I’m a New Yorker, Governor Hochul

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, September 09, 2022

 

Dear Governor Hochul,

 

There’s no pretending that we have a lot of political common ground. I think you’re pretty weird, in fact. A lot of it has to do with Covid-19. It was wrong of you, in my view, to wait until this week to end the mask mandate on public transport. It was wrong to fire nurses who had already survived Covid-19 for their failure to get a vaccine. It was wrong to keep schoolchildren in masks for nearly two whole school years. I found it creepy when you told a church in Brooklyn that you needed them to be “your apostles,” and you flashed your necklace that said “Vaxxed.” I don’t go around wearing necklaces saying “Antacid.”

 

It’s not just that, of course. It’s the normal Red–Blue divide. I should be able to exercise my Second Amendment rights in this state outside of my home and without the police examining my social-media accounts. I think it is an indictment of our state that black women in New York City are more likely to abort their pregnancies than bring them to term. I disagree with your push for expanding legal marijuana businesses, as if this were a cure for what ails upstate New York. That’s worse than the old proposed cure: casinos.

 

But I’m writing to you today because I think you just told me and millions of New Yorkers to leave, that our lack of political unanimity with you and the Democratic Party means we forfeit our claim to be from this state. At a rally in my old congressional district you said, “Trump and Zeldin and Molinaro — just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong. Okay? Get out of town. Because you don’t represent our values. . . . You’re not New Yorkers.”

 

It reminded me of your predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, who said, “These extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

 

How could you say that about Zeldin, your opponent? If Viktor Orbán had said about his opponents what you said about yours, it would be added to the long list of reasons why people think democracy is dying in the 21st century. Trump won almost 40 percent of the vote in this state, over 3.2 million voters. Outside of New York City’s metro area and Albany, this is a giant red state. You know that because you represented one of the districts that has gone red. It’s a struggling red state, too. The United States is a growing country. But even with the most important city in America, New York State is shrinking.

 

It’s not my political beliefs that make me a New Yorker. And it’s not just my residency, either. My mother moved us to Putnam County from New Jersey when I was twelve. It felt like moving to rural America — the public school had a contest in which you picked a number, and if a cow crapped on that part of the field, you won the school lottery.

 

I’m a New Yorker because my life is lived here. Even if sometimes I miss Bloomfield, N.J., or imagine what life could be like in Sedona, Ariz., or think about relocating to Dublin. I’m a New Yorker even if I never wanted to be one for the same reason everyone else in the state is a New Yorker — because life itself has meaning, and when it’s lived in New York, then it’s a New York life.

 

I remember my uncle picking me up and driving me to Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame. Because my memories of being twelve included “haunted hayrides” where I kicked the local Putnam County teenagers who were trying to scare us, and at the end I ate upstate’s one great delicacy: apple-cider donuts. I’m a New Yorker because I know everyone in the city thinks anything north of Spanish Harlem is “upstate” but that technically, living in the Metro North area, means I live “downstate.”

 

When I discovered my love for the Latin Mass, it was in an old ethnic parish in Poughkeepsie, one whose traditional altar was saved by the state’s own regulations on historic places. I got married in another parish in Poughkeepsie. I’m a New Yorker because I remember watching John Franco pitch, and I remember Endy Chávez’s game-saving catch, and Carlos Beltrán’s whiff in the ninth. I’m a New Yorker because my heart rate would slow to a healthier one the moment I got over the border from Delaware to New Jersey, and then I could tune in to the WFAN and hear Steve Somers’s voice — that accent. I went to college here, chasing the little sights Steely Dan wrote about in their songs near Bard College. And later watching Red Sox fans get their heads kicked in by Yankees fans at Fordham when things got real hot in ’04.

 

I’m a New Yorker because when I got a job at a young start-up, I took Metro North in the morning to Grand Central, and I got to feel the immense optimistic privilege of being young and hearing my own leather soles clacking sharply, purposefully — at New York speed — down Park Avenue to the office while the sun was rising. I’m a New Yorker because whenever I commuted back from the city, on the Harlem line, I had the New York commuter’s urge to shower before dinner.

 

I’m a New Yorker because the sights up Highway 17 make my heart soar and sore. These beautiful, wooded mountain roads leading through unspeakable waste in the great white ghetto of Appalachia, but carrying me toward the Finger Lakes, to these improbable little sites in the middle of our state that are so beautiful and produce surprisingly good wines. And I love my memory of being young, and married, and drunk, and looking at Lake George with my young wife’s hand in my hand. I’m a New Yorker because the generation of Doughertys that raised me lived here, and therefore I inherited, through their comic imitations all the other New York ethnic words: Some putz was giving me agita. But then Vinnie Boombots put that dumb schmuck in his f’n place. YaknowhatImean?

 

I’m a New Yorker because when I heard what you said about people like me, my gut response was to say, f*** off, lady. I don’t want to live in Florida — a state that has millions of Democrats, and soon millions more than New York will have. I’m proud to be a citizen of a town in New York and not just some HOA member living by the toleration of the local alligators. New York may not be what it was, or what it’s supposed to be, but we’re in this together, you Erie County, Buffalo Bills–fan weirdo.