light and shadow

NYC Mayor Mamdani’s address for America’s 250th.

“The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again — including 250 years ago — those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress.”

Woglom's Signal-phabet. Parakites : a treatise on the making and flying of tailless kites for scientific purposes and for recreation. 1896.

Paula Rego (1935–2022), “The Night Crow”