Being kind in New York
I'm glad Rosemary Roberts' recent trip to New York was so heartwarming, but I find her "then and now" analysis simplistic and disturbing on two fronts:
1. There were good, kind, courteous people in New York in the '60s; I'm sorry she didn't encounter even one of them during her years there. Today, there are still kind, considerate people there; rude, inconsiderate ones, too. The good and the not-so-good probably exist in the same ratios that they do right here in Greensboro.
2. Her conclusion that it was only in the aftermath of Sept. 11 that New Yorkers learned to "engage and be nice" suggests that somehow New Yorkers needed this tragedy to learn to be "nice." That calls to mind the logic that some expressed that AIDS was just the tragedy the people in my Greenwich Village community needed to learn how to live right.
In trying to make sense of the unfathomable, we must be careful not to draw spurious connections.
When we infer that tragedy can serve to illustrate the error of one's ways, we tread in dangerous waters; one cannot begin to assume knowledge of what intrinsically personal lessons have been taught in the wake of the horrific.
Kim Leipham Freedman
Greensboro
Comments (2)
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One thing is sad for Rosemary: She has to cater to these very people who refuse to step into life until conditions are favorable.
Posted on April 2, 2005 2:44 PM
Poor Baby Rosemary. She probably was in New York during the permissive era of John V Lindsay ( a liberal she no doubt voted for ) I was there and I got a Rude. Bet she ain't never got no real Rude.
Posted on April 3, 2005 12:48 AM