Dislike Strongly
El Cablebús Línea 3, Cineteca National/Bodega de Arte. Ski lift public transportation is an integral part of movilidad integrada in Mexico City (CDMX) and Estado de México (EDOMEX). I love that México thinks outside of the box that when you’re a hammer everything is a nail.
Growing up, if anyone said they hated someone or something, my father (Pop) would gently say, “don’t hate.” Somewhere else in my childhood memories are the words, “dislike strongly.”
Pop was a man who got along with just about everyone and felt fortunate to have experienced most of the personal and professional interactions he had in his long life and career as a doctor. The words “bedside manner” are rarely used these days when speaking about a physician but that was my father.
Mensch!
If he were still alive, Pop, who lived his life with boundless gratitude for all of the opportunities that the U.S. afforded him and our family, would have been devastated by the current state of the nation and ashamed of the fact that the White House is for now occupied by a hateful, racist, misogynistic demagogue who admires despots and aspires to be one.
How far we have come from Pop’s final days just a few years ago. Today, the strongest country in the world is run by a serial grifter and sex offender, whose entire life is motivated by hate.
The leader of the one-time Free World, has weaponized the justice system and is using the FBI and the military as his personal police force. Revenge and grievance drive the newscycle. The latest headlines are the malicious prosecution of the president’s own former FBI director and the New York State Attorney General. He has appointed dozens of unqualified people to run many of the government’s critical departments and quackery and false narratives have replaced science and non-partisan public policy at once renowned research institutions.
A Supreme Court filled with the president’s appointees and a feckless Congress, enable the convicted felon’s delusional view of the presidency and deprive us all of what we need more than ever, a respectful, balanced and dignified world leader. As a result, we have gotten to a place where in the U.S., masked men and women are rounding up people and deporting them based on the color of their skin and the way they speak. Thousands of dedicated public servants have been shown the door, leaving the federal government less able to serve the public and the country unqualified to navigate an increasingly complex and dangerous world. It is a sad tune we are all hearing.
Centro Histórico, CDMX.
And there’s more. In a show of its indifference to the public and remaining government employees, the Republican-controlled Congress is keeping the government shut down. In a mere coincidence, air traffic in a growing list of Democratic cities has slowed and the president has threatened to cut off billions of dollars in transportation funding to New York. Gotham City should have sent him packing when he moved from Queens to Manhattan so many years ago.
While I miss the A Train, my favorite Express line, I hope that someday New York ‘s subways are as quiet and frequent as the Mexico City Metro.
Living abroad, do I miss family and friends, New York and the land of my birth? Terribly! Especially the love and wisdom of my children, mother, sisters, primos y primas, sobrinos y sobrinas and friends.
Sugar Hill, Harlem. A neighborhood largely untouched by the greedy little fingers of the manchild president.
I miss the humor of New Yorkers, a special breed that has elevated making one another laugh to an art form.
Lactaid Loosies.
I miss the energy of New York; the product of so many different cultures striving, mostly successfully, to find a way to live together in a sometimes packed environment. I miss the food and the bridges and the City’s mighty rivers.
Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River. Walking to Brooklyn from Chinatown.
I also miss adding my voice to the resistance and protesting peacefully in person alongside the millions of other Americans holding the line against the grifter-in-chief and his klan. Thank you to all of those opposing the president’s authoritarianism, the kleptocracy he is creating and the ways in which he has incited nothing short of a civil war since four-plus years before January 6, 2021. During these dark days, those resisting the convicted felon are the true American heroes.
While all of this is happening, I am usually 2,083 miles (3,359 km) south of my home in New York. At this fragile time in the U.S. and the world, I feel I am living a more enriching and peaceful life than the one I would be living in the U.S. Life here agrees with me and is a salve from the constant assault of the 24 hour fake news cycle and the destruction of the once-noble American experiment. We have seen this movie before.
Cineteca Nacional Chapultepec, Mexico City.
As philosopher George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
I know how privileged I am to spend my sixties in Mexico, a complicated, beautiful country of proud people who, as hard as their lives may be, have the dignity to look one another in the eye on the street and say buenos días and bonita tarde as they go about their day.
Ecobici, Mexico City’s excellent bike share program, is an integral first-last mile piece of CDMX’s Movilidad Integrada. And riding a bike makes me smile.
I am not blind to the challenge that daily life can be for many of my neighbors in México. The lines in the mornings and evenings for the buses and trains and peseros that so many rely on to take them to and from jobs that may be hours from their homes. I know that the delicious lunch I buy in the market that is cheap for me, isn’t, for many of those with whom I share the table.
So many of this mega city’s 22 million Chilangos are themselves migrants from pueblitos and cities plagued by economic hardship or violence or both.
The longer I am here, I am learning to appreciate the diversity of the Mexican experience. The country‘s myriad distinct indigenous cultures as well as the amazing mezcla that its Mestizo, European, Árabe, Judio and other influences have brought it.
As far as I know, there is nowhere in Mexico City as diverse as Elmhurst or Flushing but there are ethnic enclaves and a growing acceptance of others in what has also sometimes been a xenophobic country.
I love going to the city’s south Asian markets, old Spanish mesóns, and Árabe markets that sell kosher and non-kosher food side-by-side in Lomas del Chamizal.
What I love about this massive city is its accessibility in all its shapes and forms and flavors for those who choose to take (or have no alternative) the exceptional, if crowded transit system. Carfree, I love that I can go anywhere in Mexico City by public transportation, from the remote colonias in the north and east to the tony neighborhoods hugging Bosque de Chapultepec and the mountains to the west.
I love many of the dozens of pueblitos that have been absorbed into CDMX as the city has grown. Absorbed, while also retaining some of the characteristics that made them distinct architecturally and culturally with their beautiful zocalós and parroquias.
My muse and guide here is mi novia Sandra, who has patiently explained the country and city in all of its permutations. On countless occasions it has taken me more than a few minutes to understand what is going on, what I am eating, and why it all matters.
Living here, I am also never far from the troubling daily news out of the U.S. and the mean-spirited or worse utterances of the deranged demagogue who somehow became president, twice. Hopefully, this nightmare will not go on for much longer. Hopefully, our resistance will be joined by some Congressional Republicans brave and principled enough to look beyond the November elections and the spoiled child’s vengeful wrath. Hopefully, the Supreme Court’s right wing will shake loose a Justice or two and start consistently voting against the meritless legal challenges brought by the brat. And hopefully, the U.S. military and the intelligence services will renew their vow to uphold the Constitution and refuse to do the irrational and hateful bidding of a manchild who mistakenly thinks that he is a king.
Stormy weather. Bosque de Chapultepec.
While Pop might not have been comfortable with all I have said here, this resistance needs to be expressed by all who care about justice. If we have lost the chance to speak truth to the abuse of power we have failed in our obligation to ourselves and to humanity.
Yours in transit,
Joel
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