Here’s a short little clip of Henry Miller describing how he remembers New York City and what he thought of it in what I assume to be the mid to late 70s:
One can only imagine the culture of cruelty that New York City was all those years ago considering its state now, which is a superficial touristy place filled with people trying to compete for power and attention.
Not to mention how aesthetically unpleasing the city is, but I suppose that’s a preference, I happen to like trees more and living with nature instead of plowing it down to fulfill self serving desires for our species alone. It’s hard not to think about how majestic Manhattan island likely was before profit driven humans arrived to use it as a shipping port and business center contributing to centuries of environmental destruction, a place where mass quantities of plunder for profiteering elites leave the continent and mass amounts of plunder are shipped in, euphemistically called “trade.” And again, I mean no shame to those in power, that’s just what happens to everyone when they are given undue power over others. All become tyrannical when given accumulated centralized power, none are capable of wielding it because it’s a power that is in itself tyrannical by its very nature of being there. Only through tyrannical action could that kind of centralized power have come into being in the first place and every action taken thereafter is another act of tyranny until the power is dissipated.
Ah, but I digress, getting back to the whole critique on NYC thing. Below is a computer render of what Manhattan may have looked like before us:
These heinous blights on nature we call cities don’t have to exist. New York City functionally does nothing. It does consume a lot of electricity and produce an environmentally hazardous amount of sewage and other toxic waste products, but for human survival and the health of the planet it need not exist at all, and that goes for nearly every other major city center on the planet.
100% unsustainable. Meaning you cannot have these cities without simultaneously destroying another part of the ecosystem. There is only so long that can go on until the food web collapses in regional areas, and now with such widespread destruction humans are stressing the global food web. And we can clearly see ecological impacts of these hideous urban spaces, the cities themselves have little ecological biome to speak of, except for a smattering of rodents and birds which largely consume human garbage. The cities though are essentially deserts extending out through pesticide riddled suburbia and then finally dozens of miles away from the city center a sustainable area of natural biome is allowed to exist again.
I know many identify with city living, just like others identify with living in suburbia, or small towns, but despite whatever attachments are there humans should consider the myriad of problems created by this way living, both to ourselves and nature. Because these cities have a way of making people miserable, and there are far more efficient and sustainable alternatives that can be imagined by simply by living further apart, growing food locally, and ending things like city water and sewage. Also by working more locally in smaller more closely knit groups where you’re surrounded by people you know each day it would quickly foster more community and provide more meaningful lives.
And as a last aside, I drove through NYC about a year back and it was uglier than I remember. It takes a lot of social programming to convince people that way of living is worthwhile. Further, the culture is well known there, full of scammers, cheats, and liars. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it’s undeniable that the city which is home to Wall Street is corrupt beyond measure at its very core and always has been, just like the US system itself.
I’ll leave with a song from Jim Croce who possessed something NYC has never had much of, authenticity.
You must be logged in to post a comment.