Adams rhetoric won’t rectify the migrant crisis
Mayor Adams asked some very rhetorical questions while opening his latest Potemkin town hall Wednesday night on the Upper West Side: “So, as you ask me a question about migrants, tell me what role you played. How many of you organized to stop what they’re doing to us? How many of you were part of the movement to say, we’re seeing what this mayor is trying to do and [the crisis is] destroying New York City?
Read that again, without the brackets City Hall inserted into its transcript.
This is the same Adams who days earlier declared that “It is time to stop this madness and allow capable, able, willing, and ready people to work, to contribute to our society and have a place in the American Dream ... Let them work. Let them work.”
And the same Adams whose NYPD keeps raiding migrant shelters to confiscate the unlicensed mopeds parked outside that the men staying inside use to work for the delivery apps.
Those raids seem to be part of City Hall’s increasingly aggressive attempts to dissuade migrant men in particular from coming here after crossing the border, following July’s pathetic plan to pass out flyers at the border telling people newly arrived how unaffordable New York City is.
There’s an exchange in the “Analects,” which collect the wisdom of Confucius as supposedly recorded by his disciples, that applies here:
Zi Lu said: “The monarch of the state of Wei wants you to govern the country, what is the first thing you plan on doing?”
Confucius said: “First it is necessary to rectify the names.”
Zi Lu said: “Is that really what has to be done? You are being too pedantic, aren’t you now? How will you rectify these names?”
Confucius said: “Zhong You, you are too unrefined. A gentleman, faced with the matter that he does not understand, takes a skeptical attitude. If names are not correct, one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, and if one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, affairs cannot be managed successfully. If affairs cannot be managed successfully, rites and music will not be conducted. If rites and music are not conducted, punishments will not be suitable. And if punishments are not suitable, the common people will not know what to do. So, when the gentleman uses names, it is necessary to be able to speak so that people understand. If one can say it, one can definitely do it. A gentleman should not be careless with words.
Jumping ahead 2,500 years, Mao Zedong hijacked Confucius’ phrase when he launched the Yan’an Rectification Movement while holed up with his guerilla army in the mountains during World War II, to begin separating China’s Communist Party from the Soviets and consolidating his own power and cult of personality within it.
More than 30,000 party members were purged and 10,000 killed in a thought reform that became the template for the atrocities and struggle sessions to come.
Mao’s appropriation aside, the ladies and gentlemen governing New York these days, including a growing number of socialists, should think about suitable punishments and the necessity of speaking so that people understand.
New York is a place where the gap between how the rules are written and how they’re practiced keeps widening along with the gap between the views of the public and those of the political class about suitable punishments.
Where e-bikes were legalized to protect an invaluable work tool for migrants even as the FDNY is belatedly warning about how dangerous their lithium-ion battery fires can be and while the NYPD is confiscating similar rides.
A place where “justice involved” people are still waiting, two-and-a-half years after pot legalization here, for nearly non-existent and soon to be worthless conditional licenses to sell the stuff while unlicensed stores are profitably popping up in seemingly every vacated storefront. Meantime, the mayor alternates between empty talk about educating those illegal operations and their landlords and empty talk about punishing them.
Adams’ position on migrants is in line with those of many New Yorkers and he’s hardly the only leader to mis-use words, but I’m picking on him because he led himself to the migrant-bashing part of his town hall — “stop what they’re doing to us” — from an opening monologue about how “we turned this city around in 20 months.” Really?! That’s wild, Trump-y swagger. Even his doom-saying is in that register: This is the biggest disaster! The most unfair thing!
New Yorkers just want clarity, and to have things called by their names.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.