Current mood:

-pensive-

Be glad we're not in NYC (an editorial)
Frankly, I think we should be grateful that we're not in New York right now for this transportation shut down! It's been three days without the subway or buses.

Yes, transit workers go on strike more often over here, but the outcome is less severe. Usually there will be a skeleton tube service available that you can cram yourself onto or there are the buses.

Whereas London can't handle heavy snowfalls, NYC can't handle strikes. There is actually a law that prohibits public transportation workers going on strike. So, being Americans, what do they do? They do the opposite and completely go on strike. Total walk-out, fuck you defiance. And then in response the authorities threaten the workers with jail time. Of course over here, things are negotiated more civilly, there is tea, Metro articles and long speeches in Parliament on the subject and things actually get resolved - although it takes longer than in America where the melodramatics bring about a swift and merciless justice.

Like any big Western - or, by proxy, Japanese - city, New York is full of capitalists, so it keeps functioning. Money is to be made and people want to make their money so maintain the machine.

"Rain, sleet, snow or strike, we'll get to work," Paul Jensen, the office manager at the Weber Shandwick public relations firm in midtown, told the AP.

Yet, it's funny that there are thick traffic jams in Manhattan. The cars are bumper to bumper from 96th Street, gradually trailing each other down the island at the crack of dawn. Vehicles with less than four people in them are not allowed to enter the city.

A blizzard of human disobedience has hit the heart of the world - or so some think. What will its entrepreneurial sovereign (in the guise of a mayor) do to rectify the situation now?

So the motivation for this here treatise? Although the UK has been America's footservant for over a decade now, I am glad to be here rather than there and I'm proud of the way this country settles its internal disputes. They are resolved rather than the the use of an intellectual-shotgun process where might makes right.