Post 215 - October 12, 2020

Day 215…

I’m free!

I finished up my quarantine yesterday morning and then I went out. From the local deli, I got a breakfast sandwich and then I headed downtown for a walk.

It was a great walk.

From the upper west side, I made my way down Columbus Avenue, past the Museum of Natural History and then past Lincoln Center, down Broadway and through Times Square. Then I continued down past Herald Square into Union Square. From there I turned into Washington Square Park and walked down through SoHo before I headed west and turned back up north. Near the Whitney I got a timed entry on the spot and went into the High Line Park. Working my way uptown I exited the park at Hudson Yards and got back up to 36th Street. Then it was up 10th Avenue until I finally met up with Michael at the apartment he was staying in in Hell’s Kitchen.

Ten miles all told, and I have a nice blister on the bottom of my right foot to show for it. It was the first time in two weeks that I’ve worn socks, let alone shoes.

Including my actual trip down to Florida and back, it has been over three weeks since I have been able to wander through New York. The city has changed a bit over those three weeks.

Outdoor dining seems like it is now a permanent part of our landscape. Some restaurants have re-opened for indoor dining albeit with a cap at 25% capacity. I didn’t, however, see a lot of places where it looked like people were actually eating inside. Instead, they were out on the street and they were out with a vengeance.

In some places where the portion of the street where the restaurant is located has been blocked off, the entire street was filled with tables and all of the tables were filled with people. In all the times I went out before my trip, I have never seen so many people gathered together.

It’s raining today and is also meant to rain all day tomorrow. I would be interested to see whether people will venture indoors to eat because of that. I have yet to really talk to anyone who seems ready to take that step yet. Many places have beautifully constructed awnings and tents over their outdoor dining for days like this, but there are certainly some places that don’t.

It may just be because of the path that I took, but the couple of spots that I did pass where people were going inside to eat were all incredibly high-end places. The insides of most affordable restaurants still looked dark and empty.

For the first time in seven months, I noticed some tourists out on the streets. Some were European. I heard some French and some Russian. Some were Hispanic - there was plenty of Spanish. There were also several Indian families.

While I didn’t see any of the ubiquitous red tour buses, I did notice a guy in Times Square trying to convince two women to buy a ticket for one. The two women looked like New Yorkers to me. I am pretty sure they were just playing with the guy - pretending to be interested when, in fact, there was no way that they were going to actually get onboard.

I only saw tourists in two places -  in Times Square and on the High Line. With little to do indoors in the city, it makes sense that they would be site-seeing in outdoor locations.

The Mickey Mouses and Batmans made some money posing with people yesterday in midtown. I was happy to see a decided lack of interest in the Naked Cowboy. He is strongly pro-Republican and his guitar is covered with the President’s campaign stickers.

New Yorkers seem to have reclaimed much of the rest of the city. It was Sunday yesterday, so more people were out than would probably venture out during the week. The sidewalks were even fairly crowded in some places.

Side streets off of Times Square and Herald Square, though, were still largely empty and full of trash. Those areas are mostly made up of retail and office buildings. The traffic through there is still very low so the many restaurants there are still closed. Elsewhere, though, New Yorkers are out and living their lives.

Having the freedom to leave my apartment and rejoin my city is wonderful.

Freedom, however, is a somewhat relative term. In essence I have just exchanged my small, somewhat gilded cage, for a larger gilded aviary. I still can’t really go anywhere. Or do anything.

Broadway, and by extension my livelihood, is not going to open back up until May.

That’s seven months away. That means we are just half-way there. The same amount of time is in front of us than has already passed since this all started.

The Republican-controlled Senate began its hearings today in advance of the vote to confirm the President’s choice to replace the late Justice Ginsburg on the United States Supreme Court.

The nominee is a deeply religious woman who was raised in an insular community which follows a kind of populist charismatic Catholic dogma.

The People of Praise community in New Orleans numbers about 1,600 people. They believe in ecstatic Christian traditions such as speaking in tongues. They embrace once-traditional gender roles that means that the male in the relationship is the absolute head of the household. They absolutely reject homosexuality and homosexual relationships.

In 1967, a small group of academics from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh had an encounter with what they believed was the Holy Spirit.

