Once Burned

In what has to-date been a near-complete seasonal misfire, it was winter-like around here yesterday. And because we’ve had so few really cold days, it felt colder than it actually was. As I gazed out a subway car window into the chilly ether, I thought about Richard Kimble pondering his fate and seeing "only darkness." But then, he was on his way to death row. I was merely heading to Dyckman Street. 

There are, of course, meteorological reasons why it’s been an especially mild winter in the Northeast. It’s that famously fickle jet stream and not necessarily the by-product of human-induced climate change. Still, it’s pretty unsettling to learn that January 2020 was the warmest January—the world over—on record and 2019, the warmest year! There is a scientific consensus here. The debate, I suppose, is whether or not we should be seeing only darkness.

I’d like to think that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. But as I wander around, I see litter all over the place—much of it of the plastic variety. Exactly two weeks from today, single-use plastic bags are going the way of the Passenger Pigeon in New York State. Now, I am old enough to remember when plastic bags slowly but surely began replacing paper bags in supermarkets and other retailers. A lot of people were upset about that. I can still picture my mother hauling multiple paper bags full of groceries in her two hands—chock-full of glass and aluminum cans and bottles—from Bohack’s, a local supermarket just down the block. There were no handles on the bags with the big Bohack's “B” on them.

After a while, though, one and all acclimated to plastic and came to view such bags with affection. They were a great convenience and we soon couldn’t imagine life without them. Almost four decades later the bags are omnipresent. They are also in places they shouldn’t be—like the oceans and trees—with the closest thing there is to eternal life. We will eventually adapt to life without these ubiquitous plastic bags and be better for it. We lived without them before and we can do it again.

A now for another stroll down Memory Lane: I just read an article that compared the positively benign politics of the 1990s—when Bill Clinton was president and Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House—with today’s Bizarro World. The 1990s were a decade when the federal government ran surpluses—imagine that! It was a less paranoid time, too—pre-9/11—before cameras were everywhere and a thing called social media existed. The latter being the most anti-social, noxious playground ever conceived, a guarantor of never-ending nuttiness and perpetual bile.

It’s funny to think that Bill Clinton is a veritable pariah in the contemporary Democratic party, a Me-Too Movement poster boy for bad behavior. What a difference a couple of decades make! What a difference several years make! Four years ago, I felt the burn, as it were. When I pulled the lever for Bernie, it was my primal scream moment. Don’t get me wrong. I like Bernie and agree with a lot of what he says, particularly when he rants about Big Pharma and such. But I can see clearly now: I didn’t appreciate the party establishment’s coronation of Queen Hillary four years ago. And Bernie served as the ideal protest candidate.

But then was then and this is now. I am four years older and so is Bernie. I, though, am not recovering from a heart attack and pushing eighty. At the end of the day, too, I really don’t want an avowed socialist as president leading a revolution that most people don’t want. Lo and behold, I find myself supporting another guy who is pushing eighty—a guy that I voted for three times for mayor but had become disenchanted with because of his Nanny State mentality. I even wrote a blog essay entitled “The Bloomberg Is Off the Rose” in 2010. Boy, I’ve been doing this for a long time.

It’s 2020 now, not 2010, or even 2016. Once burned, I’ve thrown in with the billionaire with the financial wherewithal to defeat the wild-eyed socialist, who, I fear, would more than likely lose to the dangerously dishonest, vulgar, ignorant incumbent. Now, that's a guy you don’t want to see unleashed and pushing eighty in a second term! Life has so many its twists and turns. I guess it all boils down to this: One never knows…do one.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)