Dear Carriage Trade People. Words matter.
Words saved you just last year when your struggle seemed hopeless and arrogant and unknowing men and women tried to take your property and way of life away without cause. Words can and will save you again, I hope you can take that leap of faith, it is my faith.
Words have always been the most powerful of weapons.
You all seemed to discover that when you most needed to. In an awful way, it is a gift to have to fight for your way of life, nothing defines and ennobles us more, nothing gives our lives more meaning. As the man said, this is a time that will try your souls. You matter, and so many people are watching you and hoping for you.
Gandhi knew that words can conquer, so did Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill. Words have always stood up to power and guns and money, throughout history, even if they sometimes seem no match for them at times, good causes often seemed hopeless. It is happening right now, and for you.
I appreciate that you have been made to feel small and vulnerable in the face of so much money, rage and power. But you are not small, no one else can make you small, and that is the beauty of words, they are the great leveler, yours are as good or better than theirs. You are making a lot of noise, many people are hearing you.
I am all about leaps of faith and the climbing out on limbs, and I will climb out on one more: words will save the carriage horses again, the horses are speaking to me once more, they are calling upon words to keep them in the city again, and help them and their people stand up to greed and power who hide behind the love of animals to do wrong.
Words may yet save the pedicab drivers, hundreds of them, suddenly drawn into the mayor’s cold and uncaring cauldron of boundless ambition and loss of integrity. It seems everyone who is not giving him money is a possible target for his ambition.
The effort of the mayor and the passionate but sadly misguided people seeking to end the long and historic role in the city is in trouble, it will fail, either next week, in the City Council, or beyond, in court. This new effort to destroy the carriage trade is wrong, and irrational, and very likely illegal, and will not stand.
How ironic that the young and raucous pedicab drivers, who have plagued the carriage trade for years, may now help save them, with their own compelling words and protests. They also are touching many hearts in the supposedly tough and cold city. They are also fighting for their families against a government that has lost its moral bearings.
I’m sure the carriage drivers can see now that they have entered their story, are part of their narrative. That they are the new carriage drivers, poor and new immigrants drawn to the park as a gateway to new lives here, suddenly and without cause or appeal – or even consultation – also marked for extinction and the loss of their livelihoods.
They too are caught up in the mayor’s dishonest determination to get the horses and repay what everyone in New York sees is a campaign debt, or perhaps bribe.
He doesn’t deign to speak to them either, or negotiate with their leaders. They are also seen, as the carriage drivers are, as less than human, as outside the moral community that runs the city. They are also just a bargaining chip in a political deal. What an awful way to see human beings, especially by a leader sworn to represent them all.
The mayor always dismisses concerns about people whose lives are being upended. Somebody will take care of them, he says, somebody will find them work. He doesn’t seem to grasp that it is his work to care about them, his work to keep them safe and secure. That is perhaps his greatest failing as a leader here.
It seems the mayor who calls himself progressive does not care much after all for ordinary people who work hard and long to feed their families and pull themselves up the ladder, the most American of traditions. The pedicab drivers are neither as glamorous or as respectable or beloved as the carriage trade, but they also deserve much better than this. The role of government is to protect freedom and property, not take them away.
It is not right for people to lose their traditions and well-being and for their families to live in fear and uncertainty because some irrational millionaire gave a politician a lot of money. It is not right for more than 100 horses to be pulled from their secure and safe home and work to be sent out into the horrific slaughter afflicting so many thousands of horses.
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Two years ago, when I began writing about the carriage horses, their cause seemed hopeless, they were dispirited, nearly defeated and overwhelmed by a mayor and real estate developers and passionate but misguided animal advocates determined to drive them from our biggest city, their home for hundreds of years.
They seemed constantly on the defensive, denying that their horses were abused overworked, mistreated. Today, the entire context and narrative of the controversy has changed. Just consider the first paragraph of this scathing editorial in the New York Times today demanding that the City Council reject the mayor’s effort to cripple the carriage trade, since his effort last summer to ban them was rejected in the most humiliating way.
“The Council needs to stop him,” said the newspaper. “As weary as members might be of this issue, which has been festering since the 2013 mayoral race, they need to dispose of it. This means standing up to the administration, to passionate but misguided animal lovers and to real estate interests presenting themselves as animal lovers.”
The carriage drivers are fearful again, and in peril again. If the mayor’s bill passes the City Council next Friday, their industry will be cannibalized and radically reduced, perhaps destroyed. Many of their horses will be in peril, scores of people will lose their work, a proud and successful and lawful and much-loved industry will have been decimated and reduced by blatantly corrupt and arrogant government overreach.
The city can offer no rationale – safety, regulation, money, public health, animal rights – to support their new effort to ruin the carriage trade. Now, everyone in the city knows what it is really about. This emperor has no clothes.
