Well it’s that time of the year … mid-term elections. I sure do hope all dem democrats ─ including Republicans, Democrats and independents ─ vote for a democrat/Democrat. I say this because the Republican Party seems to have lost its way.
I was walking around and I saw this crazy bus with people dancing on the roof. I followed the bus until it stopped at Washington Square. People were dressed as Glinda the Good Witch from the Broadway musical, Wicked.
On the evening of Thursday, Sept. 10, dozens gathered in the Village to stand together and urge fellow New Yorkers to let their memory of September 11 be in service of creating a better, more inclusive future.
Of all the political races heading to this November’s vote, the one I am most interested in is for the House of Representatives NY-11 District. This includes all of Staten Island, and several areas in Brooklyn such as Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Bensonhurst.
Many of the older adults who come through Greenwich House’s Older Adult Centers are navigating some kind of loss. A spouse or partner may have passed away. Friends they’ve known for decades may have died, one by one. Their children may have grown up and moved away, and the calls and visits may have become less frequent. Over time, those losses can shrink a person’s world in ways that aren’t always immediately visible.
In 2016 Donald Trump’s chief lieutenant, Kellyanne Conway, created a fresh starting line for the political lie, introducing “alternative facts” into the political vocabulary. Voila! Trump gets elected and sets about his version of governing, while the Washington Post keeps a running count of the lies: 30,573 in his first term; a number so outrageously high that the press, public and political opposition turn away with disgust and horror. The lying continues, but the counting stops. The liar learns that if no political price is paid, the lie becomes mere backdrop.
Most prominent in leading the demand for Dapolito renovation was Andrew Berman, director of Village Preservation, who was present by Zoom. I have enthusiastically supported many of VP’s proposals, but not this one. Berman encouraged the audience to ignore Caccapolo’s direction and discuss both Dapolito and 388 Hudson as they are linked by community needs, budget, and geography.
President Trump’s rantings from the White House, and his appeal to the most base instincts of the American population, have included calls to wipe out large swaths of American history (even going so far as to deny that the Civil War was about slavery). He has also included calls to restore the United States as a “Christian Nation,” whose guiding light should be the Christian Bible and not the Constitution.
It wasn’t something I consciously thought about every day, but it lived beneath the surface: one day I would return home, and something inside me would finally settle. The streets I knew as a child, the language, the sea, the familiar light — all of it would somehow restore the part of me that had remained suspended in time.
In my March essay (Enemy of the People) I wrote of behaviors the American Psychiatric Association characterize as narcissism. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was my source. As I said in March, Donald Trump exhibits substantially all of the behaviors listed, including those for malignant narcissism.
