There's no city in the world like New York City. Hands down, the Big Apple is the best city to be on God's green Earth. I don't care if you're a country mouse or a city mouse, everybody has a relationship with the NYC. Even if you hate the place, you still respect it.
It's the one place in the world that takes in everyone. That's what she's there to remind us of everytime we peer out across from Battery Park or while on the Staten Island Ferry.
I took this picture only 3 short months ago, when I took my daughter to meet the Lady Liberty of her home country. Which is why it breaks mine and I'm sure everybody else's heart out there to see what is going on right now in The City. As the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis shifts from Wuhan to Tehran to Milan to New York City, every single day is a new nightmare for NYC Health officials. As of writing, there are 94,409 reported coronavirus infections and 5,429 reported deaths in the Five Boroughs alone.
It's a fucking travesty.
"How did we get here?" is a question for another day. For now, we've got to figure out how to get the center of the global financial universe through this nightmare as best we can. Just break on through to the other side. That's all we got to worry about right now as a nation and a globe. Other cities, other problems can wait for another day. But this Easter weekend has got to be about New York City.
Much like we had with China, where if there was any country that could deal with a hard quarantine like was dropped on January 23, that was China... and now the Middle Kingdom is a good way down the road to recovery. With New York City, we have the most resilient city in the world. What happened after 9/11 hopefully prepared this hardy group of urban dwellers to get through this madness. When I lived in New York during the aftermath of that crisis, we went to work with the smell of burning metal and bodies filling our nostrils every single day for months. These days New Yorkers have to go about their lives with the threat of infection from a disease that so far has killed 5.75% of the people that has touched in that city. That's a specter that hangs over every action you take outside your home, every time you touch something, every time somebody gets to close to you, every time you buy food. It's maddening.
But if any City is equipped to get through that kind of madness, it's New York City. There are all kinds of different people in that city. The noble street vendors. The off-off-Broadway dreamers. The scammy Wall Street also-rans. The hipsters smoking joints in broad daylight before they go to their shit office job that barely pays the rent on their overpriced closet-sized bedroom in some converted loft share in Hell's Kitchen. The early retirees in The Village. The actors who've made it, the hustlers who haven't, the academicians, the librarians, the starry-eyed non-profit workers, the cops, the firemen, the restaurateurs, and so many more.
Like Jay Z says, there's "8 million stories out there in the naked city, it's a pity halfa y'all won't make it."
I just hope we live to see a world where those lyrics don't even half come true when it comes to COVID-19. No one there deserves to go through what that city is going through right now. But going through it is what they are all doing.
So let's hear it for New York, in whatever small way we can. Maybe just hum this chorus to hear your kids tonight when you put them to sleep so they'll know, so they'll remember, and maybe just maybe they'll hear it out there in Queens and Brooklyn, where they need to feel every ounce of support that the world can provide until this disaster is over.
New York
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There's nothing you can't do
Now you're in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you
Hear it for New York, New York, New York