Post 593 - April 4, 2024

A few days ago, the actor Michael Stuhlbarg was walking through Central Park and a guy threw a rock at him. It hit him in the back of the head.

By all accounts, Stuhlbarg is fine. Startled, I am sure, but fine. He chased his assailant, caught him, and the police took him away. The police took the rock thrower away, I mean, not Michael Stuhlbarg.

That same day, another Broadway actor, John Cardoza, was robbed at gunpoint on 145^th Street.  John is in the new Broadway musical, The Notebook. I know him from working together on The Karate Kid musical we did in St. Louis. He played the lead. He, too, is fine, although missing a wallet.

When travel began to open up again after the pandemic, I asked a friend of mine who lives in Australia when she was going to come back to New York. “Oh, I am not coming until you pass some gun laws. I’m too afraid of getting shot.”

I read what she’d written and, of course, my first reaction was to roll my eyes. New York City is not the wild, wild West. After thinking about it for a minute, though, I started to think, well, fair enough. What if I talked her into visiting and she came here and got shot?

It’s been over forty years since I started coming to New York on my own. As a teenager, I was robbed in Times Square once. It was all very quick. It was broad daylight. The guy said he had a gun, I didn’t believe him but gave him my money anyway.

Within a month or two of that, there was another incident. I was going back home to New Jersey after seeing a show. When I got to Port Authority to catch a bus, I found out that a man had been murdered. To get onto our bus, the police had us step over the dead guy’s body which was in a doorway. I vividly remember the sticky-looking blood that had pooled under his head.

He was a homeless person. His clothes were worn and unwashed. I must have somehow compartmentalized his tragic fate thinking that it would never happen to me. I wasn’t homeless. I didn’t let it stop me from not only coming back to the city again but also moving here.

Thomas Hobbes famously said that, outside the bounds of society, life is, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Is life that much different inside society’s protected walls? How safe and secure are any of us? Just because a crime isn’t being perpetrated directly in front of us, doesn’t mean it isn’t occurring nearby.

Last week, while I was walking toward the theatre district from the East Side, I was stopped at 6^th Avenue by a police barricade stretching downtown for as far as I could see. All Central Park South was blocked off as well.

The streets were empty but behind the metal stanchions, people were starting to gather. I asked a police officer what was going on and he said, “The president’s coming.”

There’d been a huge Democratic fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall. President Biden had spoken alongside Presidents Obama and Clinton. Biden was now heading home to Washington D.C.

Not being in a rush, I waited.

Three huge trucks filled with gravel were parked opposite me. In the event of an emergency, they could be driven and used to create a blockade. I saw them do that during the George Floyd demonstrations. It must have taken an army of people to set up the barricades on both sides of the avenue for such a long way. A police officer was standing every fifty paces or so along the entire length. There were hundreds of them.

After about ten minutes, a squad of about ten motorcycles made their way around the corner and down 6^th. We waited.

Some minutes later, another cycle squad which was about four times the size of the first one, rounded the corner, followed by an endless series of armored vehicles, SUVs, and limousines. The presidential car, with the Presidential Seal on the side and small flags on the front, followed. After it, came several ambulances with lights a-blazing, and other assorted cars and vans. In all, likely close to a hundred vehicles were escorting this one man back to the airport.

Not that I could identify which was which, but in that motorcade were a USSS Electronics Countermeasure suburban, a counter-assault team, secret service agents, and, most probably, a hazardous materials team.

As the presidential limo passed by me, I could see President Biden sitting in the back seat. There’s no guarantee that it wasn’t a decoy or a cut-out, but it looked like him. I had a good view through his car window for about three seconds.

While it was a truly impressive, and expensive-looking, display, it seems to me that most of what was there was either going to try to spot potential dangers beforehand or deal with the aftermath of an attack. How effective were they going to be in intervening if someone attacked from the side? They were all on a long street. There was nothing on either side of the president’s car. Everything was ahead of him or behind him. When he drove by, I was approximately twenty feet away from the president with nothing separating us except for a sheet of bullet-proof glass and some reinforced steel. None of that enormous force was going to stop somebody from the side of the street from doing something.

