The Water is Wide, I Can’t Cross Over

What do we make of a morning like today’s? A torrential rainstorm that felled the subway system as easily as a tornado felled some trees in South Brooklyn swept swiftly across the city at dawn.

Lamentations have been wailed from Times Square to the Time Warner Center, from Bayside Queens to the hardest hit, Bay Ridge Brooklyn.

There’s nothing original that I can add to these stories of inconvenience. I was wet and I waited, and waited, and waited.

I resent elected officials like Mayor Bloomberg and appointees like the MTA president Lee Sander telling us, in effect, to toughen up, shrug it off, be broad shouldered New Yorkers. The tales that workers told today of the risks they took to get to their jobs testify to our determination and loyalty to our jobs and employers. That’s unquestionable. We did our jobs today to earn an honest dollar. Did they?

Isn’t it galling that Sanders thinks the way to communicate information to stranded travelers about service disruptions and shut downs is to tell us to visit the MTA website rather than staff the stations with workers who are informed and carrying bullhorns?

Until the City realizes how much the continued weakness of our public services is affecting the business bottom line, in terms of lost GDP and harm to small business health, it seems they won’t take notice that monopolistic public service ‘governors’ like the MTA and Con Edison are failing in their contracts with the public.

The next time the subway system is taken down by 3 inches of water what if each of us loyal workers turned around and stayed home? What if we didn’t show up for work simply because we couldn’t get there? Do you think the business owners that hold those pricey long term leases the real estate developers in the past decade have shackled them to would scream that the failure of public services is hurting business and reducing collectible taxes by NYC and NYS? Would our representatives listen, hear, and act then?

Let’s give credit to politicians Eric Gioia and Michael Gianaris of Queens who’ve been on Con Ed since last summer’s extended power failure in Queens like Anderson Cooper was on New Orleans two years ago. They’re vocal, mouthy watchdogs and public servants who rail on our behalf. Can you say your representative is doing that for you?

In the past six years we’ve been doing a lot of walking:

We walked home in grief on September 11th, 2001.
We walked home under darkening skies the summer of 2003 during the Con Ed blackout.
We walked to work and home for two days in bitter weather when the MTA workers struck during the holiday season in December 2005.
We walked when the steampipe exploded near Grand Central Station three weeks ago.
We walked this morning through knee-high puddles and from five boroughs to get to work.

If Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Spitzer, NYC Council President Quinn, and each of our elected officials don’t begin more rigorous oversight of the directors of these public services, as it is their ethical, moral and constitutional responsibility to do, would they do so if…

… we walked?

More than resenting their indifference to how hard we’re trying to work around their failures I resent that each of these episodes is a press release to terrorists announcing the WWWWH of New York’s systemic vulnerabilities. If only our infrastructure and our representatives were as strong as we are together.