about who said so and how they decided that, and the same arguments will be made on the other side of the ledger and meanwhile we'll have drifted another small stretch downstream and farther from the shore we were all working towards.
Instead, we keep pelting one another with invective and excrement and not always in that order or ratio as many of us parse half a quote, oblivious to the identity and motivations of the man who helped make it famous in the first place. Carl würde nicht amüsiert sein.
I wonder who we might have become by now had the Founders settled on one of their earlier capitals before The District was the choice. We could do worse than work it all out on the Streets of New York but I remain hopeful we very well may yet find a way to be the way.
-bill kenny
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