This week, Mayor deBlasio of New York clearly signaled that he had had enough for now. He was leaving the New York carriage horse fight to the animal rights people who started it. He was running away. The savage and expensive effort to put them out of business had failed, at least for now.
I was very happy, this story has dominated much of my writing life for a long time, I have worked hard at it. I believe it was an important victory for animals, for rationality, for the very idea of humanity.
Within minutes, I got a half dozen messages from people in the carriage trade, including this from one long-time driver and friend: “…by now you have seen the headlines about the Mayor, this turn of events is fantastic and wonderful news, thanks’ again for all of your help in the struggle to keep the horses where they belong.”
Another: “Jon, I am so happy, we want to buy you some drinks when you come to New York. A little while ago, our backs were to the wall, now people are cheering for us on the streets.”
Then, within minutes, a fierce online carriage horse advocate and former carriage driver named Eva Hughes – she is part of a prominent carriage trade family – posted a long and more wary message on my Facebook page:
“When I heard/saw the news, I did not whoop, holler, yell to my daughter upstairs, get on the phone, or run to FB to post a hurray status, or even smile. I pursed my lips and said internally, “hmmm….now what?” … But I have a very definite idea of what a victory would be, and it’s not the mayor mumbling that he doesn’t have enough votes right now.
“After 8 years and $2 million (extreme lowball estimate),” wrote Hughes,”NYCLASS is not folding its tent any time soon. They will regroup, and they’ll be back.” Hughes seemed uncomfortable at the idea of a a victory celebration, and was clearly unwilling to break out the champagne or stand down. “Perhaps they’ll wait for an opportune moment,” she wrote, “like the next accident that happens involving one of our horses. It could be tonight, next month, next year, or 5 years from now, but there will be an accident, just like anywhere else there are people and horses. They could strike while that iron is hot, galvanizing their supporters with ghoulish images and purple melodrama, descending on City Hall a la the villagers in Frankenstein.“
“After 8 years and $2 million (extreme lowball estimate),” wrote Hughes,”NYCLASS is not folding its tent any time soon. They will regroup, and they’ll be back.” Hughes seemed uncomfortable at the idea of a a victory celebration, and was clearly unwilling to break out the champagne or stand down. “Perhaps they’ll wait for an opportune moment,” she wrote, “like the next accident that happens involving one of our horses. It could be tonight, next month, next year, or 5 years from now, but there will be an accident, just like anywhere else there are people and horses. They could strike while that iron is hot, galvanizing their supporters with ghoulish images and purple melodrama, descending on City Hall a la the villagers in Frankenstein.“
Eva Hughes is fascinating and complex figure in the tribal world of the New York carriage trade, I have great respect and admiration for her thinking and her conviction. I should say in the interests of transparency that we have an uneasy relationship and she has not always been a fan of me or much of my writing or ideas. But she was the first person to suggest to me that the horses are part of a new social awakening regarding the future of animals in our world, and the end of the modern era of animal rights was upon us.
I must always credit her with that prescient idea.
_
If the mayor’s obvious retreat from the carriage fight is a victory – I think it is for sure – imagine this conversation of the carriage trade had been banned – it is a bittersweet one. It has left all kinds of suffering, casualties and uncertainties in it’s wake. It has been bitter and cruel and destructive in ways the media and most people outside of the controversy have not ever been willing to consider or to grasp. When people have been fighting for so hard and for so long, they can sometimes become what they hate, and it is easy enough to be permanently discouraged and to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
But Eva Hughes, for all of her gloom, got me to thinking, and the horses woke me up again in the middle of the night and I thought I should write about what has been won and what has been lost. And lot of things have been lost, a lot of mistakes have been made, mistakes that perhaps can never be fully corrected.
For now, the horses have been saved, for now, the jobs and way of life of the people in the carriage trade are secure. Nobody knows for how long. Political wise men and women in New York seem unanimous in thinking the mayor has had enough, the horses have mopped him up like spilt milk in a diner and he is bloody and bowed. He has much bigger troubles, bigger fish to fry, great ambitions.
