I must admit that although I have a profound love for New York City, I also hold the belief that new yorkers are rude and insensitive. Although this is a prejudice, my stance on this matter was constructed through years of listening to family fears and horror stories about the people in the city, from the glazed over look in the eyes of those riding the subway and feeling their elbows unapologetically pushed into my ribs as they rush in and out, and from noticing that they choose to caress a little ball up and down in a phone than actually engage in conversation with those around them. It often seems that people here care very little about what occurs around them.
But something happened in the subway the other day that made me question the myth of the rude new yorker. As we were going through the tunnel from Astoria to Manhattan on the Q train, a tall pale woman standing right across from me in the wagon starts tilting her head down and drops her bag on the floor. As I watch this I see the person sitting in front of her gives her her seat and folds her newspaper to use it as a fan against her face. In less than two seconds, three more people were blowing air in the woman's face with their reading materials, while the woman sitting next to her offered her a candy to boost her sugar; she refused to take it, and the woman offering insisted firmly until she put the candy in her mouth and closed her increasingly pale lips to suck on it. Five minutes after she was feeling much better and everyone who helped her had reached their destination. The woman sitting next to her offered to stay until she reached her stop; she refused, but as the helping woman stepped out of the wagon, the pale woman had regained some color in her face and grinned placidly.
When I saw this simple act of kindness, it contested the generalized notion that I entertained for years, and made me wonder if new yorkers are really that disconnected from what is happening around them. I tried to step away from observing them and observed myself as i rode the subway, as I walked the streets, and I shared the elevator with people and found that I don't act very differently from what I criticize. I also realized that this rudeness is all an act. New Yorkers are not rude, they are living in an incredibly overwhelming city that bombards them with stimuli in every way, shape, and form, all the time, and the only way to remain sane within the mess is to disconnect from it. When you live here you see people sleeping in the cold streets, people high in a drug stupor acting violent, singers, dancers, vendors, beautiful art, disturbing images, and all within a single walk. It seems that remaining fully connected to the city's intensity will not make people less rude, but more saturated.
As I think about it, this rudeness does not seem to be something endemic of new yorkers; in New York City, there are people from everywhere in the planet and to say they are all rude is to deny the niceness of the whole world. However, it remains important for me to discover and experience the spots in the city where people feel more at ease, where they are able to connect with others more pleasantly, and where life is not ruled by outer pressures as much. These gems of a places exist in the city, and finding them is what I love most about living here.
