HATE IN NYC

Here’s an email that says a lot:

Tuesday night I ventured over to Herald Square, where delegates had to be escorted into the Garden by riot police. An angry throng of demonstrators was lined along 32nd Street to “greet” them with screams, jeers, placards, raised middle fingers and the vilest form of name-calling. The bile and hate was palpable and, as a lifelong New Yorker, I found the offensive display hugely embarrassing. This is not how a world-class city behaves.

There were at least 200 people at the corner where I was located, but one woman in particular caught my attention. She was standing beside me, yacking away on her cell phone, when she would pause periodically to scream at passing delegates (at decible levels I thought only a garbage truck could manage) “Fuck you!!! Get out!!!” When I finally turned to her — she was practically yelling in my ear — and told her to “chill out,” her eyes almost exploded with anger. I reminded her that these people were just human beings and entitled to a modicum of respect. That prompted her to unleash a vicious tirade against me that was mostly incomprehensible. Sensing that this was getting ugly, I quietly made my way out of the crowd, with the woman screaming after me “shame on you!!!”

Every group — left wing or right wing — has its unhinged fanatics, but the Bush-hating mob that decended on New York this week is clearly in a class by itself. Everyone ought to have the right to express their dissent, but what I’ve seen so far has less to do with exercising Constitutional rights than it has to do with intimidation, shakedowns and unadulterated hate.

This does not only come from one side, of course. But the pathologies now affecting the far left are as real and as deep as those afflicting the far right. They deserve each other; but they do not deserve to usurp the discourse in the next two months.