The mayor’s crusade against the innocent horses was a disaster from the beginning, dumb, unknowing, and ill-conceived, especially in a city with so many big problems. The mayor never managed to articulate one good reason why the horses should be banned, or offer a single bit of evidence that they were suffering or mistreated. In the end, nobody believed him at all, and he ended up in a totally unnecessary and punishing brawl with animal lovers from all over the country, the actor Liam Neeson, and organized labor represented by the Teamsters Union. They know how to fight and lobby. They wiped up the floor with him.
The animal rights activists screaming for the blood of the carriage trade turned out to be the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, every single thing they offered was either a lie, loud, foolish, ridiculous, or insulting.
I don’t share Eva’s pessimism, she is too dark for me. But she is right in a very important way. Much has been lost, and it is good to recall it and honor it before there is too much dancing. (I hope the drivers do have a party in the park or the stables, I will certainly come, they deserve one. If they won’t, I might just throw one in the park for myself and my carriage driver friends.)
So she and I, it seems, are having one of those dialogues. But what has been lost?
– The very idea of security in America. The carriage trade is an immigrant trade. The owners and drivers are the sons and daughters of immigrants who came to American from impoverished, often repressive countries to find the American dream and pursue associations with and work with animals that sometimes dated back for centuries. One great grandson of a Russian immigrant told me of his great grandfather, who fled Stalin’s brutal takeover of private farms, a horrific campaign that cost millions of lives and ended private ownership of animals, most of whom starved to death or were butchered.
His grandfather, he said, fled to America to join the carriage trade because he said he knew that in America, no political leader could ever take his horses away from him and destroy his livelihood and security. He is grateful, he says that his grandfather is no longer alive.
What deBlasio did was awful in ways the media has never grasped or grappled with. He took the freedom and security away from people who cherished it, fought and worked for it, and trusted it. Here, government was never supposed to conspire with angry rich people to take the property of law-abiding people and their way of life away. But it did. People like Eva Hughes can never feel secure again, never trust that their children and grand-children can follow in their footsteps, carry on their work and traditions, keep their very cherished way of life.
And that way of life is lost, it can not be reclaimed.
It is not possible to count the college plans canceled, careers altered, houses not bought, appliances not purchased, plans changed because the people in the carriage trade have not known for at least eight years if they were going to have work next year, or even in a few months.
The mayor never once spoke with anyone in the carriage trade, met with them, visited their stables. He joined in the ugly animal rights campaign to dehumanize the people in the trade and portray them as abusers and callous, greedy thieves. The purpose of government, wrote John Locke, the founder of the idea of democracy, was to protect freedom and property. Mayor deBlasio abused his power and authority by taking money to destroy an industry of honest and hard-working people for a cause he didn’t understand, and it, is now clear, didn’t even believe in.
In doing so, he damaged more than the people in the carriage trade, he broke a sacred bond between the people we trust to lead and protect us, and the citizens of a democratic community. Up on my farm, I’m delighted, I nearly cried. But why should Eva Hughes celebrate?
– I pause here to honor the many victims of the long and ugly (and continuing) campaign against the horses. They lost the most. Eva is right about that also, NYClass is an organization of wealthy and unprincipled fanatics who have gathered enormous support from media and political conspirators. They do not tell the truth, admit mistakes, negotiate, listen or change.
They detest science and compromise, they are, by every definition of the term, a hate group. Look it up for yourself. They have not, by any account, saved the life of a single animal on the earth. Shame on the mayor for getting into bed with them, he will regret it, if he doesn’t already. Shame on the media for passing on so many lies for so long without ever bothering to check them out.
I know of two suicides in recent years in the carriage trade, severe drinking and some drug problems tied to this conflict and uncertainty. Scores of children and grand-children have abandoned their hopes and dreams to drive carriage horses in Central Park – their grandparents and parents won’t allow it, they don’t wish them to suffer the harassment and abuse and uncertainty that they have suffered.
“This was my dream, for me, for my children. They’ve killed my dreams,” said Tony Salerno, a carriage driver. “I have no dreams now.”
Many drivers have lost their dreams, stable and horse owners who have turned away development dollars for years because they love their work, are uncertain and weakening, battered by years of protests, fear and hostility from people who say they speak for the rights of animals. The abandonment of the carriage trade by a mayor who was sworn to protect them as well as rich people with political agendas has angered and discouraged them, I imagine some will take the money and run. No one could really blame them.
