For the Fourth: on liberty
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post from many many years ago. It was written in the springtime during a visit to New York City. Reading it now, it seems almost archaic in certain ways.]
I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.
When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is the city.
And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.
I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.
All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.
The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees whose names I don’t know.
In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.
As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early Seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.
I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.
The sight is intensely familiar to me – I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.
NOTE: I was going to add a photo of the Statue of Liberty here. But instead I was very taken with a video about how the statue was constructed. I’d never previously thought about the challenges involved and how they were surmounted, but I learned about them here. And the video also caused me to reflect, and not for the first time, on how the forces arrayed against the US right now are good at destroying but not at building. Destroying is so much easier:
World Trade Center .. a true construction miracle, a symbol of American strength and motivation! Destroyed by Muslims .. now they are destroying France..
My last visit to New York City was to testify as an expert in a med mal trial at Bronx Supreme Court. It was right out of “Bonfire of the Vanities.” The plaintiff was a parolee who was shot by his parole officer. He was shot in the leg and the wound was mishandled at a City Hospital. As a result, he lost his leg. The defendant was the City Hospital system. The jury of seven, halfway through deliberations, asked the judge to force one juror to bathe as the rest could not stand to be in the jury room with him. The jury awarded the plaintiff a half million dollars, probably as much for the annoyance of the unwashed juror as for my testimony. The lawyer for the plaintiff was ecstatic as most of his cases were criminal defense. He wanted me to come back to take me out to dinner. I never went back.
Building and maintaining. Eric Hoffer insisted that the state of a nation or company could be determined by examining the maintenance logs. But if nothing has been built, there is nothing to maintain.
Yesterday, Milke Rowe (The Dirty Jobs Guy) ran a story on Fox business channel about the corn processing industry. Who knew how big it is? Who knew how many products depend on corn for their ingredients? Not I. It’s a huge business, and without it, we would be much less well fed as a nation. It has grown up and delivered its products over many, many years. Its continued success depends on careful maintenance of the creative machines they have developed. All of which were described by Mike.
There are so many other industries, jobs, and
processes like that, which are out of our sight that directly affect the quality of our lives. They are all there because a need/demand was recognized and filled by men and capital. An intricate, ingenious system that makes our lives better.
The best thing about it is that it was all made possible by a group of visionary men who gave us the Declaration of Independence on this day in 1776.
When I think about these things, my heart is filled with gratitude that I was blessed to be born in the Unites States of America.
It’s a great day. A happy n Fourth of July to all my fellow Americans. Let’s all be thankful for our heritage.
Neo: you are a gifted writer with a big heart: caring for many things and many people, and letting your readers see and feel them as you do.
Thanks for this; your complex grief at 9/11 is especially poignant and deserves wide and regular sharing. At break of day and at the going down of the sun, we shall remember.
Speaking of complex systems and how difficult it can be to maintain them….this guy sees it all very clearly. You can have competence or you can cater to identity politics, but you can’t have both.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
Celebrate the brave-hearted men, especially Thomas Jefferson, who declared themselves on July 4, 1776 against the world’s greatest and only superpower.
When I was in Charlottesville in the late ’60s as a medical trainee, locals spoke of “Mr. Jefferson”, the founder of the Univ. of Virginia, as if he’d just gone away for the weekend. With respect and awe.
Now, as a result of media race hysteria, his name seldom comes up anymore. One marginal sin trumps many enduring accomplishments for the Left only if not committed by them. And the rest of us are suckers for being sucked in. The Left can sin like Satan and get away with it.
Thank you, Mr. Jefferson!
My favorite 4th of July was sailing to Hawaii and watching my young crew shooting off fireworks from the lee rail. 42 years ago today.
JJ…”(corn processing is) a huge business, and without it, we would be much less well fed as a nation.” And there are thousands of such industries and subindustries. Yet politicians and their ‘experts’ do things that will impact these industries without any serious attempt to understand them or their interconnections. Too often, they believe that any overlay of planning (by them) will necessarily make things better.
Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov served as Deputy Manager of a Stalin-Era Soviet factory, a sawmill. The factory overcame many obstacles, but was ultimately strangled by difficulties in obtaining supplies, particularly raw lumber. Gennady, whose father had been in the lumber trade before the Revolution, was contemptuous of the chaos into which the industry had been reduced by the Soviets:
“The free and “unplanned” and therefore ostensibly chaotic character of lumber production before the revolution in reality possessed a definite order. As the season approached, hundreds of thousands of forest workers gathered in small artels of loggers, rafters, and floaters, hired themselves out to entrepreneurs through their foremen, and got all the work done. The Bolsheviks, concerned with “putting order” into life and organizing it according to their single scheme, destroyed that order and introduced their own–and arrived at complete chaos in lumbering.”
As Gennady says:
“Such in the immutable law. The forceful subordination of life’s variety into a single mold will be avenged by that variety’s becoming nothing but chaos and disorder.”
I’m afraid we are going to find out the truth of this observation hard way.
I reviewed the above book here:
https://ricochet.com/925949/running-a-factory-under-soviet-socialism/
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
@ Owen > “You can have competence or you can cater to identity politics, but you can’t have both.”
That was a frightening article, because it sets out the choices and consequences so plainly and persuasively.
It’s somewhat akin to the choices examined by Hayek: you can have socialism or freedom, but not both.
David Foster, thanks for your comment and link to your book review.
“I’m afraid we are going to find out the truth of this observation hard way.”
You understand the issue as well as anyone I have read or talked to. Kee trying to educate people. It might help.
JJ….thanks!
Owen,,.re complex systems..competence is certainly essential for running a complex system, but, also the degree of fragility of the system is greatly influenced by its design. See my post Coupling:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58361.html
David Foster @ 11:06: Thanks, yes, and I am a fan of “ChicagoBoyz.” Agree about fragility and its dependence on, inter alia, closeness of coupling. Maybe there is a rule that as systems grow more complex they implicitly couple more subsystems and the “average closeness” (interdependence? Lack of redundancy?) goes up, thus making the system tend toward greater fragility. IOW if you aren’t competent enough (experienced and canny enough) to keep designing-in more resilience and redundancy, the systems you build will get shakier as they get bigger. Something like that.