I work in Manhattan 3 days a week, but live in Bucks County PA.

I have found that, for me, this mix has given me a perspective on the Big Issues that is complex.

I can spend time in New York in my office and experience direct working interaction with:

Wasim - an Islamic former Pakistani (just became a citizen this year!) who speaks English, French, Bengali and Pashtun fluently.

Joanne - one of 14 children born in Jamaica, she sits across from me and plans her wedding obsessively.

Ayoung - sits next to me. She's from Korea, and uses Skype to video chat with her family "back home".

Daniel - a Russian national, who lives for 3 months at a time in the US & Japan.

Andrew - he's here from Wisconsin, which is, as far as I can tell, no less foreign compared to New York as the places some other folks are from.

James - a gay adult who has been living with his partner for longer than most people stay married.

John - a NY native who is getting closer and closer to his pilot's license.

The political views in the office are not as "liberal" as you might expect - in fact, I'm often surprised by the divergence from the expected.

As far as crime and "filth" - well, let me put it this way. Given a choice of walking through Central Park at 2:30 AM or walking through Gary, Indiana at 2:30 PM, I'll take Central Park ANY TIME. Also, you haven't experienced what emergency preparedness really is until you've been around a large-scale emergency response incident in NYC. If there's only 1 thing they learned from 9/11, it's how to respond and coordinate efforts.

As much as I love living in Bucks County, I do have to admit that it's occasionally frustrating to hear people spout off racist and ignorant statements about the people who live in cities. I'm especially annoyed by the statement that crime rates are lower in rural areas - I'm convinced that it's enforcement rates that are lower. I've been around too many incidents that would have put someone in jail in NYC that are willfully ignored when I'm in the country. Hell, I was recently on a call for an accident where some drunk rolled his truck with his 8 year old son in the front, and the cops called the drunk's brother to come get the kid while they hauled dad to jail - and the guy shows up in his car drunk as hell - and the cops just told him to go home and they'd drive the kid over later in a patrol car.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that you can say you don't like cities, and that's fine - but basing your opinion on what you see on TV or read in papers, rather than ongoing direct experience, is not only weak-minded, it's downright dangerous because it trains your mind to close off and not see what new interpretation of the situation around you might be best given current circumstances.

If you continually say X is true, and your logic for that assertion is based a tautology founded in your acceptance of mediated information that gives you a basis for your conclusion about X, you are succumbing to the dangers of acceptance of opinions and selected agenda-driven data point presented as actual facts.

Opinions posing as facts can form as a result of the pedagogy of the media's advertising-driven business, which seeks to maximize our reactivity while minimizing our ability to think rationally.

So, to get this back OT - a city is not a place where you are immediately stripped naked and thrown to a mob of angry minorities who will carve you up and toss your carcass into the river. Yes, there are restrictive laws about personal defensive items - I can argue from facts that these laws are too restrictive, I can argue that it's "every man for himself" when the SHTF in New York - but then when I experience "SHTF" moments in NY (Blackouts, Steam pipe explosions, building collapses), the facts keep knocking my opinions to bits. Here, at least, the authorities are ready.

For NYC, my EDC has been reduced to a small flashlight, some water, some dust masks, a pocket knife, small FAK and a radio. I keep an MRE in my desk drawer and $100 in my wallet. It's all good.