Strike!
Tuesday, 20 December: Strike! Just in time for Christmas and New Year's Day!Walking nearly three miles to work every morning is not going to be fun for long, I have no doubt. However, walking to work today turned out to be great. Everybody was walking. For the first time in my experience, New Yorkers turned out en masse to do something together. We chatted with strangers as we moved up and down the streets. We laughed about the strike, the difficulty getting to work, the gridlock, and how pleased we were to live in Manhattan (pity the poor Brooklynite who has to walk to Times Square!). We speculated with neighbors on how long the strike would last. Everybody was open and pleasant, very un-New Yorkerly; suddenly the city, home of eight million different cultures, languages, and people, became a much smaller, much more intimate place.
New York is truly an entity unto itself. To be sure, it exists with New York State, within the United States, within an interconnected world. But the experience of living here is really quite unique. If transit workers (or teachers, or builders, or whomever) struck in Jacksonville, there would be difficulties, there would be havoc, there might be big problems. But here, life itself changes. Attitudes change. New services spring up overnight: taxis take off, Starbucks must be making millions (every businessman who formerly took the subway stopped in to have a coffee as he walked, it seems), shoe stores opened early (no kidding), wireless hotspots are filled with people commuting "from home." The roads change (direction, and parking rules and driving permits are suspended), the school schedules change, the stock market changes, one's relationships with neighbors change, ambulances drive differently, business acquaintences chat about getting to work over the phone before moving on to important issues: everything changes. And it is annoying, yes, but not MERELY annoying. It's an experience.
And it's not all bad, either. My walk this morning took me through Central Park, which was lovely. I liked talking to random folks, joking with those who made it into work, noticing the cool weather and seeing people laughing in their filled cars. All things considered, a day or two of this might be great.
(Of course, the strike is sure to last longer. Oh well.)
posted by Skay @ 12:35 AM
2 Comments:
I saw the strike on the news after reading your blog yesterday. Sorry it happened, but I'm glad you are enjoying it (so far).
From your recounting of the morning, it seems New Yorkers don't do anything halfway, do they? And what greater equality is there than everyone hoofing it to work together?
I hope you continue to enjoy it.
No, nothing halfway at all.
And what you say about the equality is very, very true--much to the obvious dismay of some be-suited people with attache cases (though not, by any means, to the dismay of all such people).
Let me note one other interesting thing I observed yesterday night: Brooklyn Chasidic Jews clearly have the best organizational skills of, well, possibly anybody in New York. Enormous numbers of them were lined up on Fifth Avenue yesterday, being shepherded four-by-four into cars that zipped up, filled, and zoomed back to Brooklyn. I heard one passerby (on foot) grumble, "How come THEY get cars?" Well, because they've clearly organized the best carpools ever, dummy.
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