We live our lives in trust. We believe that the little chain on our front doors offers us protection from all who would break in. Despite seeing cops and evil perpetrators kick in chained doors on television all the time, we have faith that our own chains will hold and keep us safe.

When I am on a subway platform, I believe that I am being vigilant. I try not to walk near anyone who might be disturbed. I try not to walk between the tracks and a person just standing there. I always think, “it’s the innocent-looking ones who are going to push me in front of the next train.”  I can’t, however, look in every direction at the same time.

Some guy stabbed a pedestrian in the butt on 96^th and Broadway just a couple of days ago. The pedestrian never saw a thing, the guy just came up behind him, stabbed him in the ass, and fled. Who expects that?

I’ve never understood the argument that gun owners make when they say that they need their guns in case they get robbed and have to protect themselves.

Robbers do everything they can not to announce themselves. You will likely be asleep when they break in. If you leave the gun loaded on your bedside while you sleep and a thief comes into the room, unless they trip over the cat and wake you up, you’ve just given them an extra weapon. Remember, you are unconscious.

Responsible gun ownership, however, means that your gun is safely put away under lock and key. How does that help you, when some slime-ball is pointing their gun in your face and demanding the combination to the safe?

We are secure only in that we have made a compact with our fellow citizens to respect each other. We have made rules and passed laws to codify what that means. We can walk through our lives because we believe that, in general, we are safe. We believe that most people surrounding us are trustworthy. We rely on our instincts to tell us when things start to feel sketchy and put our guards up.

When things happen most of the time, though, we are not prepared. We are not expecting them. They are a surprise.

We all secretly believe that we will be able to survive an earthquake or a tsunami. I always figured that in an earthquake I’d just get under a door frame and be fine. Until I was in an earthquake, I didn’t fully realize that the door frame would also be moving. I also didn’t quite understand that there would be no warning whatsoever. It just starts. The few counts it takes for you to register what is going on, might be the delay in moving to the door frame that ultimately snuffs you out.

In all the tsunami videos I’ve watched, and I’ve watched a lot, it looks like everything is moving in slow motion. In reality, the water is moving faster than people can run. If it wasn’t, more people would be able to escape drowning. I’m a little obsessed with watching tsunami videos. I’m not sure why.

Our lives are not secure, and they never have been. It doesn’t matter where or when you live. Australia may not have the gun problem we have, but they do have an enormous percentage of the most poisonous animals on the planet. It seems to me that you are probably at least as likely to get bitten by an Australian brown snake out in the bush as you are to get shot in midtown New York.

We can make ourselves more secure, but we will never be able to make ourselves completely secure. That’s just life. We weigh the risks and then get on the plane anyway. Or we don’t. We get in the car to drive upstate for Thanksgiving, or we don’t. We go swimming in the ocean with all the potential for sharks and jellyfish. Or we don’t.

If someone is going to throw a rock at us or stab us in the ass, there is very little we can do to prevent it. We are much more able to stop somebody from doing that to someone else. It means that we must make better rules and agree to stick to them. It means that we are morally responsible to look out for each other. It means we need to pay attention.

There will always be people who will try and harm other people. There always have been and there always will be. We can limit what they can do by banning assault weapons, increasing mental health funding, enacting social programs, curbing price-gouging, increasing social programs, providing affordable housing – the list is endless and all within our grasp. We can limit the damage a disturbed individual can do, and maybe even lessen the level of their disturbance, but we will never eradicate it.

The snakes in Australia? We should probably just let them go about their lives and leave them well alone. Earthquakes? Not sure there is anything we can do about them either. Most everything else? We can help. We can change things. We can start actively trying to stop climate change to lessen the impact of the weather on our lives. We can take care of each other much better than we currently are. In doing so, we can make ourselves safer. Not safe, but safer.

We can make the world a better place if we choose to.

I am now going to take a shower and hope I don’t slip. I am then going out for a walk where I hope to do my best to keep from being attacked.

In other words, I am going to keep going, go out, and live my life as best I can. What other choice is there?