Viking
11-03-2004, 06:44 PM
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press Writer
November 3, 2004, 6:25 PM EST
NEW YORK -- The announcement came over the loudspeakers at the Park Slope Food Co-op shortly before noon: Sen. John Kerry was conceding. People looked at each other stricken over the soy milk and organic vegetables.
Pilates instructor Rachel Priebe ran weeping from the store.
"I'm heartbroken," said Priebe, 30, sobbing gently as she loaded her bicycle on a Brooklyn sidewalk. "The rest of the country must be pretty out of touch with reality."
While Democrats mourned nationwide Wednesday, the mood among liberal New Yorkers was particularly dark and foul as some of the country's most Democratic precincts digested the results of the election. From Park Slope to Harlem, there was despair, dismay and cynicism over President's Bush's re-election.
Upper middle class Brooklynites called red state voters misinformed and self-interested. And outside the Apollo Theater in Harlem, residents cried that the fix was in and Bush had stolen another election.
"I'm devastated," writer Emma Starr said as she left the nation's largest member-owned and -operated food co-op. "I have proposed that we should have two distinct nations. Why should we be forced to live together under the rule of an evil dictator?"
The overwhelming sentiment in West Harlem, Manhattan's most Democratic district, was skepticism about the electoral process, based largely on voting problems many blacks faced in Florida in the last general election.
"I didn't think he would be able to steal it again," said construction worker Charles Collins, 43.
"It's a fix," said transit worker Marselee Mitchell. "This is real messed up."
New York City in some ways was the political reverse image of most of the nation Tuesday.
One-third of voters surveyed in nationwide Associated Press exit polls called themselves conservative, one-fifth liberal.
The opposite was true in New York, where about one-third of voters called themselves liberal, compared with one-fifth who identified themselves as conservative.
Three quarters of the city's voters pulled the lever for Kerry, compared with 48 percent of voters nationwide.
Leonard Lopate, the liberal host of a morning talk show on public radio station WNYC, described left-leaning New Yorkers on Wednesday as stunned, despairing and alienated from the rest of the country.
"In the end it was issues like so-called moral values, gun control, things like that, that seemed to be much more important than the big issues that they felt were at the heart of this," Lopate said in an interview. "We are the symbol of the United States to everybody except the rest of the people in the United States."
Joanne Koeller, a 52-year-old graphic artist, struggled for words Wednesday as she paused during a walk on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and tried to describe her feelings about the election.
"I want to cry I'm so depressed," she said.
Dr. Charles Goodstein, a psychiatrist at NYU Medical Center, described the patients with whom he spoke Wednesday as deeply saddened.
"It's had a real impact on them," he said. "There's a sense of hope that's been given up, the loss of an ideal, a kind of pessimistic view of the world."
He said, however, that what he was seeing was not clinical depression and he expected the somber mood to lift eventually.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny-eln--morningafter1103nov03,0,2269870.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
Associated Press Writer
November 3, 2004, 6:25 PM EST
NEW YORK -- The announcement came over the loudspeakers at the Park Slope Food Co-op shortly before noon: Sen. John Kerry was conceding. People looked at each other stricken over the soy milk and organic vegetables.
Pilates instructor Rachel Priebe ran weeping from the store.
"I'm heartbroken," said Priebe, 30, sobbing gently as she loaded her bicycle on a Brooklyn sidewalk. "The rest of the country must be pretty out of touch with reality."
While Democrats mourned nationwide Wednesday, the mood among liberal New Yorkers was particularly dark and foul as some of the country's most Democratic precincts digested the results of the election. From Park Slope to Harlem, there was despair, dismay and cynicism over President's Bush's re-election.
Upper middle class Brooklynites called red state voters misinformed and self-interested. And outside the Apollo Theater in Harlem, residents cried that the fix was in and Bush had stolen another election.
"I'm devastated," writer Emma Starr said as she left the nation's largest member-owned and -operated food co-op. "I have proposed that we should have two distinct nations. Why should we be forced to live together under the rule of an evil dictator?"
The overwhelming sentiment in West Harlem, Manhattan's most Democratic district, was skepticism about the electoral process, based largely on voting problems many blacks faced in Florida in the last general election.
"I didn't think he would be able to steal it again," said construction worker Charles Collins, 43.
"It's a fix," said transit worker Marselee Mitchell. "This is real messed up."
New York City in some ways was the political reverse image of most of the nation Tuesday.
One-third of voters surveyed in nationwide Associated Press exit polls called themselves conservative, one-fifth liberal.
The opposite was true in New York, where about one-third of voters called themselves liberal, compared with one-fifth who identified themselves as conservative.
Three quarters of the city's voters pulled the lever for Kerry, compared with 48 percent of voters nationwide.
Leonard Lopate, the liberal host of a morning talk show on public radio station WNYC, described left-leaning New Yorkers on Wednesday as stunned, despairing and alienated from the rest of the country.
"In the end it was issues like so-called moral values, gun control, things like that, that seemed to be much more important than the big issues that they felt were at the heart of this," Lopate said in an interview. "We are the symbol of the United States to everybody except the rest of the people in the United States."
Joanne Koeller, a 52-year-old graphic artist, struggled for words Wednesday as she paused during a walk on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and tried to describe her feelings about the election.
"I want to cry I'm so depressed," she said.
Dr. Charles Goodstein, a psychiatrist at NYU Medical Center, described the patients with whom he spoke Wednesday as deeply saddened.
"It's had a real impact on them," he said. "There's a sense of hope that's been given up, the loss of an ideal, a kind of pessimistic view of the world."
He said, however, that what he was seeing was not clinical depression and he expected the somber mood to lift eventually.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny-eln--morningafter1103nov03,0,2269870.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire