To Dream The Possible Dream
We are amidst a mayoral election in New York City. A very crowded Democratic primary with nine candidates on the ballot is June 24th, early voting just opened yesterday. Our current mayor, Eric Adams, he who cozied up to Trump and had his federal corruption charges dropped in April, is running as an independent.1 New York has rank choice voting, it allows us to list the candidates in order of preference. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in 2021 amidst sexual harassment allegations from thirteen complainants, is running for mayor, some say he is the frontrunner. His laundry list of crimes, scandals and mismanagement is long.2 Cuomo also costs the tax payers a lot of money beyond his salary, we paid $60 million in legal fees when he was governor.
The next mayor of this city cannot deliver for working people and satisfy big money interests. Cuomo’s Super PAC Fix the City is financed mainly by real estate and finance interests, along with $1 million from DoorDash and $5 million from former three term mayor Mike Bloomberg. What real estate and finance wants comes at a high cost to working people’s lives. We are at odds with one another. People who want to make the job of running this city like a business are the people who need to keep us at the bottom.
Zohran Mamdani is a 33 year old state assemblyman running for mayor. He represents District 35 in Queens and is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The first time I saw him was a viral IG reel (right here) after the November election. Mamdani visited Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx, interviewing people on the street about the election. The mainly Black and Brown working class people talked about if they voted, why they didn’t, why they did for Trump and not Harris. They talked about the cost of food, of rent, the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Mamdani listened. He didn’t disparage anyone who voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all. It was one of the best post-mortem analysis of the election. He asked if people were interested in a mayoral candidate who would freeze the rent on stabilized apartments, make buses free and provide universal childcare. When someone speaks to something that actually affects your life, you notice. These are the benchmarks of Mamdani’s campaign. To quote his website-
Zohran Mamdani is running for Mayor to lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers.
Issues of affordability are often referred to as “kitchen table issues,” a phrase past its prime in a country where no one can work one job full-time at minimum wage, afford an apartment and support a family. It’s a bit condescending, a reach across the wealth gap to the working people, it’s code, it’s a gesture. If you ever actually recognize your life in anything a candidate says, you notice. No one speaks to our actual lives, in any way that rings true. To do so would be to acknowledge that the free market can’t fix everything. In fact, to do so, would probably be to admit that the free market is what’s fucking us up.
When Mamdani speaks3, I hear possibility, someone with a vision, someone who understands what is affecting people’s lives and how to make change. I don’t worry about how young he is, how he doesn’t have as much experience as other candidates. Some of that experience should not be out on the streets again.
Possibility is the best drug I know. It lifts the brain, clears it a bit. There might actually be a future, a good one. The air changes, it’s nicer to breathe, like when you go to Central Park.
Decades of voting for the lesser of two evils, something I am guilty of, of going with this supposed common sense, has led us here. And this right here, it is a shitty place. It’s called settling.
What more than politics demonstrates how our language has become simultaneously weaponized and neutered, incapable of communicating what is happening to people? Listening to pundits on cable news show go on and on about are the LA protesters peaceful enough? I don’t understand how we qualify proper protesting in the face of what the government is doing, illegally sending in the National Guard and Marines, disappearing people showing up for their check-in, students here on visas, folks showing up to work. ICE just steals people, and the language is lacking, it doesn’t convey the violence of the state’s actions, the devastation for families.
Neutralizing the language, its ability to cut through us, is part of the weaponization. Property damage is mistaken for violence-nobody cares about that stupid self-driving car on fire, it just looks good on a screen over and over and over again. Fire is terrifying. A shutdown highway is disruption, not violence. The real violence is happening to people.
We keep asking if the protestors are peaceful enough, if the people are legal enough, the babies our bombs blew up couldn’t have been completely innocent. There’s always a valid reason why the police pull someone over, surely something is awry. What’s happening is the worst case scenario for most of us, to lose someone we love, to have them taken away, to maybe never see them again.
Most likely, we’ve been done in by watching a genocide live-streamed while no one in the literal world can stop it. I used to think some entity in the world would do something, maybe the United Nations, their website says peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet. More thoughts and prayers I guess.
In early May I attended the Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) annual members meeting. I’m not Jewish and I’m not a member, I have been a part of some of their actions. I went to the conference for much needed guidance, because I could feel myself giving in, slacking, stepping back, a drift. And yes, that is acceptance. Hand-wringing at home is acceptance.
During one of the workshops I felt myself recede, faced with people I respect, whose dedication and commitment I’m not sure I have. I’m not fierce enough, or radical enough. I am not a revolutionary. There’s some corner of my brain that is stuck on exceptionalism. The ego, I suppose. And yeah, I’m not inspiring, fascinating, special enough to do of it alone. None of us are. Time and time again I am reminding of how American I am, the ugly beast of individualism rearing its head. None of us have the resources to do it alone. We are our own best resources, not one of us, but the sheer numbers of us.
Nan Goldin says
The more of us there are
The more of us there are
Who am I to argue with Nan Goldin?
If I recede, if I give in to this weakness, this self-consciousness, then I’ll have to die inside to deal my choices. Masha Gessen, in conversation with David Leonhardt on the NYT Opinion page on June 9, 2025:
I think that Trump’s ideas, which are for the most part very, very, very bad ideas, are rooted in a sort of articulated worldview. One of the key elements of this worldview is that he has a really horrible view of human nature. He just really thinks that people are awful. People are mean, greedy, out for themselves. I think he probably is like that himself, and I think he thinks that everybody else is like it, and that’s why he’s so transactional and that’s why he impugns that kind of motivation to his partners, his interlocutors and his voters.
If I don’t do anything, then I become this kind of person, because the bitter pill I’ve swallowed poisons me. Dramatic! But true. That’s what they want us to be, the same shells of human beings they are. And that’s what we become when we tell ourselves that nothing can be done.
Hopefully we’re moving towards a reality where this mold is broken. I want to believe the theories that we’re living in the last gasps of the patriarchy, but I don’t think it’s that simple, and I don’t think it takes care of itself. Sometimes, you need to help something along. To the end.
Morgan Bassichis is a brilliant and hilarious musician, comedian, writer and activist. They were recently interviewed for The Creative Independent and I’m leaving this here, some much-needed enlightenment.4
To me, a much worse fate is to do nothing or to feel like you can do nothing. A feeling of powerlessness, of not moving with others towards change, to me is a fate worse than death. Spiritually, emotionally, sitting at home alone watching MSNBC sounds scarier than anything I can imagine, because we get to be here in this time on Earth, and that means we have agency, and … there is nothing more life-affirming as taking collective action with other people towards justice. I truly believe there is nothing on earth more life-affirming than saying, “It is worth us being brave together, fighting for something we may not achieve, risking failure along the way, but giving ourselves to it.” That is, to me, an ecstatic, erotic, spiritual, life-affirming, joyful, deeply connective experience that is also reparative. It’s the healing of the false idea of false separation between us. I want to keep choosing that every day.
Adams ran as a Democrat, and, before politics, dabbled in Republicanism.
He also used to rap, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to share this video that stars cookbook writer and actress Madhur Jaffrey here
The Creative Independent interview is great, linked here. Morgan Bassichis