New York, New York, the F train is not a means of transport for the faint of heart.
Coney Island-Stillwell Ave was the last stop for Debrina Kawam, a homeless woman, who was sleeping on the train when she was set on fire by a Guatemalan migrant on her last Sunday morning.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Kawam had likely been avoiding the homeless shelters because they were overrun with violent illegals, but the precaution did her no good.
The last we saw of her, she was standing and burning, while people walked by or filmed with their phones at the last stop in view of the cold seaside air.
The murder on the F train took place weeks after Daniel Penny, a Marine Corps veteran, who had been:
[L]et off’ after heroically intervening to stop a career maniac—who previously assaulted a number of elderly women with no consequences—restraining him on a Brooklyn bound F train.
The F train, traveling from Jamaica, Queens to Coney Island, will take you from JFK Airport to the beach and it is the second longest subway route after the A train which was made famous by Duke Ellington. The 27-mile length of the route makes the F train a magnet for homeless, scam artists, subway performers, and assorted crazies who know they can enjoy a ride of over an hour and a half (on a good day) with scenic views, three boroughs, and a selection of comfortable seats, with room to stretch out your feet from a window seat.
There was a time when subway personnel walked through the cars, warning anyone putting their feet up, but these days they have far bigger problems, not just old-fashioned pickpockets and muggers, but random stabbings, serial sexual predators who go in and out of the system, and crazies who push waiting riders onto the tracks when they get too close to the yellow line.
On New Year’s Eve, a man was pushed in front of a subway train. He somehow survived the experience with a broken skull. Subway stabbings have become so routine there were two on New Year’s Day within 20 minutes. The next day an MTA employee was stabbed in the armpit. The only thing still distinguishing today’s subways from the worst days of the seventies and eighties is the lack of car-to-car graffiti that had become typical in that area.
The subway has always been a metaphor for New York City:
Its trains rushing between the depths of tunnels and the heights overlooking busy streets linked a bewildering city into one whole.
Over a hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer sketched the subway as a collection:
[Of] tired clerks, pale girls, street cleaners, businessmen, boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves [thundering] through the dark.
But the balance of power has since shifted away from the clerks, girls, boys, and businessmen, over to the drunkards, thieves, along with the killers, and the monsters.
The trouble with the subway, as with the city,
is that some take it to go somewhere else,
while others use it to take advantage of others.
Overrun by criminals, homeless, and migrants:
[T]he subway is no longer a transportation system, but a colony with a permanent population who form a gauntlet that the rest of us have to run to get to anywhere else in the city.
Congestion is caused by the squeeze of more and more people into a violent and dangerous system, and what makes the subway violent and dangerous is a direct reflection of a fallen city.
The fundamental difference between the city and all other forms of living is density.
In towns and villages, the proportion of private space to public space is weighted toward the individual, but cities are all collective public spaces with very small private spaces in which to survive.
Cities are built by utopians but populated by dystopian[s]. The difference lies in the society.
Unlike less dense communities, cities offer little refuge or escape from public spaces into private ones. And a social breakdown in a city is felt immediately. The pandemic, for example, dramatically changed New York City.
[T]he tension in the air told [those observant enough to sense it] that nowhere in the city was safe anymore.
The subway, at its best is a means of connecting the city’s varied neighborhoods. The New York City subway is why Los Angeles and other cities long resisted rapid public transportation—to keep the bad elements from spreading.
While other cities can gate off the worst of the problem, retreat to the suburbs, and hope that tolls and the cost of car ownership can keep roaming maniacs at bay, there is no such defense in the city.
This may best be explained by the use of a painful yet appropriate analogy:
Like heroin shot [in]to the veins, whatever is in the city hits its subways first. Drugs, violence, terror, pain, and fear travel along the lines.
They roam the byzantine interiors of stations left over from the convoluted merging of the city’s different systems, they live in them and kill in them.
Final thoughts: Just as the subway is a metaphor for the city—“and the city is very sick”—so too is the city a metaphor for the country. And the country is very sick.
America dodged a bullet with the re-election of Donald J. Trump. Now may God grant him the wherewithal to return our beloved country to her former glory.
God speed President Trump.
