It Happens in My Town

What is happening here in New York is an unmitigated shame.

Crazed crowds of people are drunk with impunity. They demand that people of the city, one of the most tolerant places on Earth, accept responsibility for sins real and imagined. This crowd methodically destroys what it did not create. It strips the city bare of its international appeal, and that unbound care-free charm. Fear is signing a long-term lease in this town. Feel the fear for your own life and honor, for being suspected of racism. A casual sidelong glance may cost you. Your business may be destroyed.

I live here most of my life and can’t comprehend where the hatred is coming from. It is not coming for New York’s white working population. Quite the opposite. Our pathetic Democratic politicians are afraid to lose their own electorate. They are playing games of tolerance and restrain. They should have told the nasty crowds to go home. Their demands were heard, time to clear the street. Instead they let the young gangs to slash and burn. And loot.

Please don’t tell me this is normal. There can be no excuse to this. This ain’t democracy, this is a riot. Someone’s riot. I was never a conspiracies supporter, but where did all these sufferers come from? They supposedly suffered from racism at the hands of the city government. This simply isn’t possible. Etched in my mind, now and forever – ‘young progressive crowd’ is a bunch of scoundrels looting stores and burning police vehicles. With pathetic police trying to chase the thieves here and there. They can’t protect us.

There is no command to restore the order here. I don’t call for shooting the looters, but these streets belong to all of us. Not to the windows-busting scum, who does it just for fun. I can’t forget the police commissioner hugging the demonstrations. Just so there is no blood spilled on his watch. What a darn shame.

Everyone is waiting for something. Instead of real action we get a curfew instead, just for few days (NB – it was extended for a much longer period). I think they are afraid of a civil war, here and around the country. And this is New York, the city I know and love, my home. I stopped recognizing it, at all. It became a play space for a crowd not enamored with the ideals of equality and fraternity. They are drunk with permissiveness permeating the air. They can do anything. These people don’t give rat’s ass if they are destroying the town they live, work and rest in. No one cares what would come later or even if the ‘later’ would come at all. Do you want to call this a ‘peaceful protest’? I certainly don’t. It will take a long time for things to go back to normal, when the stores open up and life returns. Some new geological period will begin. It would offer new political and daily order of things. But it may takes years

Stinging shame. I’m engulfed by pain.

The following text was recorded in New York, in early June, 2020