A CITY’S GREATNESS SHOULD NOT BE MEASURED BY STRIFE

Chicago may be my ancestral home, but unless I have the rite of my annual weekend in New York, my hands tremble uncontrollably: ogling the Armani suits at Bergdorf’s, obscenely overstuffed pastrami-on-rye at Second Avenue Deli, meandering through Little Italy, Sabbath pageantry at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the trek up Broadway to Zabar's, cheesecake at the Carnegie.

New York's mystique is also the source of its perennial condemnation, the city of jumbled contradictions, the oxymoronic coexistence of incredible prosperity and poverty, power and powerlessness, refinement and raunch. This is no longer a city of charming kaleidoscopic contrasts. Its vaunted electricity is a cacophony of caricatures of urban life, the most grotesque exaggerations of what the rest of us rubes call “daily reality.”

It is not just that the homeless sleep in urine-stenched doorways, but that they sleep in doorways of restaurants where one could nonchalantly drop $200 for a single plate of pasta. It is not just that panhandlers panhandle, but that they panhandle so belligerently right outside the Plaza, where $500 might buy you a night in the barest no-frills cubicle. The well-groomed society matron no longer dares wear her pocketbook fashionably slung from her shoulder, but strapped across her cloth-coated chest, for the ever present fear of being mugged or spattered with pig’s blood on even the most elegant avenues.

The absurd caricatures of New York's opulence and squalor remind me of the Russian immigrant, newly arrived in Israel, who was taken to see the opulent gardens of Baron Rothschild's Tomb. Obviously impressed, the newcomer gave out a cry: “Oy, now that's what I call living!"

New York's very existence depends on clashing social forces pulling against each other with equal-but-opposite intensity. It is not built on the flimsiest consensus for the common good, but on the energy emitted by millions of contentious interest groups struggling at cross-purposes to each other.

There is a transcendent lesson to be learned: New York is not alone among great cities that exist by virtue of a frenetic tension between intransigent, polarized social forces. Too many cities attain their purported greatness through an system of angry stand-offs that pit rich against poor, black against white, immigrants against “true Americans,” Christian against Jew, powerful against powerless.

One of the inevitable price tags on urban growth is the ever increasing polarity between disparate groups, the ever intensifying contention between discordant forces, the ever widening gap between have's and have not's. The difficulty of building a community by forging a common agenda increases exponentially. That is not entirely unhealthy; even the healthiest cities need occasional shots of dissonance to jumpstart the torpid processes of social change.

Atlanta, the noisily touted exemplar of the New South, is failing the test. Charlotte only sense of manifest destiny is to be “the next Atlanta.” Now Greenville owns the imposing challenge of being at the critical juncture between provincial smallness and schizophrenic megalopolis. The ever increasing distrust and acrimony between races and classes, the inestimable poverty and homelessness, the drug-induced terror in our streets, the kids killing other kids just for the hell of it, right here in our not-so-long-ago bucolic loveable little town should make us tremble as much in fright as in anger.

How do we prevent Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest from becoming the rule in a community like ours that has so much potential for good? Well, must start talking with each other, not merely preaching our biases to the amen corner. No other remedy can possibly succeed unless it we build it on reasonable people who are resolved to speaking peaceably with each other, no matter how much they think they disagree.

Our goal must be to diligently minimize the influences that polarize and play off group against group and individual against individual. We know too well how easily race or religion can split a community apart. We know too well how easily "social and economic progress" becomes a euphemism for the continued subjugation of the poor and powerless.

Any city on the cusp of largeness must redouble its efforts to maximize opportunities that bring people of dissimilar interests together for the common good. It must guard more vigilantly than ever against becoming a community of ludicrous caricatures in which the magnitude of poverty and prosperity becomes so absurd, and the people become so contentious, that the accepted answer to the question "Can you tell me what time it is?" is "F**k You!"

The maniacal tug-of-war that gives New York its energy should serve as stark warning to the rest of us whose cities aspire to greatness. What a pity and bitter irony it would be if the magnificent city we might build turns out to be an opulent garden with a tomb in place of its heart, over which a few fickle fools will say, "Now that's what I call living!"