Letter from America: What I learnt about love and solidarity in my nine hours in New York City

A few days before the killing of Charlie Kirk and the outpouring of hate it unleashed from Maga, I visited New York City. I had nine hours in the Big Apple. Not much, but enough time to dip my little finger into the state of America, to get an inkling of the country and the people; a chance to sneak under the slew of headlines that might lead you to think the US is just one deranged wannabe dictator. How deep does Trumpism go? 

Here’s what I found out. 

The 5.19am bus from Tuxedo Park landed me at the Port Authority bus station on 42nd street. Gateway into Midtown Manhattan. 

I have found that one of the best ways to feel any city and its people is by running through it. So I eschewed the subway and decided to run – downtown – to my first destination: Brooklyn Bridge, home to a newly borne parkrun (the US’s 93rd parkrun and this one only three runs old). 

Before 7am, a relative quiet hovers in the cloistered streets of New York. It’s dawn; there’s light, but the sun hasn’t pierced through the thicket of skyscrapers. It’s the time when homeless people catch their last bit of kip, shuffle cardboard mattresses, and when dog-walkers are out pooing their dogs in pocket parks. 

My run took me past Grand Central station and the Empire State building. Grand as they are, I didn’t stop. As I reached the East River’s edge, the United Nations headquarters reared up, its grand aspirations bottled behind its shiny exterior. 

An idea under siege. The rising sun rebounding.

Running along the river front was more complicated – and took much longer – than I imagined, but eventually I reached and crossed that wonder of 19th-century engineering and architecture and found the start of the parkrun. 

The parkrun offered me family (11 million of them) and familiarity (same format wherever you are in the world) in a strange land. Its finish offered a view that swept up lower Manhattan, Wall Street and out over the river to the Statue of Liberty, proclaiming from a distance.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Once upon a time. 

Parkrun over, I crossed the bridge again and took the subway uptown. Down in the train station at mid-morning I looked at the array of humans opposite me, their multiple colours and languages. I was struck for the first time by a thought that would recur throughout the day: New York is a melting pot of peoples. Cosmopolitanism has become its DNA. No one will ever be able to reverse engineer that.

That is, unless in your quest to make America White Again (which it only ever was by virtue of a genocide), you are prepared to force millions of people to move. But New York City will prove more durable than Gaza. You can’t unscramble this egg. Just as you can’t deglobalise economies. 

There was a reason Luddites lost two centuries ago. They will lose again now. 

You can’t reverse the tide of human progress.

It’s 10am. The sun is up as my sore legs climb out of the subway at 59th Street. 

Providence would have it, I bumped into the annual Labour Day Parade making its way down Fifth Avenue. Or rather, it bumped into me. And what a bump.

The parade stretched further than the eye could see, probably all the way back to Brooklyn.

“Get up, get down, New York is a union town,” chanted members of different unions. Teachers. Nurses. Stagehands. Journalists. The NYPD.

Floats. Music. 

Children. 

Dogs. 

Marching bands.

Dignity. Defiance.  

The parade passed in front of the infamous Trump Tower. Some marchers stopped and mocked. Most just ignored it. Ostentatious, fake and shiny, it just couldn’t compete with real life on the street.

The sense of solidarity was overpowering. Joy in community. All different, but all united. 

Miles away at the front of the march were Zohran Mamdani, the future mayor of New York, and Bernie Sanders, a man who should have been president and actually could have united America.

That afternoon the Labour Day Parade was better than any show on Broadway. And it didn’t cost a cent!

As I dissolved myself into it, I felt deep down that Trump can’t win his battle against America. 

He can war, but he can’t win. 

He can scramble, but he can’t unscramble. 

Most people of America, whatever flags they wear, want peace and freedom, and when they realise just how seriously it’s threatened they will respond. 

The problem is not the lack of people standing up for humanity. It’s the lack of bold leadership.

A global problem. 

Midday. Eventually I tore myself out of the parade’s warm embrace and walked the short distance to Central Park. I hired a bicycle, inserting myself into a polyglot stream of runners, bikers, walkers. 

When in New York I always visit Strawberry Fields, the memorial Yoko Ono created for John Lennon, opposite Dakota Mansions, their home where he was assassinated in 1980. But to get there I took the long road (again) and pedalled my way round Central Park’s circumference, taking in the natural and human beauty of the park.

Strawberry Fields is like Grand Central concourse, always busy. A constant stream of people flow through the space, kow-towing before the Imagine mural. A single busker sings Lennon’s songs, this time a woman, Liz Chidester (Liz and the Lovelies), singing mostly