This toll's for thee
Feuerherd, Peter
THIS TOLL'S FOR THEE Peter Feuerherd November 3, 1994, the day after election day: I have the privilege of hitching a ride into "the city"—as we Queens residents refer to Manhattan's Skyscraper...
...Two years have now passed...
...Catholic Register...
...While watching the Republican Convention in San Diego this year, my fourteen-year-old son had one question for me: "Is this why the Mets are playing in Mexico...
...His side won yesterday...
...They have already concluded what has taken me decades to arrive at: politicians, at best and at worst, have only a marginal impact on what this year's campaign experts have told us are fundamental political issues—family values, sexual morality, addiction, and personal character...
...He has a very responsible job with the agency that supervises many New York-area bridges and tunnels...
...I remind myself of this in the midst of the 1996 election campaign in which the candidates and their spin-meisters have declared an epic struggle between the forces of post-hippie decadence that threaten the nation's moral fiber and a reactionary conservativism that delights in withholding welfare monies from widows and orphans...
...THIS TOLL'S FOR THEE Peter Feuerherd November 3, 1994, the day after election day: I have the privilege of hitching a ride into "the city"—as we Queens residents refer to Manhattan's Skyscraper National Park—with a conservative activist wannabe politician...
...My political pal did join the new conservative revolution...
...In many ways, they are smarter...
...We followed everything with keen interest...
...I'm not old enough (yet) to complain about this generation not being up to snuff...
...Take for example a recent report on skyrocketing drug abuse among teenagers...
...We see here the limits of political power...
...But her incredulity suggest to me that the days are long gone when a sitting president might be a model or a guide for any kind of behavior, least of all that of teen-agers...
...She rolls her eyes...
...But then we come to the epicenter of evil—the lines leading to the toll booths of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel...
...If my enraged interlocutor and political appointee can't affect the bridge and tunnel tolls that fetter New York's drivers—something that government actually controls—why should we believe that politicians can have any impact on behaviors and attitudes that lie far beyond the realm of political influence...
...I was growing up in suburban Long Island...
...In 1968, my wife and I were both eleven years old...
...Are teens hooked on drugs in your town...
...I think about my conversation and his political promises as I drive back from vacation in August and spend $11 driving to and from Brooklyn through Staten Island into New Jersey and back...
...We both recall being enthralled and horrified by the political events of that year, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, as well as the Democratic Convention...
...When I was their age, I was interested in politics, now they are interested in computers, science, and popular music...
...Traffic runs smoothly and my driver is in a happy mood, buoyed by yesterday's electoral successes and perhaps by the scent of political appointment...
...these events mattered...
...I consult our resident expert: my daughter, a junior in a New York City public high school...
...she, a recently arrived immigrant, was living in Brooklyn...
...Are your drug-using classmates influenced by who sits in the Oval Office...
...It is an unscientifically posed question, of course, to an unscientific sample...
...My interlocutor shakes his fist at the skies, curses this monument to liberal government duplicity, and rages at the extortion of the $3.50 one-way toll...
...However, New York motorists have not been liberated from the fetters of big government as my $11 tab clearly shows...
...Not now, not for the younger generation...
...This...
...Peter Feuerherd is assistant editor of the Long Island Catholic and national affairs writer for the National Catholic Register...
...He details how the new Republican Congress and the new Republican governor will create a pristine Utopia unhindered by the constraints of government regulation...
...The talk show hosts think so and blame one man: William Jefferson Clinton, the college student who didn't inhale...
...This, he declaims, while pointing to the lines of exasperated drivers, is what big government does: pads payrolls and afflicts innocent motorists with unreasonable demands— all to feed the welfare-state monster...
...This will all change, he promises me, when the newly ascendant conservative revolution comes to power...
...Twas not always so...
Vol. 123 • October 1996 • No. 17
