If you have lived in New York long enough, the City will come up with crimes and incidents every decade or so that feel like a new low, in a town always teetering between redemption and perdition.
A human being was murdered on a New York City subway Monday afternoon by a 24 year-old former Marine - who somehow thought it was within his rights to apply a chokehold, which amounted to deadly force, against a 30 year-old black man who had committed no crime.
The victim’s name was Jordan Neely; I have seen his Michael Jackson-dancing routines on NYC subway platforms and in Times Square myself.
He was a fixture in the subway stations for years.
One of the many performers and characters who make New York City special in the first place.
His suffering and mental instability was met with a sense of lethal entitlement from a stranger who had no idea who he was: Neely, an exasperated man, publicly exclaiming he was hungry and desperate and obviously in the throes of mental anguish, was killed by a stranger while others filmed it.
The ‘Central Park Five’, Bernie Goetz and Amadou Diallo are all names that are synonymous with situations that have polarized the city in the past.
Donald Trump famously called for the execution of the young Black and Latino men later exonerated in the highly charged, Central Park rape case.
He took out a full page ad in the New York Times to make his racist case for vengeance, though in reality, he himself was more of a sexual predator and threat to the public than the five accused youths from Harlem.
Bernie Goetz shot four of his fellow subway passengers in 1984 - all young Black men who he felt were trying to rob him - and received a shocking amount of support from the sort of New Yorkers drawn to the NY Post.
The same folks who would make Rudy Giuliani mayor a decade later with his ‘war on crime,’ which was essentially a promise to white New Yorkers that he would lock up as many minorities as possible in the interest of ‘cleaning up the city’.
His ‘stop and frisk’ policies amounted to harassment and further institutionalized an ‘us vs. them’ mentality in policing.
For a time he became wildly popular among a certain demographic, especially those that lived in the mostly white suburbs that surrounded the city.
He was a fantastic mayor (sarcasm) if you lived on Long Island, or Rockland County - and the City to you was a place you visited a few times a year with the kids and didn’t want to deal with ‘Squeegee Men’.
One of whom was shot point blank by an off-duty NYPD officer for soaping up his car windshield - and the mayor fielding questions full of outrage by the press - responded with an aspersion of ‘let’s not forget who we’re talking about here’ when referring to the Black victim.
Rudy’s not-so-subtle point being some lives were worth more than others, doubly so in the case of a white officer versus a minority citizen. That officer walked free from his crimes and later sued the NYPD for firing him for his actions.
All eyewitnesses to the crime said the NYPD officer was the aggressor and shot the man after pursuing and instigating the aggression.
The officer stated at his trial that he ‘felt threatened’ - which is not usually the case when some gets out of their car and pursues someone across several lanes of traffic before shooting them in the chest at close range, as the disgraced cop did.
In many ways Goetz, and later the NYPD cops, (Diallo’s executioners made the same claim of feeling threatened when the young African student reached for his wallet, they infamously shot at him 41 times) became the societal precursor to the GOP’s ‘stand your ground’ laws.
Ron DeSantis’s latest permit-less carry gun laws in Florida are perhaps the most execrable example of this rising vigilantism-phenomena in conservative America.
Some are reacting to threats that are overblown, or outright lies being pumped into their households by right wing media, in ever increasingly violent ways.
This ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ mentality is spreading like a virus in the hearts and minds of the folks consuming conservative media.
It’s dangerous, disingenuous, and is causing real world tragedy on America’s subways and streets.
Among the most egregious recent cases of this, of course, was the attempted murder of a 16 year-old Black child who simply knocked on the wrong door in Kansas City.
The fact that there is a right wing ‘news and information’ infrastructure in this country that amplifies the misinformation that roils the racist demographic - to the point that old men are murdering their fellow Americans - is appalling.
A lifetime of ignorance is metastasizing in their minds into bloodlust and revenge.
An old man who picks up a gun in fear of ‘the other’ has already wasted his life and learned nothing from his time on this planet except to live in ignorance and hatred.
If he does so because he has been manipulated by a corporate media that knowingly fed that man, and millions of others like him, mistruths and racist vitriol to keep the money flowing in and their tax breaks permanent, that is downright sinister.
If left unchecked, the divisions in our country and those that exploit them for political gain and profit, may lead to our merciless devolution as a nation in the years ahead.
In Texas over the weekend, five people lost their lives, including an 8 year-old child. The family had asked their neighbor to stop shooting in his front yard because a baby was sleeping.
A request for basic human courtesy and decorum was met with deranged force and an AR-15 assault rifle.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, himself an absolute coward and as venal and despicable as any politician can be, skipped the usual ‘thoughts and prayers’ and went right to the heart of the matter for Republicans.
