The NYC citizenry was spared yet another onerous Bloombergian restriction by a a last minute lower court decision, invalidating the ban on the sale of sugary beverages greater than 16 oz. However, the fight is not over: Bloomberg has two opportunities to appeal the decision.

Everyone knows that consuming sugary beverages regularly is bad for your health, as are many other things. For example, you can legally buy as many Camel shortie cancer packs as you want, enough to fill that same banned plus 16 oz. cup.

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At the public hearing to co-locate a charter elementary school in the only public middle school in Greenpoint, a parent stood up and asked, “If the NYC DOE [Department of Education] is doing such a poor job by parents, why don’t we open more charter schools?”

Those who think the solution to fixing the problems of urban education is to redirect taxpayer dollars to privatized charters don’t understand what parents want. We want an end to Bloomberg’s “my way or the highway” totalitarian mayoral control of our schools. Before hopping into another dysfunctional relationship with the next mayor, it’s worth discussing our painful love affair with public education, and an abusive city DOE, in order to find our way out of this mess.

In 2002, the mayor wrested control of our public schools from what for thirty years had been the decentralized power of local school boards. This much authority given to the mayor to appoint the New York City schools chancellor, set policy, and create budgets was radical and unprecedented. School boards were erased and the city Board of Education became the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). A voting body might sound democratic, but the majority eight out of thirteen PEP members are appointed at the pleasure of the mayor. Imagine the public outcry if the U.S. President were able to assign members to the House and Senate as a rubber stamp for all of his policies. The PEP has never voted against Mayor Bloomberg, even as so many of his controversial policies don’t make any sense for public schools. The one time PEP members threatened to vote against Bloomberg with the use of high stakes tests to end social promotion for third graders, Bloomberg removed those appointees the night before the vote in what was dubbed the “Monday Night Massacre.”

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Nothing compares to the 21st-century marketing machine that persuaded Americans to spend $17.6 billion on Valentine’s Day (VD) in 2012, an average of $126 per person, according to the National Retail Federation. That figure was 8.6% higher than in 2011, impressive in an economic recession. In fact, VD is the third largest retail holiday of the year. That’s real money spent primarily on one-time gifts that are reasonably priced the rest of the year, such as a culinary orgy of designer dark chocolate touting medicinal and love potion benefits.

VD is a psychologically nerve wracking day even for those madly in love, and only fuels the fire like a lithiumion battery on a 787 Dreamliner. It’s the artificial pressure to have a romantic experience through huge expenditures of personal capital. And often it’s a downright depressing day for many, like the lonely super-model who couldn’t land that GQ-looking billionaire.

The free market creates this insidious, illogical, yet highly effective guilt trip, pimping out Cupid for the explicit purpose of making an obscene profit. VD is pure capitalistic manipulation to make you feel guilty, like the talk-show audience peer pressure to clap when the sign illuminates “applause” right on cue, despite an underwhelming performance.

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For many years the mainstream media has verbally eviscerated hipsters as if they’re some kind of Ebola virus. Hipsters are vilified, accused of destroying the social and moral fabric of America with their off-the-grid lifestyle and perceived sloth, to being the Fifth Column in the gentrification and displacement of working class folk through collaboration with Gordon Gekko inspired real-estate developers. Unless you’re a wealthy, celeb hipster, you’re a target.

Many of America’s movie stars portray hipsters, including Dustin Hoffman as the 21 year old, silver-spooned Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967) and Sam Elliot as the 32-year-old bohemian lifeguard Rick Carlson in Lifeguard (1976). Both characters rejected corporate offers; one in plastics, the other as a Porsche salesman.

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The locals beat me up every hot summer day in 1950s south side Chicago. I was in late middle school and didn’t fit in as I was not from the neighborhood, merely a seasonal, summer visitor every year for three long summers. My status changed dramatically in the second year when the local Italian street gang found out that I made a better zip gun than anybody else. That was a good thing, because I was skinny, relatively weak and a bad fighter. Instead of being a victim, I became one of the boys, but a boy who didn’t have to carry a knife, a car antenna, a baseball bat or any other object that might be useful when you ran into rival gangs. I had status.

We were a motley group of kids. Some of us were already seasoned wiseguys in training, having worked as spotters outside gambling parlors, always on the lookout for the cops. On the street, we would menace any adult we felt like, simply because there were so many of us, but if we mistook a wiseguy for a citizen, we would quickly learn our place in the local pecking order. They would simply pull back their suit jackets and we would see a revolver and immediately scatter.

Fights were routine. Numbers counted. If there was enough of us and enough of them, we would often fight. The local emergency room would fill up with cuts, bruises, broken bones, but the local morgue stayed mainly empty. Seldom did anybody die, even though tempers ran hot and the stupid kids would often start fights that were not intended. Kids who would become wiseguys learned their future trades through youthful emergency room visits and lived to fight another day.

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