I can’t pinpoint exactly when
democracy ceased to exist in America, but I think I can safely say that it no
longer exists and hasn’t existed for some time. I suppose as good an example as
any would be the recent failure of new gun control legislation after the
Newtown elementary school massacre. For the first time that I can remember, a
powerful interest group (in this case, the gun lobby) proved that they were
actually stronger than popular opinion. (If you recall, a majority of Americans
at that time said that they supported stronger gun control laws, and yet they
failed the pass.)
The other day I found myself
walking down West 12th Street in the West Village, looking at the
sprawling new development taking shape where St. Vincent’s Hospital used to
stand and thinking, “Gee, that really would
be a nice place to live!” I had momentarily forgotten that a hospital used to
stand in that location, a hospital that had cared for many AIDS patients during
the worst days of the AIDS crisis and had stood at the ready to care for any
survivors on 9/11.
How about the most recent stories
about global warming? How scientists are now 95% certain that it’s because of human activity that the Earth’s
temperature is getting warmer? Do you think that’s going to stop people from
burning fossil fuels? If someone can light the water coming out of
his garden hose on fire, do you think
that’s going to stop fracking?
There have always been rich
people, of course, but the rich today are so much richer than they ever have
been before that it seems naïve to think they won’t always get their way. If
Mayor Bloomberg wants to overturn term limits and serve a third term, he can
just buy the election. If developers
want to overturn zoning regulations and build high-rises around the entire
length of the High Line, they can just do it. If chain stores want to take over every mom and pop
store in the city, who’s to stop them?
The insidious thing about these
kinds of changes is that once they happen, they never go back. You can’t undo them. You can’t tear down a
high-rise once it’s built. You can’t reverse global warming. You can’t bring
someone back to life once they’ve been killed with an assault weapon.
So, as the oceans continue to
rise, extreme weather continues to increase, gun violence continues to escalate
and the New Plutocracy continues to build their skyscraper canyons, all I can
do is say, “It’s been real, planet Earth. Let the next generation worry about
it. Thank God I won’t we around to see it. Not my problem.”
