I’ve never been a fan of the traditional blue hydrangea — and I had to suppress an initial wave of nausea at the sight of patriotic colors at this juncture — but like everything in the heather garden at Fort Tryon Park, these flowers quickly won me over. Plants that elsewhere would appear garish and suburban achieve a certain magnificence in a beautiful garden.
This week, New York City passed its annual budget, which contained severe cuts for the Parks Department. (Specifically, a 14 percent cut to a budget that was already less than 1 percent of the overall city budget.) It was demoralizing to consider yet another way that the city’s leadership has failed to acknowledge the importance of creating and maintaining outdoor space when we’re being inundated by a virus that spreads indoors. Like everyone who’s not a politician gets that, right? And yet here we are, still getting crumbs from the lavish buffets served up to cars and police.
I’m not too worried about Fort Tryon, which like a handful of other parks around the city receives private funding, but I think it’s a terrible precedent that only parks capable of generating their own funds should prosper. Obviously this impulse toward privatization and private funding is not limited to parks, and in all contexts represents a failure of the government to raise (via taxation) and allocate money in equitable ways. Usually parks are a metaphor for healthcare (or just ‘care’) in these posts; today, they continue in that role but sadly become more literal.
For me, the one thing this lockdown has clarified is the concept of political choice. In normal times, it’s easy to forget that so many of our policies are the result of choices made at some point by our political leaders, but which happened so long ago as to seem preordained (for example: we chose to build highways instead of railways; in New York City, we chose to give car owners a huge amount of public street space). But now, we can see these (bad) choices — and the repercussions — with unprecedented speed and clarity. Last week, our city leaders made a choice to fund police overtime the mayor’s ferry system instead of allocating more money to the parks. (And to probably twenty other social services designed to help underserved people.) At the national level, it’s a choice to ‘open the economy’ — to force people back to work (often for punishingly low wages) and to open restaurants — instead of paying people to stay home for a few months until the virus could be monitored and controlled, as they’ve done in other countries whose leaders have made different (better) choices than we have. There are so many choices being made right now at every level of government, and an astounding percentage of them are bad choices. When people are beaten down by these choices over years and decades, they forget that there was ever another option. My hope for Fourth of July 2020 is that, along with expressing regret about the horrendous choices, we’ve made, we can remind ourselves that, with regard to the laws and policies that affect so much of our lives, we can make better ones going forward.
In this week’s entertainment news, I made a less dire choice to record a new song 🙂
Here’s a link if the video doesn’t feed through.
‘Stone Against My Palms’
Down to the pines, into the sea
Stone against my palms, skinned at the knees
Pain is a salve, wire wraps around a heart
Dream away, dream away a life
The sun came out to kill, the air was still
What’s a man to say? Shook his hand and paid
