7 July

Voting Against Hate: Saving The Horses, The New Awakening

by Jon Katz
A Vote No For Hate
A Vote No For Hate

A New York City Councilwoman voted “no” to hate this week. Deborah Rose, a Democrat, said NYClass, the group spearheading the ban on the carriage horses, had jammed her office’s phone lines with robo-calls and waves of hateful mailers and fliers, Facebook messages and tweets urging a carriage trade ban. An animal lover, she said the effort to intimidate her and overwhelm her office had persuaded her to support the carriage horses.

Why is it that they never tell us the good news?

Hate seems out of sync with the times lately.  Pope Francis is challenging us to live in harmony and treat one another with dignity and come together to save our common home, the earth. They are taking down the Confederate flag in public places. People are now free to marry who they choose, not who allegedly religious people tell them to choose. The President is singing Amazing Grace in a South Carolina church.

In New York City, the people seeking to ban the carriage horses have not gotten the word, even though their mayor, who is trying to ban the horses,  says he is the most progressive politician in America.  They do not follow the teachings of Pope Francis or Jesus Christ or the Dalai Lama, even though they repeatedly claim the right to judge the morality of others.

They do not believe in talking, negotiating, loving, empathizing, listening or learning. Hatred and cruelty are the only weapons in their arsenal, they wield them continuously and ruthlessly. Nobody seemed to mind when they were doing this to the carriage drivers, but when they picked on the politicians, all hell broke loose.

The City Council has discovered what a hate group is and how it works.

Hate surfaced in a particularly loathsome way in New York last week when it was revealed that  NYClass is spending a half-million dollars printing and distributing grotesque fliers that suggest all of the carriage drivers are racist and sexist bigots who must therefore have their work and horses taken from them. It is wrenching, but not in the way the group hoped.

I close my eyes and feel for the animals when I learned that this very wealthy group had spent more hundreds of thousands of dollars (out of millions) that could have actually gone to help animals who are in need. That’s the thing about hate, it is beyond comprehension sometimes, solves no problems, smothers reason, defies truth and rationality, hates science and learning. It is accountable to no one and lives in a world completely of it’s own making, and in it’s own reality. When powerful politicians climb aboard, it becomes dangerous.

That, perhaps is it’s great strength and great weakness. Hate is beyond the good faith and the rational world of human beings trying to live well with one another and solve the problems of the world.

Can you imagine Francis treating the carriage drivers the way the people who say they are for the rights of animals treat them?

The most surprising thing about NYClass (“We Love Animals, We Hate People”), I suppose, and I am not happy to say it, is that the group seems to have no class at all. The so-called animal rights group – there is no evidence they have ever saved an actual animal – is notorious in New York for harassing the carriage drivers, falsely accusing them of abuse and neglect, raising enormous amounts of money from animal lovers that are funneled into political campaigns that serve the murkiest and most submerged of interests.

Now they are turning their harassment and intimidation ethos – an elemental mark of any hate group – onto political leaders who dare to defy or challenge them. And the political leaders are striking back. What a colossal blunder.

The horses, it turns out, are much more powerful than their enemies, even with all of their millions and political connections, even with a big-city mayor in their pocket. They have survived one of the nastiest, most profoundly dishonest and possibly corrupt campaigns in the modern history of animal politics. The effort to ban them has collapsed. Hatred has failed.

“A  hate group,” says Wikipedia,” is any group or movement that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s most experienced trackers of hate groups: “All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. Hate group activities typically can include criminal acts of harassment or intimidation, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.”

Score it 100 per cent for NYClass.

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The carriage horse controversy  is proving to be a significant turning point in the increasingly ugly campaign against the horses and the people in the carriage trade. I think it is bellwether for the deepening struggle across the country to keep animals in our world and in our everyday lives, as they have been throughout human history. New York is a big stage, what happens there is seen and felt everywhere.

As it becomes clearer every day that the mayor’s ban is a stunning and embarrassing failure, the campaign against the drivers has turned  much more into a deeply offensive and desperate campaign of rage and defamation than any issue involving the rights or welfare of animals. The drivers are being harassed, followed, investigated, insulted, informed upon, videotaped in secret. Fanatics who fail become desperate, the psychologists say, they cannot ever consider their own shortcomings, they increasingly obsess on the imagined flaws of others.

“After months of consideration and listening to constituents, “says Rose, “I have decided that I will not support a ban on horse-drawn carriages.” She said in a statement that she appreciated the vocal conversation the issue had generated, “but the more I study this issue, the more clear it is to me that the carriage horses are well-treated, in most cases by carriage drivers who grew up with horses on farms.”

Councilwoman Rose has discovered what scores of the most respected equine veterinarians, behaviorists, trainers, equine advocates and veterinary associations have been saying for several years. The horses are not abused, they need and deserve protection from their saviors, they are among the most fortunate horses in the world.

Although the New York media is casting the controversy as a contrast between organized labor and animal rights organizations, it goes, in fact, much deeper than that. It speaks to facts and truth, to the corruption of politics by big money, to the profound ignorance of animals that threatens their lives and their future, and to the nature of hate and the degree to which we will permit them to influence our civics and the future of animals.

Last week, Councilman Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat and a person of color who is also gay, said he may also oppose the carriage ban after seeing the fliers from NYClass suggesting the carriage drivers continuously and brazenly use hate speech. he was offended, he said, by NYClass’s effort to exploit the suffering of other people in the name of the carriage horses.  In New York, all three newspapers support the horses, so do two-thirds of the city’s residents, the Chamber of Commerce, The Working Families Party, the Central Park Conservancy. Political observers in New York say no issue has so united the city since the attack on the World Trade Center in 2011.

This is a story that goes far beyond labor and real estate development. It speaks to the way we treat one another, the way we treat animals, the way we treat the earth. The horses have sparked a new social awakening, they are leading us to see another way, beyond hate, beyond accusation, beyond conflict. Finally, a political movement I could join.

NYClass is a symbol now, not a movement any longer.  They have squandered their money, their credibility, their trust in the lowest and most degrading of ways. Sadly for the many people they have harmed, and for the horses they would put in danger, the symbol is hatred and cruelty.

The horses offer us a much more powerful symbol. I like to think that hatred is falling out of favor. Remember, they never tell us the good news.

 

 

 

 

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