Ben

"I can see the subway map in my head."

By Students of NYC

March 22^nd, 2024

"Me, I love studying subways. I can see the subway map in my head. I can tell you all the train lines and stops in the boroughs; I’ve studied them all. If you give me two destinations anywhere in New York City, I can tell you how to get from one to the other on the trains. You know what the coolest thing about our subway map is? A lot of other subway systems around the world have maps that are geometrical and straight lines. But in New York City, all the lines are curved and you could pretty much use the subway map as a street map. It’s not perfectly geographically accurate, but it’s close.

NYC kids — we have great ideas. But we can’t be heard if the media isn’t willing to let us be heard. They love a flashy headline that gets people interested. Like if a student gets hurt or is involved in a crime, they are all over it. They put a mic in front of us, and we have to scramble to find words. But that’s not the story about us. We’re not getting an opportunity to find or express who we really are. I think the media realized that it’s the negative that gets the clicks. When people gravitate toward the negative stuff, the news gravitates toward it because they want to get attention, but that means ignoring the positive stuff too.

A lot of times, in the media, I just see two sides attacking each other. Each side wants to prove that they’re right, but instead of discussing it, it just seems like they are trying to destroy the other side. And the media is all “this is the worst time to be alive.” But I don’t think that’s true. Just look at history. In the 1930s, we had the Great Depression. You had breadlines and hardly any jobs. You see unemployment and homelessness today too, but it’s not the worst it’s ever been. And there’s always been rivalry throughout history. Two sides are against each other because yeah, they're two sides and they have opposing viewpoints. They're going to argue that they're right, because they have to. I’m not so much against two parties saying, 'oh, I am right because of this and they're wrong because of this.' But it starts to become bad when you have people exaggerating so much — sensationalizing these headlines trying to make people click. If everyone just had access to facts about situations, we could genuinely discuss how we felt about a certain topic. And we could have the right to maybe even switch sides when we read the facts. But today, everyone calls the other side fake news and gets more and more extreme to a point where even good criticism or good feedback is ignored.

So it’s like, you're in a car, you're stuck in traffic and there's a person ahead of you that's moving slowly, and you are mad at that person for moving so slowly, but they're still a person and you don't know why they're moving slowly. Maybe they're confused; maybe they're a tourist that's coming and maybe their car isn't working so well and they can't go so fast. And I feel like being in a car, you get so mad, like: Why are these cars not moving more quickly? But maybe you're not 'stuck' in traffic. Maybe you are traffic to someone else. Consider that. In the car behind you, there's a person who thinks the traffic is you."