new york street arab

Being some reflections of a man selling art on the streets

No. 2 – The tears of Japan and the humans disguised as robots

The Buddhists say that everything is coming from you. It’s the individual that creates their own reality.

Everyone knows the truth of this concept (if I go about my day all moody and sullen, I’ll get more than my share of negative responses) as well as its limitations (if someone straps electrodes to my private parts and turns up the voltage my good vibrations are likely to be of limited efficacy in alleviating the pain).

This weekend I found myself in a funk. The weather could have been a factor. Manhattan was bathed in golden sunshine all weekend but it was cold. Back to January temperatures, hovering around zero (celsius), a bitter wind blew hard Saturday. Strong winds are the enemy of the street artist and, on Saturday, the howls and cat calls of Mother Wind were making mischief, blowing canvasses in to 14th street, sending CDs on to the sidewalk, and making all those potential customers walk briskly by, looking for shelter.

Though the wind had dropped off Sunday I was out of sorts. I’d had an argument with my girlfriend before I came out and as I watched the Sunday crowds wander by I felt an enmity for humanity overtook me. Those who stopped provoked me because I felt a disconnect and those didn’t stop provoked me even more, for ignoring my art.

Feeling angry I went to get coffee and asked another vendor, Mush, if he ever felt like killing everyone in the square and feeding their carcasses to the rats. Mush, who sells exuberant and eye-catching canvasses that celebrate New York’s jazz age, is Japanese and way too polite to find common cause with my mad ravings. He looked at me wide-eyed. “Really?” He said.

“Well, not really…But kind of…Well, actually yes. Right now I want
everyone dead.”

“Wow!”

“I know. Do you want a coffee?”

In the Pret A Manger they gave me a free cream cheese sandwich, which lightened my mood some but I was still bubbling over with barely suppressed rage.

When I came outside I saw something that almost tipped me over the edge, and which brings me back to my original point about creating your reality.

In my first blog I mentioned how the square was scene last weekend for scores of Japanese raising money for the victims of the recent natural disasters there. Yesterday those numbers had dwindled to a young Japanese mom, who had set up a stand where she was giving out bracelets and slices of cake. On her small table was a bucket for donations and, beside her, her small daughter sat.

When you are confronted with a scene like that, what do you bring to it? I think for most people it’s relatively obvious. Here is a young woman thousands of miles from her homeland, feeling helpless no doubt as she watched this tragedy unfold, wanting to do something to help and seeing an opportunity to teach her daughter a simple moral lesson about human charity. As an onlooker, therefore, you bring a sense of empathy and compassion for what the Japanese have collectively gone through in the last weeks, and perhaps an admiration for this young woman’s passion.

Unfortunately, there are people in this city who, either through fear or a total lack of imagination, forgo these emotional responses in favour of a more immediate concern. These are the people – and you all know a few – who bring their job into every scenario. Concerned citizens of New York, these people are your real enemies. They are the same people who that phrase, “the banality of evil,” referred to when trying to understand why ordinary people so readily took up the nastiest elements of Nazi policy in Germany.

They are the people who, in perpetuity, are just doing their job. In Iraq or in the Welfare Office, lobbying on behalf of arms manufacturers, marketing junk food to obese children. Just doing their job.

By no means are they always in a uniform but the one yesterday was. She was an employee of the Parks Department and like so many guarded and fearful souls she hid behind shades. When she looked at the young mum and daughter she heard only one word ring out: ‘violation’. And perhaps somewhere beyond that, much quieter, the echo of another word: ‘promotion.’

She wrote the young mom a ticket for $250.

“What are you doing? You’re not writing her a ticket surely?”

From behind the glass wall of her aviators, she did not consider me worthy of a response.

“Not now,” said one of her lackeys, a black guy who was standing pathetically behind her looking half-ashamed.

“I just want to help my people,” said the Japanese girl, tearing up.

“I’m going to help you,” I told her when she came by my stand with her husband later on, after the goons from the Parks Department had sloped off.

I’d like to. Maybe you can tell me how? My first thought is to write something for the NY papers. Let me know if you have any other ideas. Something to teach the androids that there’s more to life than following orders. Create our own world; one breath at a time.

* The title of these blog posts was taken from an essay about New York’s population of homeless children written in 1890. In no way, shape or form is it meant as a reflection on people of Arab descent. I just like the words.