Two years ago, when the mayor said he would ban the horses, and that it would be his “number one priority,” it was words that beat him back. Liam Neeson’s words, the driver’s words, the words of their many supporters and friends all over the country, the newspaper’s words, the business associations and working people’s words, the driver’s words, horse lover’s words, the words oof veterinarians and trainers, the unions and blue-collar associations, women and men, blacks and whites, children and adults, tourists and riders, the words of more than two-thirds of the people in the city.
A sane politician would have long ago moved on to deal with the staggering list of real problems, real crises. This mayor is the White Rabbit, he sees only what he wants to see or what people pay him to see. He lives in his own reality.
The most striking thing about the Times editorial (and those of the other newspapers as well) is that it would not have been written two years ago, when so many people wondered about the constant allegations of abuse and mistreatment leveled about the drivers. It was presented as a conflict, not a moral issue. The false accusations of abuse have been left behind, refuted by scores of behaviorists, veterinarians, trainers and horse lovers. Nobody is even claiming any longer that the horses are being mistreated or in danger, which gives the new effort to remove them a surreal quality.
And the horse owners and drivers discovered their words too, and there was an outpouring of posts, blogs, photographs telling the other side of the story, poignantly and for the first time. And people heard the words and accepted and believed them. It wasn’t e-mails to city council members that saved the carriage trade, it was authentic and heartfelt words. And a lot of truth.
Today, the narrative is different, there is, in fact, the new social awakening that a retired carriage driver named Eva Hughes predicted some years ago. A new paradigm. People are understanding that the horses are safe, healthy and fortunate to be here, the carriage horses are the lucky ones. In a just world, they would not be fighting for their existence but celebrated for the lessons they are teaching us. They can be among us, we need them.
People are coming to see that the animal rights movement has lost its way, it no longer speaks to the people who love animals or for the true rights of animals – to survive among us, and in our every day lives. It has no vision for the future of animals in our world other than to remove them from us.
The people in New York City have come to understand the great challenge for the environment, for the rights of animals, is how to keep the horses where they are, not how to remove them to hidden farms and preserves, where they will have no work, nothing to do, and no one to love and will never be seen by ordinary people.
“It’s a new ball game this week, ” my single city council source told me yesterday. “There are a lot of nervous and unhappy people on the City Council Transportation Committee. They hate the way this looks and feels. They do not like this mayor. It’s not over. Many people are very angry.” On Friday, the Transportation Committee will vote on the mayor’s proposal. If it is defeated there, it is dead.
In the Sioux and Cheyenne nations, vigils and prayers to keep the horses safe and present in New York, the Native-Americans understand all too well what it means when we send the horses away and betray their long partnership and contract with human beings. Those are powerful words. They tell us that if the horses leave, they will take the wind and rain and water with them, the magic and mystery will leave our lives and the lives of our children.
This week, a great and deepening outcry at the mayor’s brazen effort to tie the carriage horse vote to enormous raises for City Council members. There is an outcry on behalf of the pedicab drivers, their cause is similar, love them or not.
There is an outcry from taxpayers who don’t understand why they should pay $25 million to transplant an industry that is law-abiding and profitable and intensely regulated. There is alarm about the appearance of propriety that the mayor is too blind to see. There is concern for the more than 500 pedicab drivers, many young and poor, about to lose their jobs for no stated reason other than that it would help the mayor get rid of the horses.
There is fury over the power of real estate interests to dictate public policy. And all over the country, anger and confusion from horse and animal lovers who do not understand why the leaders of New York City have failed to see the importance of keeping animals – powerful and content symbols of the natural world – where they belong and are so safe, loved and sorely needed.
People who care about animals are fighting for the lives of the carriage horses, not fighting to send them into danger and oblivion and slaughter. And everyone who works feels the fear and suffering of the carriage drivers and their families, living in uncertainty for so long.
I see an army of words, soldiers of their own kind stretching to the horizon. The horses are talking to me again, they are raising Hell.
Thomas Paine has always been one of my great inspirations, partly because he taught me the power of words to protect the rights of people. He did what the carriage drivers are about to do, I believe.
Paine believed government was a necessary but dangerous evil. Because of the distances between people, it would one day be necessary to build state houses and city halls and big capitols. It is only natural, he wrote, that their first laws “will have the title only of Regulations and be enforced by no other penalty than public disesteem. In this first parliament every man by natural right will have a seat.”
But Paine grasped the future, he saw a political leader like the mayor of New York passing laws like the one meant to ruin the carriage trade. He saw overreach as the inevitable evolution of government. He would have been outraged“.
More words for us from Paine:
“Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world. here too is the design and end of government – freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound, however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, ’tis right.”
This week, at this time and place, a curious struggle between a powerful government and some innocent and hard-working and very ordinary people over freedom and security, not real estate or the rights of animals.
In some ways, a very old struggle, one of the oldest. I believe words will win the day.
I think we only need two: ’tis right.”