Are we better? Are we lost? Are we changed, changed utterly?

Here are some images, some moments, for you.

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We are post-Tower of Babel now.

The culture of New York is now completely fragmented, and this happened through language.

It used to be that while there were a million different languages and accents here, everyone was trying to communicate as best he or she could — all the time. New Yorkers were famous for this! Any given day was thrilling, because random strangers, from whatever part of the world, would say something silly or funny or wise to you in passing, and everyone would manage to get the gist of each other, whatever anyone's level of English. We were all present in the joy of being Americans — New Yorkers!— together.

That commonality is simply gone. Culturally, this city could now be anywhere in the world — any globalist, polyglot city. The culture that was New York has been smashed right through.

This is the globalist play, right? The globalists understand better even than we had done, how precious a specific culture is, and they understand that if you throw enough people at it from everywhere in the word, with no acculturating processes or numerical limits, there is eventually no culture left there at all.

English-speakers are no better than anyone else, of course, but there is value in a shared culture that can only come about via a shared language; indeed, a lingua franca; national language.

The fact that somehow, all at once, English has collapsed as even the remotest goal of New York City common speech, and that speaking English seems not to be important at all to many of the newest immigrants, means that there is a loneliness and sadness and boredom and homesickness, involved with getting around New York City and its boroughs — journeys that used to be thrilling because you met people from everywhere, through their English.