By This post is also available in: ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ (GREEK) TÜRKÇE (TURKISH)
A 33-year-old Muslim man named Zohran Mamdani…
He is challenging Trump…
He says, “We will destroy his fascist regime”…
While US President Trump takes pride in the bombs he dropped on Iran and their destructive power, New York is seething…
In this city, which is home to the largest Jewish population in the world, Mamdani, a Muslim democratic socialist running for mayor of New York, openly defends the Palestinians and says, “If Netanyahu comes to this city, I will arrest him.”
While other candidates say on live television that they will visit Israel first if they win the election, Mamdani talks about ‘genocide’…
This young African—born in Uganda and of Indian descent—whom Trump tries to disparage as a “communist” is a member of the City Council of New York. He is working the crowds and embracing tens of thousands in the squares.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the most senior independent member of the US Senate and a Jew of Polish origin, is lashing out at Trump, calling him “an authoritarian and racist liar, a fraud and a representative of the elite billionaires.”
Democratic socialist Sanders, who openly supports Mamdani, sees Trump as ‘the greatest threat to American democracy.’
And as all this swirls around in my mind, along with the question “Where is the world headed towards?”, I realise that I am in Gocmenkoy…
I am waiting at the crossroads in Gocmenkoy, at the ‘traffic lights’ on red.
These traffic lights are there for no reason…
I don’t think they serve any purpose other than causing traffic jams…
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t…
When they’re working, long queues form, and when they’re broken, traffic flows faster…
I wish they were always broken…
This is a main road leading from Gocmenkoy to the road leading up to the Nicosia fair…
If you draw a ‘waiting line’ for the two ‘side roads’ that intersect with this main road, drivers will stop there and wait, then cross to the other side of the main road when it’s their turn.
So, an unnecessary ‘traffic light’ has been installed over there…
Moreover, when you’re waiting in a queue behind a few cars, you can’t even see the light.
Every single day, the sheer lack of common sense at this intersection drives me absolutely mad…
One minute I’m in New York, the next I’m in Gocmenkoy…
The reasons why the experts who ‘design’ these roads do such a sloppy job don’t leave me alone…
I usually wait for the ‘green’ to turn on with a mouthful of profanity…
I was walking around New York, in my mind, when I witnessed a black Mercedes speeding down the main street and coming to a sudden stop with a screech…
The black, new-model Mercedes, which had stopped at the last moment at the red light on the crossroads, was being driven by a woman with fake blonde hair.
In Nicosia, where expensive cars are now driven by our ‘women with headscarves’, this Mercedes-driving woman with her head uncovered and a huge plastic hair clip caught my attention…
Of course, she wasn’t concerned at all with New York, or Madani…
I’m sure she had no idea about the genocide in Palestine, or Trump’s missile launch at Iran…
Thanks to the new opportunities provided by the ‘family budget’ and our ‘automotive sector’ over the past two years, she was enjoying her Mercedes with a ‘Z’ licence plate…
This young woman with her unkempt hair suddenly opened the window and threw her cigarette butt right to the middle of the crossroads…
If there hadn’t been a long line behind me, I would have run, picked up the cigarette butt she had thrown, and said, “Ma’am, you dropped your cigarette.”
I couldn’t say that because the traffic light turned green, and she sped off…
I glanced at the cigarette butt across the street…
The cigarette butt, blown by the wind from the car following the woman, began to dance and run towards the middle of the road…
It was moving forward in the wind, upright, as if it were alive…
I kept my eyes on it… At the bottom of the traffic light, it had betrayed dozens of other cigarette butts like itself, and moved away from them…
It was clearly the special cigarette butt of a special cigarette…
It was resilient; it had learned to stand upright, not to get stuck in one place, and to walk…
So, the woman in the Mercedes had gusto…
Fortunately, the woman was far away, and I didn’t have to deal with her…
I could have paid more attention to the cigarette butt, but I left it in the middle of the road and fled the scene.
I consoled myself by thinking that the old ‘norms’ no longer apply in such ‘public’ matters…
We were taught at school to ‘warn’ those who behaved badly.
It was a ‘civic duty’…
But what if I had said something to the woman and she had given me a piece of her mind in the middle of the road…
I skipped what I learned at school; now the realities of the streets are important…
Just a few weeks ago, I came across a wealthy ‘woman’ of this kind in front of an indoor sports hall…
Her vehicle was a ‘jeep’ that was much more expensive than a house with a garden…
She was leaving the Industrial Zone…
While waiting at a red light, she opened her door, spat on the ground, and got back into her vehicle.
I was right behind her, and I felt a wave of nausea.
Immediately, the words of a fascist politician came to mind: “You’ll get used to it…”
Look at the folly of my mind: I left Mamdani in New York, and now I’m fixated on women trying to climb the social ladder…
What’s going on here in the middle of Gocmenkoy?
This article was originally published on 01.07.2025
Source: A WOMAN’S ‘CIGARETTE BUTT’ IN GOCMENKOY AND MAMDANI IN NEW YORK…
