{"id":137412,"date":"2020-12-19T16:58:02","date_gmt":"2020-12-19T13:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/nyc-progressives-make-it-their-mission-to-afflict-the-comfortable\/"},"modified":"2020-12-19T16:58:02","modified_gmt":"2020-12-19T13:58:02","slug":"nyc-progressives-make-it-their-mission-to-afflict-the-comfortable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/nyc-progressives-make-it-their-mission-to-afflict-the-comfortable\/","title":{"rendered":"#NYC progressives make it their mission to afflict the comfortable"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#NYC progressives make it their mission to afflict the comfortable<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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There was no shortage of suffering in New York in 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic, economic hardship, rioting and street violence, there\u2019s been plenty of misery to go around. But according to some prominent elected officials and bureaucrats, the fun\u2019s only getting started. They seem to see it as part of their job \u2014 really, their duty \u2014 to make sure that New Yorkers feel the pain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At a Brooklyn rally in early June commemorating the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams gave an impassioned speech. Before a crowd of thousands of mourners \u2014 who gathered en masse despite the risk of exposure to COVID and the city\u2019s state of emergency forbidding public assembly \u2014 Williams denounced critics of the protesters. \u201cThe people who have been affected the most have been uncomfortable for 500 years!\u201d he thundered. \u201cIf one person is comfortable, we all should be comfortable. But if one person isn\u2019t, we all shouldn\u2019t rest.\u201d As a prescript<\/a>ion for society, this standard of comfort would be hard to universalize. But Williams elaborated: \u201cWe must always, always comfort the afflicted. But in order to get justice, we must afflict the comfortable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

A similar sentiment was voiced that same week by Brooklyn Councilmember Brad Lander \u2014 like Williams a steadfast political progressive and long-standing member of the Working Families Party. During a June Web cast with former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger \u2014 on the topic of \u201cElectoral Politics and the Jewish Obligation to Advocacy\u201d \u2014 Lander expounded at length on the difficulty in being an outspoken leader on racial justice, while recognizing one\u2019s own white privilege. \u201cSometimes our liberal, Jewish social<\/a> justice worlds on the Upper West Side and for sure in Park Slope have a kind of comfort about them,\u201d Lander explained. He explained \u201can ideal\u201d that he had heard articulated, \u201cfrom a Christian, rather than a Jew, of \u2018comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,\u2019 which I have made a core ideal of my social-justice activism.\u201d In a 2015 interview, Lander called the principle a \u201cdeep, sometimes painful, but often joyous responsibility.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Brooklyn
NYC leaders including Brad Lander and Erin Drinkwater say they are guided by the principle of \u201cafflicting the comfortable.\u201d<\/figcaption>
Getty Images; Facebook<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In July, the city moved 700 homeless single men into hotels on the densely populated and famously tolerant Upper West Side, purportedly as a response to the pandemic. Residents were stunned to find their neighborhood turned overnight into a skid row, with nonstop open drug sales and drug use, public sex acts, and rampant street harassment of women and girls. During a contentious local Community Board Zoom meeting about the issue, Erin Drinkwater, a deputy commissioner of intergovernmental and legislative affairs at the Department of Social Services, spoke blandly about the need for \u201ccompassion\u201d and implied that the concerned neighbors were racist for opposing the city\u2019s move. Following the meeting, Drinkwater tweeted \u201cComfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable.\u201d When asked what she meant by this, she said that it was a quotation from the Bible\u2019s Book of James and that it spoke to her sense of mission.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One might ask why a social-services functionary in New York City would cite the Bible in defense of public policy \u2014 except that the quotation is not even from the Bible. In fact, it is from Finley Peter Dunne, a popular Chicago columnist from the 1890s who invented a humorous character named Mr. Dooley, an Irish bartender who delivered his wisdom in dialect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The original quotation, in which Mr. Dooley described the function of the news<\/a>paper: \u201cTh\u2019 newspaper does ivrything f\u2019r us. It runs th\u2019 polis foorce an\u2019 th\u2019 banks, commands th\u2019 milishy, controls th\u2019 ligislachure, baptizes th\u2019 young, marries th\u2019 foolish, comforts th\u2019 afflicted, afflicts th\u2019 comfortable, buries th\u2019 dead an\u2019 roasts thim aftherward.\u201d Somehow, in a bizarre game<\/a> of \u201ccultural telephone,\u201d this mock-sonorous fiddle-faddle has gathered the effulgence of holy writ for progressives, who take it as descriptive of their \u201cjoyous responsibility.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

On the one hand, it\u2019s comical that this scrap of tabloid wit is taken so gravely by self-righteous officials. Properly speaking, isn\u2019t it their job to make people more comfortable, not to diminish comfort? But on the other hand, it\u2019s frightening to consider that New York is now run by progressive militants who appear to believe that their vocation is to \u201cafflict\u201d their constituents by disrupting their undeserved calm and comfort. Mass immiseration is not a side effect of bad policy; it is the policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal, where this piece first appeared<\/a>. His book, \u201cThe Last Days of New York,\u201d<\/a> will be published in May 2021.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#NYC progressives make it their mission to afflict the comfortable” There was no shortage of suffering in New York in 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic, economic hardship, rioting and street violence, there\u2019s been plenty of misery to go around. But according to some prominent elected officials and bureaucrats, the fun\u2019s only getting started. They seem…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/12\/jumaane-wiliams.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[87084,4953,5000],"class_list":["post-137412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-12-19-20","tag-new-york-city","tag-progressives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}