EXTREME FOOLISHNESS ANYBODY?

It's been a couple months since this candidacy began. There are some things that time gives you. The window is a clouded and each passing week cleans the window and a image emerges from the world on the other side. What is coming into view is shocking but am I shocked enough? New York neighborhoods are under assault from a second, entirely separate, economy. The 16 years of this aggression, the Rudy and Bloomy years, rolled over the neighborhoods like a military campaign. The city government was the business partner of the developers/chain stores/gentrification and most of the media reported the process as sad but inevitable. The whole thing came to a pitched climax last year with an epidemic of evictions and construction cranes falling on our heads. The city and its developers think of neighborhoods as soft colonies to invade. Small shopkeepers are dispensable. Corner delis, ma and pa pharmacies, non-chain hardware stores... these are considered a dated concept. In fact, the neighborhoods are not considered to BE economies. The last time the city studied the economies of neighborhoods was during the Dinkins administration. You see where this is going. The hyper-development aggression - called inevitable, prosperity, the future - was actually a bubble economy. This was a self-dealing financial class of people who crashed with those cranes. Now -- the neighborhoods that have the least amount of luxury condos and chain stores are the healthiest. The auto-cannibalism of New York City, eating our own neighborhoods, has momentarily stopped because the bubble economy attack was financed by over-leveraged debt from Wall Street. Those people are waiting to start up again, and Mike Bloomberg is their guy. What can we do to defend the neighborhoods? Neighborhoods are not sepia-tinged nostalgia. This aint no Norman Rockwell here. Neighborhoods, with the gatherings of people who know each other and acknowledge that closeness throughout their day, are in fact the hippest thing going. Neighborhoods are complex, organic, sustainable economies. Neighborhoods are not predator financial organizations. They are better for children and other life. The Rise of the Neighborhoods! - that would be something to spend seven months preaching about. The degree to which this is not something the commercial media discusses is daunting. 3rd party candidates are not covered as a matter of policy. We would have to preach in unusual places, do marathons, stunts. A 24 hour whistle-stop tour on the underground trains. Walking around New York, preaching from trees, preaching in the sewers. We could preach at Bloomy's London pad when we tour there in May. I don't know what to do. It's inventing new language, re-exciting old values that are forgotten... It's a lot of exhaustion and embarrassment. Personally, I think I was settling into a respected kind of foolishness. Academics are calling me asking to research my sidewalk preaching from ten years ago. I need to listen to Abby Hoffman, who would go out and steal from corporate stores, just to "stay tuned up." I've been resting on my foolish laurels. I've got to get real scared again or I'm not helping anybody.