I am writing from New York City now, my home for over a decade and the place I always thought would be my permanent home. Life offers up unexpected twists and turns, and I was dragged reluctantly away from the city, so I make it my business to visit as often as possible. Each time I’m here I seem to focus on different things (how much of my old neighborhood on the Lower East Side is overrun by NYU, how much leaner the general population is than in other (driving) parts of the country, how hard the city is on my feet, etc.).

On this visit it has become obvious to me why the city is so persistently democratic in its voting habits. Living here is an experience that requires daily accommodation to other people. A big part of that accommodation is the frequent necessity of waiting in line. The super-rich may have ways of avoiding lines, but most others, even the moderately rich, must wait for cabs and subways, for elevators and tickets and attention from clerks. In a city of over 8 million some form of waiting is a standard part of daily life. And waiting your turn with strangers, belly to back sometimes, is a humbling and equalizing experience. One must acknowledge the rights and dignity of others. One must behave with a modicum of civility. And it is rare not to feel that everyone, at least everyone in that line at that moment, is more the same than different.

Another fundamental element of New York life is walking on jam-packed streets, streets crammed with speedy young people, with the slow-moving elderly, with an unpredictable fringe element, people with shopping bags and people with deadlines, the manic and the chill, people in crisis and people browsing. And what is amazing is how it all seems to work. There is a dance of ducked shoulders, sudden leaps into the street, elaborate side-stepping. Collisions are rare—in fact I can’t remember that in all my years of New York walking I have ever been in a sidewalk collision. If you live here, and even if you’re just visiting, you learn to negotiate these crowded sidewalks, speeding and slowing when necessary, diving forward one minute, pausing the next for someone who needs deference. To walk the streets of New York is to learn that you are not the center of the universe, no matter who you are; you learn to compromise in a million small kind human ways. And this, to me, is what makes the city a truly exceptional and compassionate place. And deeply democratic, with both a small and a large D. 

We are all different and we all need understanding; nowhere is this more evident than in New York. And though it is no longer the city from which I write, it is still very much the point of view from which I write.