Abbott described the victims as ‘illegal immigrants’ which besides the fact that it wasn’t true, injected a dehumanizing slur into yet another mass shooting in the United States.
We risk becoming a nation of self-appointed vigilantism and brutality.
Justice meted out by meatheads watching too much Fox News and UFC fighting.
With the looming horror of guerrilla warfare just over the ridge - if the burgeoning white nationalist movement continues to gain momentum.
Trump began this week giving an interview to a far-right Christian Nationalist broadcasting service that models itself on Newsmax and that proclaims America ‘a white Christian nation’ as the central theme of their programming and dogma.
Think Oral Roberts meets Attila the Hun, the latter of course being best known for his ransacking of Roman cities, which seems to be a perfect metaphor for enlisting Donald J. Trump in your pursuit of bringing a theocracy to the USA.
This channel is more interested in picking pockets and plundering than they are in spreading any of the central teachings of Christianity, namely: compassion.
This sounds all well and good to Donald J. Trump, himself perhaps the most egregious and toxic by-product of New York City in my lifetime.
Trump’s civil trial for the rape of E. Jean Carroll (and the subsequent disparaging her as ‘not my type’) is well under way in a federal Southern District of New York courtroom this week and I have absolutely no doubt that he is 100% guilty.
Sexual predation is perhaps the defining characteristic of Donald Trump when you get down to the heart of the matter; certainly a lifetime pursuit when you look at the various timelines in the dozens of credible accusations against him.
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in his presence most likely has their own stories of his inappropriate language and behavior when it comes to women.
As I have from my time working on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’, as among other things, Ivanka Trump’s talent wrangler.
At best, he is deeply misogynistic and a bully, his true nature violent and sinister; this deserves to come further into the light one day.
E. Jean Carroll is inarguably a hero for pursuing her case against him.
Trump has always taken the wrong side in any of the galvanizing cases of NYC, his former home.
His first reaction to 9/11 was to spread misinformation about Muslim Americans in Jersey City celebrating from roof tops - and to brag that he now owned the tallest building in lower Manhattan.
His comments about Muslims in the hours after the attacks were designed to get New Yorkers, newly traumatized and looking for revenge, to turn against their neighbors and to target American immigrant communities as ‘the other’ and something to be feared.
It’s knee-jerk xenophobia and it’s nothing new; Trump’s attempts to use such a base move for his own ends obviously came to fruition 15 years later when he ran for President on a platform based almost entirely on racism.
Now he’s running again and the racism has morphed into fascism - with a willing army of Christian nationalists looking to get in on the action.
We must of course resist this trend as if our democracy depends on it because it does. As does any sense of living in a peaceful society.
A sense that seems to be shattering day by day, as news of the latest shootings keep pouring in.
The two things are intrinsically related, the hateful legislation & rhetoric by the GOP, and the uptick in violence.
That kind of dogma is like a stress test for the human psyche, many Americans are not equipped to pass it.
The same demographic is being bombarded with advertising and messages to purchase firearms, the more lethal the better. Their psychological wounds, fear and shortcomings are being exploited for profit and poll numbers by the NRA and the politicians they own.
These same bad actors will align with so called ‘Christians’ and make the targeting of trans youth and the LGBTQ community a central tenet of their teachings, inspiring acts of domestic terrorism.
Terrorism is exactly the right word for it in my opinion, as just this past weekend some neofascist ‘soldiers’ showed up in black ski masks and red jackets, like some sort of SS unit that shopped in a Men’s Warehouse in Las Vegas.
They carried Nazi flags and held a giant banner that had the words ‘There Will Be Blood’ printed on it to terrorize the people attending a drag event in Ohio.
A state that not only seems to be leading the nation in public Nazi rallies, thanks to their viral leader who looks like an A.I. rendering of an angry white skinhead with a face tattoo and sloppy form.
It’s no surprise the Buckeye State has a bumper crop of bigots - given men like Jim Jordan and J.D. Vance represent them in Washington, DC.
Men who would sell their own mothers for a chance to kiss Donald Trump’s ass, over and over again. If Trump goes full Christofascist you can bet those toadstools and dozens of others will fall in line.
These men, and perhaps hundreds of other Republicans, will continue to stoke the fires of xenophobia and racism in America.
And we, as citizens, will pay the price.
We must fight back with kindness and compassion, seeking to illuminate the truth, and the equality and goodness of others - while we fight to protect their rights.
That is the only way.
What if one person on that subway had offered Jordan Neely something to eat?
I guess Abbott missed a chance to ship those ‘illegal aliens’ (WHO WEREN’T HERE ILLEGALLY AT ALL) to Chicago in time: Ironically, despite what you hear and think of Chicago, they would have been safer here. I haven’t heard that any of the people Abbott sent to Chicago were shot..