This weekend, a chance to speak up for the carriage horses and the people in the carriage trade, to try and save the horses and stop the cruel treatment of the people own and ride them. Also a chance to call attention to the animals in the world who are truly abused and who suffer greatly. In New York City, many millions of dollars are being spent in the name of animal rights to endanger the carriage horses, animals who are safe, loved, well cared for. Not a penny is going to the many animals in need. The carriage horses, the last domesticated animals in our greatest city, are in peril.

So I am going to New York Saturday to stand with the carriage  horses and their owners and drivers. There is a pro-carriage horse rally in Central Park (Grand Army Plaza) from 1:30 to 4 p.m. Saturday. I plan to be there.

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Compassion is the very basis of morality. Politics without humanity is immoral. Ideologues who can’t listen become fanatics. It is not possible to love animals and hate people. The suffering animals of the world call out to us to speak the truth,  to recognize the reality and horror and truth about abuse and cruelty and think of them.

This is the weekend of the carriage horses, the stables are open to visitors and supporters, the horses are marching in a parade in Queens on Sunday. There will be a benefit for retired carriage horses Saturday night. Good reasons to leave the farm and head to the big city.  This is  the weekend of Clip-Clop,  the annual celebration of the horses, who have graced Central Park for 300 years, much longer than the buses, trucks, bicyclists, skate-boarders, joggers, pedicabs, cars, carts and pedicabs that flood the park today.

There will be meetings, tours, events and dinners devoted to supporting Blue-Star Equiculture, a draft and work horse rescue and organic farming center, and the New York Carriage Horses. You can find the schedule of events here.

There will also be many demonstrators on the other side making a lot of noise.

The moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that true morality is not possible without empathy and compassion, and the assault on these people and their way of life is anything but ethical or humane.

It is the people in this controversy who are suffering terribly, not the horses. It is the people who are hurting from cruelty and neglect and elitism.

At stake is the future of animals in our world.  New York City is a big stage, if domesticated and healthy and safe and  beloved animal cannot survive here, then where in our culture can they survive? Can they live and work and remain with us – their most basic and essential right – or will they be removed from our sight and consciousness and vanish from the earth as so many animals have in modern times?

The carriage owners and drivers have been battered by a system that  dehumanizes people in order to persecute and destroy them. It is wrong, I am happy to stand with them.

This controversy is a great moral inversion, a derailment of the democratic process, an upside-down, viscerally unknowing view of animals. Sometimes it seems that the whole point of the campaign is to diminish and batter people. The carriage horses are safe where they are, safer than almost any horse in America. they need to be protected mostly from the people who would save them.

The carriage horse owners and drivers have broken no laws, committed no crimes,  violated none of the many regulations that govern them. The horses are among the most supervised, monitored and regulated animals in the world. By all accounts, well-cared for, that ought to be the end of this story. In America, law-abiding people who work hard and hurt no one are entitled to their freedom and sustenance.

But it is not the end of the story. American politics and civics has become a tribal affair, bands of angry and righteous people drawn into endlessly warring camps, talking only to one another, reading each other’s blogs, raging on one another’s Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, fueling each other’s rage and fanaticism and blindness. Our political leaders, corrupted by staggering amounts of money and sworn to protect freedom and property, simply join the mob. Since the people seeking to ban the horses can no longer talk with anyone beyond  their circle or listen to them, there is nothing for  people of conscience to do but go and be present,  stand by the horses and the humans who care for them, love them, work with them.

So off to New York. This is what is right for me.