Following that, they held a small student conference during which about a dozen student attendees claimed to have had a similar experience. Some of them prayed in tongues.

That spiritual fervor spread to Notre Dame University, where the nominee attended law school, and the University of Michigan and then further.

Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan wrote a book called Catholic Pentacostals in 1969. It attracted more followers. It became apparent that these people wanted to do far more than just pray together, they wanted to live together as well. That’s how the Ranaghans came to start the People of Praise community in 1971.

At the beginning, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church distrusted the movement, but in 1975 the then Pope, Paul VI, held a ‘charismatic mass’ at St. Peter’s Basilica that 10,000 people came to.

Other communities began to spring up.

In the 1990’s some Catholic bishops felt the need to intervene because there were reports that the leaders of these communities were trying to control all of the financies and relationships of their congregants saying that it was the ‘Will of God’.

Speaking of a similar group called the Mother of God convent in 1995, Cardinal James Hickey of Washington said, "This community suffers from a lack of charity, from the failure to reach out in reconciliation, from anger, suspicion, slander, fear. No private individual can say he or she presents the absolute will of God for another person in life's personal decisions. No lay person has a right to demand religious obedience from a fellow adult lay Catholic."

People of Praise is not a church, per say.  Members in the community go to church services of their choice on Sunday mornings then gather together for a private People of Praise service in the afternoon. Members tithe 5% of their earnings to the community and agree to submit to the leadership of the spiritual director.

To become a part of the community, potential members spend a year with the group to see if it is right for them. After that year, they sign a document stating that they intend to remain participants for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Arthur Wang, who left the group six years ago described them as being extremely right-wing. “The group was not this bipartisan group of people. The social scene was extremely Republican, very much Rush Limbaugh.”

A 2009 document from the group outlined some of their beliefs in terms of gender roles.

There is a statement that men and women share a, “fundamental equality as bearers of God’s image.” Women in the community are encouraged to pursue careers in a variety of professions and it condemns discrimination against them. At the same time, it avows that men and women were designed for different roles.

A man cannot dominate his wife but a wife “should take her husband’s direction seriously.” A husband is responsible for “correcting” her when she strays from the path.

The judicial nominee has apparently risen in her career with the support of the men in the community. In one document she is described as being a “handmaiden” within their society. By all accounts, since the popularity of A Handmaid’s Tale, that term has been changed.

This nominee is 48 years old. If she lives as long a life as Justice Ginsburg, she could very well sit on and influence the United States Supreme Court for the next 39 years.

I may not have the freedom to live my life, these days, exactly the way it was at the beginning of the year. I can’t work in my chosen field. There are limits on where I can go and what I can do.

Where it counts, however, I and the other members of my chosen community, live under the umbrella of grace of some of the most important freedoms there are.

I can love and marry whomever I choose whether they are of my same sex or another.

The women in my life can choose what happens to their bodies without a man telling them that they can’t.

I can speak my mind, freely, without governmental interference.

And I can vote. I, like everyone else in this country, can help to decide who our leaders will be.

The current Republican nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States of America will work to dismantle those rights. She, and the society that she has chosen to be a part of, does not believe in them. Maybe not all of them, but the encroachment upon even one of those painfully difficult banners of our freedoms is too much.

We all deserve freedom. Freedom “to be you and me” as Marlo Thomas’s children’s album so proudly proclaimed 40 years ago.

I do not begrudge the President’s nominee the right to be a part of the community of her choice and to believe in the things that she believes. She, like all of us, is free to do that. If the members of her tribe chose to follow a set of beliefs that I don’t believe in, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t impinge upon my life at all.

She cannot, however, and should not, be able to take away any of my freedom by forcing me to follow those rules as well.

Freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the bedrock upon which our founding fathers based the formation of this greater community that is our country. There have already been a lot of obstacles put in the way of that lofty goal - some by the very founding fathers who first created it.

Slowly but surely over the intervening years we have worked tirelessly to remove those obstacles - one stubborn piece at a time. Now is not the time to go back.

For heaven’s sake, please just get out there and vote in favor of our continued freedom. It’s not a given. We always have to fight for it.

All of us should have the freedom to dictate how we live our lives.

None of us should have the power to dictate how others live theirs.