Weekly The Generation, Year 1, Issue 17
December 26, 2023
When New York City Mayor Eric Adams thinks of his job or the city, he sometimes thinks of crashing planes. In the past week, Adams has twice used disastrous flight scenarios for his analogies when addressing arguably the last US city where a politician would want to make those comparisons.
During an interview with WPIX that aired on December 17, Adams was asked to sum up 2023 in one word and explain its meaning. “New York,” Adams quickly said. Then he invoked 9/11.
“This is a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our trade center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open,” he said. “This is a very, very complicated city. And that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”
A day later, Adams hosted a community meeting at an elementary school in Queens that was attended by many local leaders. Before he started taking questions from the room, Adams took a moment to share how he had been bullied as a kid and to address his critics.
“So, all those who want to yell at me and call me names, I’ve been there and not done that. I’m focused on recovering this city,”
he said. Then, again, he started to think about planes.
“I am the pilot, folks, and you are all passengers. Stop praying for me to crash the plane. Pray for me to land the plane because there’s no parachutes on this plane,” he said.
In 2022, he once said that it’s hard to tell the difference between someone who’s “hooked on cheese” and someone “hooked on heroin.” He also compared himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression when he addressed his first 100 days in office last April.
Adams responded to the backlash to his 9/11 comment on Tuesday during a press conference.
Source: Business Insider
