Never-ending harassment

By Alex P. Vidal

 

“If bigots behave like bigots, it’s not a huge surprise.”—Salman Rushdie

AFTER hurriedly disembarking from the Queens-bound F subway train in the Delancey Street-Essex Street Station past 2 o’clock in the afternoon March 18, I approached the two New York Police Department (NYPD) cops as they entered the main door of the subway turnstile, used in subway systems and other mass-transit systems to check patrons’ tickets.

I told them “I needed help” and narrated I experienced another harassment (my second in six days) from an emotionally distraught man minutes earlier inside the train while on my way to Queens from Brooklyn.

“Are you hurt? Do you need medical attention?” asked one of them.

“No, I’m OK,” I quickly retorted. “I’m just worried that the man might attack me again if he sees me before I reach my destination.”

I told them the incident happened when the train had just passed by the York Station and there were two other passengers aside from me and the assailant.

I said I wasn’t supposed to be in that station but I needed to avoid the unidentified toughie; my final destination would be at the 74^th Station on Roosevelt Avenue, Queens.

“You mean it happened in Brooklyn?” asked the same cop. “I would advise you to stay here (he pointed to the small office outside the turnstile) and wait for the next train. There’s nothing we can do now as we can’t chase him if he’s on the train that left and where you just came from.”

I knew that York Station was part of Brooklyn, but I had no idea that Delancey Street-Essex Street Station was already part of Manhattan.

I waited for about eight to 10 minutes for the next F train and followed the cop’s advice.

 

-o0o-

 

After taking the incoming F train, which had more than 20 passengers, I managed to reach the 74^th Station unscathed.

As of this writing, I was planning to write anew NYPD Commissioner Dermot Francis Shea regarding the incident.

On March 12 evening, or several hours after I experienced a scary verbal harassment from an angry man who mistook me for “a Chinese” on board the F train bound for Coney Island in Brooklyn, I e-mailed Commissioner Shea to report what happened.

After several minutes, I received this reply: “Your City of New York Correspondence Number is  #1-1-9742727. Thank you for contacting the City of New York. Your message has been forwarded to the appropriate agency for review and handling.”

It seems it’s no longer safe to take the subway train as long as there is a pandemic.

Some ignorant and hateful individuals think the Chinese brought the coronavirus to the United States.

Every now and then, stories of harassment and acts of violence have been reported these past weeks. Most of the victims were Asian Americans, and the hatred toward the “China Virus” has gone from bad to worse that some people seemed no longer interested to openly tackle the subject matter.

The subway system is the main public transportation system in New York. It is one of the oldest and largest public transportation systems in the world (in terms of number of stations).

With some 5.5 million riders on a given weekday, it is one of the primary modes of transportation for the majority of New Yorkers and tourists.

The system is operated by a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

When will the harassment and bigotry stop? No one knows.

Let’s continue to protect ourselves at all times, as I used to counsel the two prizefighters inside the ring before the bout.

 

-o0o-

 

In the lengthy introductory essay of For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand argues that America and Western civilization are bankrupt, and that the cause of the bankruptcy is the failure of philosophy: specifically, the failure of philosophers and intellectuals to define and advocate a philosophy of reason.

In the subsequent selections, culled from her novels, Rand presents the outline of her philosophy of reason, which she calls Objectivism.

These excerpts cover major topics in philosophy–from Objectivism’s basic axioms to its new theory of free will to its radical ethics of rational egoism to its moral-philosophic case for laissez-faire capitalism.

For the New Intellectual contains some of Rand’s most important passages on other philosophers, including Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche.

Many of its selections also develop Rand’s unprecedented critique of altruism—the notion that our basic moral obligation is to live for others.

Why do Rand’s novels contain often-lengthy philosophic speeches?

Because the speeches are crucial to the story: to advancing its plot and capturing the characters’ motivations.

Rand’s goal as a fiction writer was to present her conception of the ideal man.

But her view of good and evil differed so radically from others that she had to originate her own philosophy.

“I had to do it, because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with most of the existing philosophical theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher…”

The speeches are “necessarily condensed summaries, because the full statement of the subjects involved is presented, in each novel, by means of the story. The events are the concretes and the particulars, of which the speeches are the abstract summations.”

Both together are needed to make her vision of the ideal real.

 

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two dailies in Iloilo)