I do everything possible to find a window seat facing the Hudson River on the train to New York City. That wasn’t an option Tuesday afternoon. There wasn’t a window seat to be had let alone one on the river. I ended up sitting opposite two young women in a row with facing seats, mine with my back to the direction the train was traveling. I hate that.
I also don’t typically strike up conversations with fellow passengers. I prefer to scroll through my phone, nap or, on occasion, work. But I felt apologetic joining and crowding these woman and struck up a conversation with one of them. She might have justifiably been apprehensive — if nothing else I was old and she was young — but within a minute or two we were chatting easily.
She told me she was twenty-two years old and a student at Hudson Valley Community College. By the time she got off the train in Poughkeepsie — allowing me to commandeer her forward facing window seat, if not one on the river — she confessed that she was on her way to Kingston, NY for a court date for not wearing a seat belt.
She claimed her innocence, though unlikely in a way that was going to impress any judge. She was confident she’d been wearing a seatbelt because she was so intoxicated, sitting in the back of whatever car she’d been traveling in, she told me, that her friends had buckled her in.
I didn't judge her. By then we were friends. In the forty or so minutes it had taken us to travel from Hudson, where I got on the train, she’d told me much of her life story. She’d grown up in Kingston, moved to Indianapolis after high school to live with an aunt, and after graduating from her two-year college hoped to enroll at NYU. It sounded as if she’d never traveled much further than Indiana but she very much wanted to see the world.
I asked her whether she was going to vote? I assumed I’d receive an unequivocal yes. If there was any demographic you’d think that Vice President Kamala Harris would have in the bag by now it’s young Black women. But my fellow passenger — if we exchanged names I don’t remember hers — said she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t because she had issues with the candidates. She just seemed not really to care.
She asked me how she’d go about voting? I asked whether she was registered and she said she thought she was, though she couldn’t remember whether she’d voted in the 2020 Presidential election. Where would she go to vote? I said probably somewhere near where she was living in Albany. She said she’d look into it but as she left the train I have little confidence that I’d converted a non-voter into a voter.
If Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the free and fair results of the last election, succeeds on his second attempt I don’t blame him. I blame us. Not me in particular, nor my family, who have been canvassing enthusiastically for his opponent, but the American people. Barack Obama, a while back, said that we were suffering from an epistemological crisis. That’s a highfalutin way of saying that we can’t tell truth from lies, fact from friction.
I’m afraid it’s worse than that. A number of years ago I wrote a story for New York Magazine about a massive cement plant proposed for Hudson, NY that promised to mar the Hudson Valley’s idyllic landscape. Fortunately, it was defeated by highly motivated and organized grass roots opponents.
Supporting the plant were the Swiss multinational corporation behind it, of course, and a smattering of locals. But what I discovered interviewing supporters wasn’t so much that they sought a huge cement plant in their backyard, let alone the jobs it would allegedly produce. They just felt powerless to do anything about it. Their voices didn’t matter so why bother? I can’t say that I entirely blamed them or that their apathy was misplaced. Many, but certainly not all, of the opponents of the plant were wealthy weekenders who were used to getting what they wanted and knew how to leverage power.
Watching the obscene amount of money that’s been thrown into this election and the way the candidates have groveled at the feet of billionaires doesn’t do much to make the rest of us feel empowered. The fear of autocracy hangs over the election should Donald Trump prevail. But in some ways it feels as if we’re already living in an oligarchy.
But such armchair analysis didn’t seem to be what was motivating the young woman seated across from me to vote, or rather not to vote. She seemed smart and hopeful enough. She wasn’t cynical. She just didn’t seem to understand that she had skin in the game; or any responsibility to participate in the democratic process. And that’s probably an indictment of our educational system. That’s an epistemological crisis.
As I was returning upstate Thursday afternoon I spotted Vladimir Kara-Murza and his wife Evgenia in Penn Station. He’s the Russian-British activist who was part of the August prisoner exchange that included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Kara-Murza was likely twice poisoned, arrested for treason over his opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his commentary for columns that he continued to write from his prison cell.
Nobody else seemed to recognize him. And I might not either if 60 Minutes hadn’t run a story about him recently. As much as I admire his courage I probably wouldn’t have approached him and not just because I didn’t want to lose my place in line for the train.
I’m not quite trying to draw a contrast between the young woman I spoke to on the train and an activist willing to sacrifice his life for freedom and democracy. But unless more Americans develop an understanding of how precious democracy is we’ll be needing Kara-Murzas here as much as they do in Russia.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found be found on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
