We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this breaking sociopolitical rant.

This past winter, in the immediate wake of an inspiring, hopeful, historically unprecedented act of political esprit de corps, untold thousands of New Yorkers made the dispiriting conscious choice to literally treat their city like shit.

When the snow stubbornly carpeting New York in January and February finally—finally—began to recede, I was shocked to discover the property of my Bronx apartment complex studded with dog turds.  Call me naïve, but I couldn’t believe my neighbors would disrespect our shared home like this.

The scene was no different around the rest of the neighborhood:  the sidewalks and curbsides a minefield of thawing scat.  When I would text friends in the other boroughs to see how they were surviving the long, cold winter, the response was some variation of, “Fine—except for hopscotching around all the dog shit.”  The problem was so pervasive, it was covered on the local news:

Frustrated New Yorkers took to Reddit to vent.  They posted personal appeals for decency on scaffolding poles and lampposts:

Photos I snapped around my Bronx neighborhood

All of which reminded me of a scene from State of Grace (1990), a movie I’d already been thinking about in light of St. Patrick’s Day, in which Jackie Flannery (Gary Oldman) laments the yuppie gentrification driving the Irish out of Hell’s Kitchen:

Oldman as Jackie and Sean Penn as Terry in “State of Grace”

“It never used to be that way.  Used to be you dropped a cone, you could pick it up and finish it.”  Hear, hear.

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