Adams is dreaming big
Sez city can lead U.S & the world, & ‘I’m ready’
In a rousing speech delivered to the city’s faith leaders Thursday, Mayor Adams urged the city to serve as a beacon of hope for the rest of the country and the entire globe in what he cast as a spiritual journey away from the darkness of the COVID pandemic and the fallout it has wrought.
Adams has focused much of his attention of late on the violence that’s gripped the city over the last two years, but on Thursday he framed his mission as more than that, presenting himself not only as a political leader for the city, but as a spiritual one as well.
“We are the epicenter of the virus, but we’re also the epicenter of hope. If we get up, America gets up. The way goes New York, goes America, and the way goes America, the way goes the globe,” he said to cascading applause. “This is our moment.”
His words at the interfaith breakfast were reminiscent of a message he delivered right before winning the Democratic nomination for mayor last year. Basking in that expected victory, he called himself “the face of the new Democratic Party” — a line that immediately raised eyebrows and signaled potentially greater ambitions.
On Thursday, it was clear Adams was once again offering himself as a national model — this time, one leading a city that he hopes will lead a nation out of a pandemic.
He began with riffs on the hate-based attacks being leveled at Asian-Americans and Jews in the city — and urged religious leaders to direct New Yorkers away from focusing on their differences and toward what they have in common.
He touched on gun violence, homelessness and mental illness — and while he has proposed policy prescriptions for each of those problems, he declared on Thursday that they require spiritual solutions as well.
His mother, who died during his mayoral campaign last year, served as an emotional touchstone for him several times during the speech, at turns invoking the homespun wisdom she shared with him as a boy and also her final message to him.
“My mother told me as a child, ‘Baby, if you live long enough, you’re going to find yourself in dark places. Those dark places can be burials or plantings.’ This is our moment of plantings. COVID is a dark place. Gun violence is a dark place. Homelessness is a dark place,” he said. “Let’s take these dark places and not tell New Yorkers they are burials — but that they are plantings.”
He urged the faith community to avoid fear — and do what they are called to do — offer hope instead.
“I’m ready for this moment, and let me tell you something, there’s not one day that I woke up afraid, not one day I felt unsure. With all of the challenges, all the uncertainties, fear is not part of anything in my DNA,” he said. “I want this moment so bad because I know people are hurting in ways that they never thought they would hurt before.”
He then dove into how he wants to address that pain with a rallying cry for religious leaders to speak with “those young men who are pulling the triggers” and the children filling the city’s homeless shelters and the homeless men who are laid out on the city’s subway cars.
“You can’t be just a preacher. You can’t be just a rabbi. You can’t be just a cop. You can’t be just a doctor. You got to go beyond that and give justice to people who are in need,” he said, his voice growing hoarse. “This is the moment to go beyond who we are and move to the level of who we can become. Be fearless in this pursuit that we’re on. Don’t sit back and watch this moment pass us by. This is our time.”
To make it so, the mayor asked for faith leaders to pray for him, as he invoked his mother once again.
“I just heard her say, ‘You got this,’ ” he recalled of their last moments together. “Whatever it takes for you, whatever someone said or whispered to you or held your hand during a difficult time, I want you to dig into that and hold onto that — because absence from the body is present in the spirit.
“This is a journey of spirituality. And many people, when I say it, they don’t get it. But you do,” he said. “I am not here because of my abilities. I am here because of my spirituality.”