Saturday, August 29, 2015

The Local Nightmare May Be at an End

By Bruce L. Brager

Needs no caption.
Credit: Bruce L. Brager
New York can really be a fun city, as they used to say. Not just the stock market, the Wall Street roller coaster. But at least this time they have been panicking, and then changing their mind about the panic, over the huge Chinese economy, not the tiny Greek economy. But Wall Street is more a national than a state issue.

New York City has its problems. Poverty and crime are problems, though less than in most other major American cities. The city needs more jobs, though unemployment has greatly decreased since the Great Recession. There too many guns in the streets, but this is true of everywhere in this gun-fetishist society. New York has one of the better gun control policies in the country. We don’t have open carry, stand your ground, or anything like that belonging more in the TV version of the Wild West. But a New Yorker who wants a gun just needs a few hours’ drive to get one.

The city still needs affordable housing, despite having lost the most expensive area title to Washington, DC. But local real estate developers prefer to build condos for billionaires and a huge Ferris wheel in Staten Island. Let’s just hope the builders don’t get legionnaires disease.

A beautiful park in north Staten Island, with a great view of the Manhattan
Skyline, is being converted into an outlet mall and a giant ferris wheel.
Credit: Bruce L. Brager
The relationship between the NYPD and the Black community is worse than it has been for years. New York City traffic remains New York City traffic.

So what is the big issue in New York City recently? Times Square. Some attractive young women have taken to soliciting tourists to take picture with them. The women are wearing just bikini bottoms and body paint. Horrors. The mayor is very upset. The governor says it reminds him of the bad old days in Time Square. The police commissioner wants to tear up the new pedestrian areas to get rid of the area where these immoral women play their trade. Others want the law that allows women, as well as men to go topless in public in New York City, changed.

On a related issue, a new law has been introduced in the New York State legislature to ban the sale of sugar soda to kids under 16. The nightmare is almost over. We will soon end the horror of kids getting wired with sugar staring at half-naked women. And here I was worried about freedom of choice, gun control, the economy, crime, disease, etc. etc. etc. This is not an endorsement of kids drinking sugar, just so you readers know.

I am just glad we don’t have any statues of Confederate soldiers (as far as I know). I can’t recall seeing a Confederate flag regularly flown – at least not in Upper East Side Manhattan. There has been no having to make martyrs to the First Amendment out of idiots.

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