– In fact, the populist mayor and his real estate pals may have succeeded in destroying the carriage trade without a ban. In feeding them to the lunatic fringe of the animal world, the mayor has left them to the mercy of billionaire real estate developers who will eventually kill them with money. Unless the city steps in aggressively to protect them and build for their future, the carriage horses will inevitably be done, as surely as if they were banned. The mayor could pressure developers for all kinds of deals, including money and stables to ensure the horses presence forever. But he doesn’t have the vision to do that, he is not interested in saving animals, he is interested in saving himself.
– It is not possible to argue and hate year after year without becoming something of what you hate and argue with. I took two years out of my regular book writing life to write about the carriage horses, it was one of the great and meaningful experiences of my writing life. Despite rumors and accusations to the contrary, I have not earned a single dollar from it, it has, in fact, cost me a great deal of money in advances and royalties from paid work I was supposed to be doing.
In these two years, I have encountered relentless challenge and hostility, some of it cruel and disconnected from reality. A lot of it has come from the people who say they are for the rights of animals. The worst of it has come from some of the people in the carriage trade and around it, not the people seeking to ban them.
I do not care to recite the things that have been said about me, the things I have been accused of, the insults to my integrity and character. It is all ll part of the game, I am a big boy with thick skin. Public life in America is not simple in our time. I am not offended or angry by these attacks, they sometimes make me sad. I have been called a liar and a whore, people have tried to ban me from Facebook, from writing about animals, I’ve been barred from carriage horse blogs and groups, some have accused me of secret and money-grubbing plots, accusations which reek of the worst kind of bigotry.
And these are the people who are on the same side. The other guys sometimes seems civil.
But these angry people are casualties too. Some people have been fighting too hard and too long, it is just hard for them to let go, and it is true that hatred and rage are corrosive. They can eat us up from the inside as well as the outside if you spend too much time with them. I won’t do it, and I understand that the people who do do it are victims.
– Civil discourse is another major casualty. The people in the carriage trade have lost the idea that we can be protected from defamatory and unjust attacks, that we can be safe from harassment. They know now that people can hack into their cellphones, scream profane and vicious insults at them in public. They know the police will not protect them, not even if people stick placards in the horses faces to provoke, make the children in their carriages cry, accuse them of murder and abuse.
They have lost the idea that journalism exists as a bastion to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. This is no longer true in the Corporate Nation, only our blogs can protect us. The New York Times is a few blocks away from the Clinton Stables, no reporter in all these years ever took a walk to see if all the accusations against the carriage drivers were too, not a single one.
For years, the media in New York has eagerly relayed every wild and demonstrably false accusation until almost everyone in the city – including me – assumed they must be true. This very nearly cost a lot of people their reputations, identities, work and way of life. This caused a lot of suffering. It is not possible to count all of the wives, husbands, children offended and frightened, uncertain year after year about their lives as this unnecessary controversy raged on.
But still, I do believe there is a victory, Eva. I did laugh, I did cheer, I don’t need a Facebook button for that. There is, after all, a difference between winning and losing, and even a short-lived victory is one. I was happy to get so many happy messages from your colleagues in the carriage trade, I hope I get more.
Peace and compassion to you, Eva. I hope that you and your family will be able to take some respite from this conflict and pat yourselves on the back, even for a few minutes. You fought hard and did good. Maybe it’s time to celebrate a bit. That is up to you.
At the end of her message to me on Facebook, Eva Hughes wrote this, and it is appropriate for me to end with her words, rather than mine. She has been in the trenches a lot longer than I have:
“Right now, the atmosphere is a miasma of uncertainty. My grandmother taught me the quote, “there is no security from the cradle to the grave”, and I have always routinely reminded myself of that truism. But there was a semblance of “regular life” security in the Hughes household before this aggression by NYCLASS began. The kind of security a married couple and/or guardians of children craft with an eye toward the future; the planning that helps to provide future stability as best as one can. All of that planning and security was ripped from us, by NYCLASS and by extension, Mayor BdB, and this turn of events does not return or restore that to us.”