it’s a great day to be a new yorker 🗽
reporting from simultaneously the best city in the world (new york city) and the worst place on earth (the comments section on linkedin)
This letter was inspired by this LinkedIn post by The New Yorker, or more accurately, by the comments section of that LinkedIn post (it’s a good story, regardless).
Everyone has a different opinion on what makes you a “real” New Yorker. Native New Yorkers will say it’s being born here. Others will say it’s crying on the subway or giving (correct) directions to tourists or picking up the lingo. As I approach my ninth year of living here, a lot of my out-of-state friends joke that I’ll be getting my “real New Yorker card” soon. But I think being a real New Yorker is simply giving a fuck (despite the reputation for indifference). It’s loving and appreciating and believing in the city enough to want more for it and its people. I think my actual real New Yorker flex, rather than having lived in different boroughs or knowing my way around the subway system, is that I’ve voted every single year I’ve lived here.
Today, I am immensely proud of my city for standing up to the federal government and the billionaires puppeteering it. Unlike some people, I don’t need to see myself in a mayoral candidate; I’m satisfied knowing that we’ve chosen a public servant that lives and works and eats in the city, and genuinely cares enough about its people to have actual conversations with them about the issues they’re facing. A foreign-born, Muslim, and Democratic socialist mayor represents the very essence of New York City—one of the most culturally, linguistically, and culinarily diverse places on Earth, built by people that have endured the unimaginable just to seize their chance to “make it” here.
And yet, the comments on that post tell a different story, one of people who we live amongst and work with, who cling to hateful, uninformed rhetoric and the idea that politics is a zero-sum game (I also relish the fact that these people often don’t live in the city but sure love opining on its decline!). It’s a reminder that there’s still work to be done and a lot to be proven. A reminder that a fundamental tenet of Americanism is the glorification of capitalism and bootstrapping, a belief system that runs on inequality and exploitation. I once saw a tweet that said something to the effect of, “Living in America is being so afraid that someone else will get something for free that you make life equally miserable for everyone.” And it really explains why progress is such an uphill battle here. It’s in our DNA. Some of the most exploited Americans have been misled into believing that their problems are the fault of DEI and GMOs rather than extreme greed. It’s deeply embedded in the fiber of our national character. To change that is to unlearn nearly everything we know, to create a different idea of what it means to be American in the Western imagination. “I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist,” wrote John Steinbeck of the national mood during the Great Depression.
But I also believe that loving New York means refusing to buy into the jaded mentality of “that’s just how New York is.” This city is a living monument to the work of starry-eyed dreamers, from the philanthropists that shaped the topography of the city to the artists that have shaped the world. New York is never finished or fixed but that’s part of its beauty. And I love that we have collectively decided on (cautious) optimism, to imagine a better future for all, not just a wealthy few. New York State’s motto is “Excelsior” which means “ever upward,” reflected in both its towering skyscrapers and its relentless ambition. New York has always been the City of Dreams, but rather than dangling that dream on a fishing line from an ivory tower, the new generation of politics is co-creating a new one, giving us permission to ask for more. I love this city and I love being a New Yorker (I’m feeling very locally patriotic post-election and post-marathon). And love is sometimes messy.
From The New Yorker piece:
While his opponents described New York as broke, dysfunctional, and crime-ridden, Mamdani talked about the city as a lovely, if chaotic, place—full of tumult and injustices, yes, but also of life and possibilities. The Mamdani Cinematic Universe is a place where you can take the subway to the city clerk’s office to marry the girl you met on Hinge, where you can do Tai Chi and salsa-dance with old folks on the Lower East Side, where you can go for a polar plunge off Coney Island on New Year’s Day and walk the entire length of Manhattan on a hot summer night.
💖 jenny
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