Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [42]
There’s a disregard for the past in New York that dismays even a lot of New Yorkers. It’s true that no one pays much attention to antiquity. The immigrants who came here came for something new, and what New York used to be means nothing to them. Their heritage is somewhere else.
Old million-dollar buildings are constantly being torn down and replaced by new fifty-million-dollar ones. In London, Rome, Paris, much of the land has only been built on once in all their long history. In relatively new New York, some lots have already been built on four times.
Because strangers only see New Yorkers in transit, they leave with the impression that the city is one great mindless rush to nowhere. They complain that it’s moving too fast, but they don’t notice that it’s getting there first. For better and for worse, New York has been where the rest of the country is going.
The rest of the country takes pride in the legend on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses . . . / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. . . . ” Well, for the most part it’s been New York City, not the rest of the country, that took in those huddled masses.
Millions of immigrants who once arrived by ships stopped off in New York for a generation or two while the city’s digestive system tried to assimilate them before putting them into the great American bloodstream. New York is still trying to swallow large numbers of immigrants. They don’t come by boat much anymore and they may not even be from a foreign country. The influx of a million Puerto Ricans in the 1960s produced the same kind of digestive difficulties that the influx of the Irish did in the middle 1800s.
New York’s detractors, seeing what happens to minority groups, have said there is just as much prejudice here as anywhere. New York could hardly deny that. The working whites hate the unemployed blacks. The blacks hate the whites. The Puerto Ricans live in a world of their own. The Germans, the Hungarians, the Poles live on their own blocks. Nothing in this pot has melted together. The Chinese and the Italians live side by side in lower Manhattan as though Canal Street was the Israeli border. There’s no intermingling, and in a city with almost two million Jews even a lot of Jews are anti-Semitic.
In spite of it all, the city works. People do get along. There is love.
Whether New York is a pleasure or a pain depends on what it is you wish to fill your life with. Or whether you wish to fill it at all. There is an endless supply of satisfaction available to anyone who wishes to help himself to it. It’s not an easy city, but the cups of its residents runneth over with life.
It’s a city of extremes. There’s more of everything. The range of notes is wider. The highs are higher. The lows lower. The goods, the bads are better and worse. And if you’re unimpressed by statistics, consider the fact that in 1972 the cops alone in New York City were charged with stealing $73 million worth of heroin. There are 1,700 murders in an average year.
Neither of those statistics is so much a comment on crime as it is a comment on the size and diversity of New York City.
No one keeps a statistic on Life. The probability is that, like everything else, there’s more of it in New York.
An Essay on War
We are all inclined to believe that our generation is more civilized than the generations that preceded ours.
From time to time, there is even some substantial evidence that we hold in higher regard such civilized attributes as compassion, pity, remorse, intelligence and a respect for the customs of people different from ourselves.
Why war then?
Some pessimistic historians think the whole society of man runs in cycles and that one of the phases is war.
The optimists, on the other hand, think war is not like