It’s Thursday, late morning here in New York City. I’m sitting in the park, overlooking the Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades, it’s beautiful outside. My park neighbor has brought his radio, smooth piano jazz rolls through the air.

This is New York, a city whose name conjurer’s image’s of impossibly high skyscrapers, crowded citizens clamoring for room on the subway, a megalopolis. But not from where I sit. This is sweet songs of summer insects whose voices come to me like waves lapping a distant shore. This is a bird dancing in the wind, floating up the Hudson. This is echoes of men and women working their machines, off not to far, somewhere. This is children lounging, soaking in the summer the sun, happy to find a quiet place in Manhattan North.

Amazing how this can all be here. That is, the beautiful dynamic of urban America. New York, more than any other place from coast to coast, is the shining example of what America is. New York is our brand advocate, our PR agent, and our smooth talking good looking executive working their way through a global party.

In this city you will find your Cowboy’s, albeit naked, you will befriend your farmers at the green markets, you will debate your points with the rushed white collar cad at the subway door. You will have a brief tryst of “truthiness” with a blue collar, complaints of suffering at the low waged hourly work. You will find every level of thought, personality, belief and patience. This city is the diversity of America, unconfined to its’ urban borders, sprawling in every direction. Unable to contain itself, this is America, constantly refined and redefined.

America, New York, its citizens are ever changing what it means to be American. Organically restating themselves as times change. Ten years ago, to me, New York was a place where a musician could come to live in poverty, while building celebrity. It was a city of ghetto living artists, living and breathing the color of their hood. The same could be said ten years before that, and so on.

Today, New York City is a place of impossibly disproportionate divides between those that have, and those that have not. A city whose artists are in exodus searching for a new home. A flame burning low, as the world decentralizes from the great American dream. Our brand is in trouble.

America must reconnect with itself. It must listen to those that make this dream; those that make this improbable brand what it is, and what it is not. Neglecting changes, no matter how rapidly they occur, only hinders, and hastens decay. New York, coming to terms with its missing class, will suffer as it learns who it is. As it learns how a city that has concrete corridors with temples to corporations existing with quiet nooks of nature, and homes for mighty and meek, must make a place for all those who make this idea, this place, this brand what it is.

America, New York is in need. We, those who make “it” what it is, have changed. It is time for the brands of the world, corporations and nations, to understand and to conform to those that make them who they are, not ask that those same people conform to who they want them to be.

All things live in a cycle, and grow and decay as such. One can allow ideas and objects to go to disrepair, or they can nurture and cultivate. Take haste to listen to your world, to understand that your brands, and all its elements are representative of not just what you think and believe, but what those who embrace your brand think and believe.