Naomi Wolf's latest letter from New York.
Naomi Wolf’s latest letter from New York is well worth reading.
Here is my short summary:
Naomi Wolf documents the fragmenting language environment: people simply weren’t talking to her in English, and were virtually ignoring her, even while they were serving her: her Uber driver, who was speaking an African language in his phone through the whole journey, the cashier at the supermarket who was speaking to her colleagues in Spanish and never said a word to Naomi in English, and barely acknowledged her existence.
What she calls “aesthetics” has degraded: young women’s clothing is dark and unfeminine with a touch of the ‘dominatrix’, women sit with their legs apart, the art advertisements in the subway no longer feature art from the Western tradition, “no impressionists, no Mozart”, instead “In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe”, “Nona Faustine: White Shoes” at the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, etc etc. She shows a few posters in her substack post.
125th Street, where she got off the subway, was a growing, thriving part of Harlem when she was last in New York before the pandemic; people were moving there from everywhere else, buying up properties. Now there are meth addicts wandering the streets, and many small businesses Chinatown which was thriving in 2019 have now been driven into bankruptcy or collapse by the lockdowns; many shuttered storefronts.
Now the big developers are moving in and selling $700 shoes and sculptures priced in the tens to hundreds of thousands.
She met with her circle of isolated and exiled unvaccinated friends; now their extended circle of vaccinated friends includes people who have had cancers, mini-strokes, hand tremors, and quite a few had died.
After this meeting here was a cannabis store clearly targeting children with cannabis lollies and biscuits, and she saw a group of kids going in.
It all sounds like a nightmare: in the conclusion, Naomi Wolf she says she asked God “Why do evil and suffering seem to be everywhere? How long will this last?”, and the answer that came to her in her time of prayer was, “It is the time of Satan,” and that “there is no way out but through”.
Her latest letter from New York is well worth reading:
Addendum:
I was thinking about what Naomi said. There is a glorious hope available in the gospel of Jesus, which certainly outweighs anything this world could ever throw at us.