To: Vice President Joe Biden
The Naval Observatory
One Observatory Circle NW
Washington, DC, 20008Re: Your Big Mouth
Dear Mr. Vice President,
If you’re so concerned about the health of New Yorkers, do us a favor and cover your mouth before you talk again.
We’re all a little uneasy about swine flu — and for good reason — but your suggestion that straphangers cut up their MetroCards and cower in their apartments is reckless and stupid, damaging to our economy and our psyche.
This is the city that never sweats, at least not the small stuff. If Osama bin Laden couldn’t keep us from riding the subway after 9/11, Porky Pig certainly isn’t going to now.
You say you don’t like confined spaces, like airplanes. Fine — don’t get on one and come here ever again.
But if you do, here’s a MetroCard so you can take the subway or the bus — just like 7 million of us do every day, through good times and bad. Squished up against each other, we may give up our privacy, and even a little bit of our dignity, but we do it with pride and resolve.
We’ve done it for 105 years now, through far worse epidemics than this.
Yes, the subway we love to hate is a breeding ground for entire civilizations of germs and bacteria.
But after riding the Lexington Avenue line during rush hour, our hands are still cleaner than yours are after spending just a single minute in the seedy backrooms of Washington.
On Monday, a showboating Air Force One made half the city duck and cover, bringing back memories of our darkest day.
But yesterday, Gaffe Force Two (that’d be you, Joe took a shot at our economic backbone.
You and the president claim you want to stimulate the economy. But this week, you sent people fleeing from their desks in the middle of the workday and then urged them to stay home for good.
You campaigned as a proponent of mass transit. But your remarks could generate mass hysteria.
We didn’t ask for your two cents, and our subway turnstiles don’t want your two bucks.
As we say in New York: Flu you, Joe. And the pig you rode in on.
Yours truly,
The New York Post staff
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