New York City

I recently returned from a short trip into the Big Apple, New York City. My self-avowed socialist friend of mine was moving and my wife and I offered to help out. To give some background for those who don’t know me well I’ve lived in central Virginia my whole life, aside from a couple months for birth in Baltimore, and a couple years that the military had me elsewhere. I have visited DC and Baltimore, briefly, and had the privilege of visiting Doha, Qatar, once. Nothing prepared me for NYC. Following are my observations.

Apparently people up north don’t pay taxes for roads. That’s the only explanation I could find, since every road I drove on seemed to have an exorbitant toll. The New Jersey Turnpike even had you pay by the mile, but the mystic code that the payments were based on remains completely beyond me.

Once we got into the city our GPS told us to take a few tunnels and plow through Manhatten. Fortunately it was a Saturday, but it still took us an hour to get over to Queens even starting uptown. Here I made another observation: You can’t see the sky. It’s like it doesn’t exist. You look up and all you see is buildings towering. When pedestrians cross the streets they took up the ENTIRE CROSSWALK. It was like a scene from a zombie movie.

Queens itself looked a lot like smaller cities, except with tons more people. It actually seemed quite pleasant, during the day, as crowds go. The natives, whether from Queens or otherwise, seemed to share a natural aversion to manners. It bordered on the bizarre. I am used to meeting people who are rude themselves. What I am not used to is the corner prophet getting fewer weird looks for shouting “REPENT!” than I do for saying “Good morning” when I, alone, pass another lone walker on the sidewalk.

Public transit in the city was relatively well organized, considering that everything up north is union ran and government funded. The prices were outrageous, but at least everything ran smoothly and on time. I would feel chained with no vehicle of my own, but I can see why people in large cities often opt not to own one.

After the grueling drive and moving all the things inside, and a short trip to the Ikea store, we spent the wee hours of the night walking to Times Square. The only word I can find to describe Times Square at night is: Insane. Utterly and completely insane. The buildings move and light up the night with their billboards. I have never seen so many people in one place. A veritable sea of humanity! After shouting down an imbecile who was too free with his tongue we stopped to eat. Another thing I’ll give NYC: They have good food everywhere. No sooner did we step out of the pizza place than we ran right into a desert shop, and the baklava was fantastic.

The next morning we rose early to go see the one thing I wanted to see more than anything else in the city. We took the subway from Queen’s to Staten Island. From there we purchased our overpriced tickets to board a ferry, bound for Liberty Island. Say what you will, seeing the Statue of Liberty is not a New York experience. It is an American experience. The emotion of it still brings tears to my eyes even as I type this, days later. Words like majestic and beautiful fall terribly short of describing the event. I can’t begin to imagine what it must have felt for the countless of immigrants who saw this as their first piece of America.

As I gazed upon her I wondered, how is it that there are Americans who are unaffected by this? How can there be those who live as citizens in the US, and yet hate her so violently? How do their minds work, that they can see this great nation, symbolized in that statue, as the source of the world’s woes?

From my New York experience, I’ve decided that it is a cool place to visit, but I most certainly am blessed to live south of the Mason-Dixon line.

From my American experience I have never been more certain that this is a country worth defending. We have been, and I hope will continue to be, the beacon of hope and freedom in a desolate world.