As CapitalNewYork just pointed out, the New York Times construed my recent absorption in a Jean-Paul Sartre book, while sitting in the chamber, as a token of the Legislature’s bleak mood.

While I can’t speak for my colleagues, my disposition in Albany has remained rather optimistic. It’s certainly more optimistic than Sarte’s.

Yesterday’s near-unanimous tally, from both sides of the aisle, regarding a Resolution to deny the vicious, disingenuous advance of the BDS movement against Israel, was enough to raise anyone’s mood. Unless, of course, they’re an anti-Semite.

Which brings me back to Sarte. The French existentialist author’s play No Exit portrayed an afterlife in which three departed protagonists are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. Thus, Sartre’s oft-quoted L’enfer, c’est les autres (“Hell is other people.”) But I wasn’t reading No Exit. I was reading Sarte’s Anti-Semite and Jew, which he also wrote in 1944 about a rather different kind of hell.

So yesterday may have had its moments of ennui. But it was anything but bleak.

Dov Hikind
Member of Assembly

00000