Public, Diversity, Crash

Dear Topos, Sep 9
New York City does two things well: the public sphere and diversity. It also does two things badly: traffic and cops.
Hannah Arendt, 19th cen German philosopher, talks about the public sphere as the place where people act together. The public sphere is conducive of actions and interactions of people’s uniqueness. It is the space where people appear to others not just as productive agents or enemies (the “other” in the traditional meaning of boxed out category of unlike me), but as unique people capable of disrupting our assumptions. NYC has numerous spheres where this takes place (at lest more so than most cities I have been to). In Union Square, for example, people gather just to be around other people. On any given day hundreds of people will be sitting around the park and the square alone with friends or meeting new people. A group of people is usually gathered round a mega phone in the evening where someone is giving a spontaneous speech dreading the government or calling for people power. Break dancers and fighters take the ground. Ballroom dancing is accompanied by a boom box. Drugs are dealt and stoners chill out. It is a place where people come to be unique, to perform, and to interact with others. I found myself absorbing a whole day talking with strangers in this place. It is an example of city property going public. This sort of public interaction is not uncommon in NYC.
Until coming to NYC I had never seen a city where it is so expectable for people to transplant their own culture and not be absorbed by US culture. It is perfectly expectable in NYC for people to speak their own languages, and furthermore, to run their businesses using their own language as the primary language. On one block there may be a Lebinez, Arabian, Korean, and French shop all with signs in their own language and all selling their own authentic foods or supplies. The West Indies parade celebrated all these countries as their own distinct countries, flags and all, without filling the need to blanket them all in an American flag. Blackness itself is so diverse here that one must distinguish what origins the person comes from. Whiteness also is blurred by the countless shades of white and white people speaking so many different languages and so many different places. Diversity becomes real.
When 8 million people are crammed together, and a couple million of them transport themselves in metal fire machines 8 times the size of themselves going 20 times as fast as they can walk, catastrophe is in store. Just upon entering this mammoth speed world the NYC police took us right out of it – not by ticketing us or taking us under arrest. No, they took no need for those old fashioned delays. A van full of cops going (probably) 70 miles an hour just ran right into the front of our car. The white air bags and smoke seemed much too much like heaven, and the shattered glass to much like a wrecked car. But where was the blood? The lost limb or broken arm? Both Krystan and I walked out of the totaled car untouched except for a scrap on my ankle and a wound on Krystan’s arm that left an imprint saying “air bag” backwards.
The car is now sitting at a scrapers with swarms of New Yorkers bartering off any lat piece of value.