The history of the world is tribes banding together behind large walls, going to war against one another, rejecting other religions, other ways of life. And yet here, on these crowded streets, the world came together. A bit of Spanish overheard here, a bit of Mandarin over there. Farsi, Yiddish, Italian. And yet somehow it worked. Food was ordered, diapers were bought, a flange was sold from a picture someone brought to a hardware store, neither person sharing a language. A neighborhood, a city, held together by a kind of societal duct tape, a New York shoulder shrug, a who-am-I-to-judge?
