UNsafe in New York

Dees Illustration

Becky Akers
Lew Rockwell

New York City was under siege this week. Decent folk cowered at home while two-bit thugs stalked our streets, guarding the self-important sociopaths invading Manhattan.

Yep, the United Nations’ General Assembly met as always at this time of year, plotting to grab more power over the world, and the NYPD milked that for all the overtime it could get.

Were you to stroll around the skyscrapers in midtown, you’d assume you’re in occupied territory. Cops – phalanxes of them – clog every intersection, and movable, metal barricades fence off whole streets, confining New York’s disarmed populace to sidewalks as though we pose some sort of threat. Recall that many of the dictators bloviating at the UN have hundreds or thousands of rapes and murders, a war or two, torture and often even genocide to their credit, not to mention the usual plunder and theft. Yet Our Rulers fret about protecting them from us.

And so cops bar traffic, both foot and vehicular, from whatever streets the sociopaths’ motorcades will curse. Because, yes, even the tinhorn tyrant from Dirtpooristan, where the annual per-capita income is $1.31, cruises town with his entourage lolling in limousines, plural.

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If you don’t live in densely populated Manhattan, you may not appreciate the havoc cops wreak when they close streets. New York’s traffic is the stuff of nightmares for good reason: street-space is as scarce as innovative bureaucrats. There are far more cars than inches of paved road, so taking even one artery out of commission snarls traffic for miles.

Ditto for pedestrians. Manhattan is a walker’s paradise; you can live your entire life here and never own wheels because everything you need – and much that you don’t – lies within a few blocks of home. Even straphangers who ride the subways to work each morning still walk from their apartment to the station and, on the other end, from the terminal to the job. At any hour of the day, and often of the night, you’ll find at least a dozen pedestrians ambling along a single block, and many times that number during rush-hours.

But with the UN’s incursion, cops suddenly declare whole streets “frozen zones.” They’ll block the intersection with their cars, forcing other drivers to a halt. Ditto for the anyone caught at that moment on the sidewalk: we are forbidden to cross the street. It lies empty and clear until Their Highnesses have rolled past in regal isolation.

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