Watching the marvelous 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada makes me long for the New York of the before times, meaning the pre-COVID-19 New York.
In the movie, starring Meryl Streep, we see people on the streets, in restaurants, fashion shows, art galleries, and in the workplace (the offices of the fashion magazine Runway) without a face covering, without social distancing, without a single hand sanitizer dispenser in sight.
If only we could bring back that New York ASAP!
On the sidewalk at the northwest corner of Broadway and 110th Street and the sidewalk at the northeast corner of Broadway and 106th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, someone wrote with a blue marker pen this message: "IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY 11-07-20." Obviously, it was to commemorate Joe Biden's defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
But despite our elation over Trump's defeat, we shouldn't forget that that doesn't mean he will fade away. It just means he will no longer occupy the White House and that he will no longer be in power.
You can be sure his presence will be felt in other ways via Twitter, rallies, conservative talk radio, etc., criticizing and belittling Biden and the Democrats every chance he gets.
Trump will definitely refuse to go gently off the stage. His enormous ego will not allow it.
This past summer, a young black woman stood in line about three or four people ahead of me, outside the Trader Joe's supermarket on Columbus Avenue, near 93rd Street, in Manhattan. She carried a canvas tote bag that was printed on the side with this message: "Reading Can Seriously Damage Your Ignorance." In the center of the words was a drawing of an open book.
Being a book lover, the message struck a chord with me. I thought it was a wonderful way to promote the reading of books and to celebrate the life of the mind.
Radio talk show host Thom Hartmann, a liberal, once briefly interviewed a scholar who worked at a libertarian think tank. The scholar had written a paper regarding the colonization of the moon as a social experiment.
That idea got me to thinking: what if lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people established a moon colony? Would that society be just and egalitarian or corrupt and totalitarian?
