Surrogate babies born illegally in the Ukraine. A swelling online marriage business in Japan. The global theme is connection at all costs, with screens, contracts, pets, children. No one wants to be alone during a crisis, it seems. All the same I wake early one morning in late May with no desire to engage or read the news whatsoever. The tragic has become mundane. Instead I take a walk, head in the other direction for once, towards the city boardwalk that is not yet full of people, towards a place where I might be able to get a cappuccino. Towards sun.
Another hipster coffee shop that is not open until noon. Deceiving hospitality. I am left instead with quiet poetry. A city that is approaching normalcy. One hears more traffic again, and the sound of trains. People commuting, going places, resuming productivity. Seems our time of grounding is nearly over, if not finished already. Have we succeeded in learning the lessons we needed to learn? Did we see what we needed to see?
Slowly we expand our inner circles. Countries that already had social safety nets and public healthcare return to normal faster, for the impact upon their societies was so much less. Other countries, like America, are rife with conflict and opposition for every decision, in all directions, 100,000 dead already — here and there, we have many different stories. America, self-deemed superlative in all respects, has indeed taken the crown with this one.
The American Dream.
They bought a bottle of Patron to celebrate their Uncle’s death. An immigrant family of Mexican dreamers, brought up by their boot straps with the help of the Teamsters. Her uncle was the only citizen of an entire apartment complex of families. Came home from visiting his mother in Mexico in March, went to work for a few days, then began to feel sick, and started self-quarantine. When he didn’t get better, he went to the doctor, requested a coronavirus test, and was refused. The next day he went to another hospital, asked another doctor, and was again refused. So he drives to a different part of New Jersey, goes to a drive-through testing facility, where he is turned away a third time, told that it was only for essential workers.
When he finally got tested, it was not exactly by choice, this time transported directly to the emergency room and incubated within hours, only to die a few days later. Yes, the American Dream — learn who the first President is, tell your nieces to aspire for Ivy League bricks, truck supplies all over the country, and then experience the same kind of racism one might have at the border, except he’s been here for years now as a contributing citizen.
After he died, his younger brother began to feel sick. He was a healthy man, an avid biker, and having already seen the treatment his documented brother received, decided to stay home with garlic and ginger. Then one day he took a turn for the worse, and his son was on the phone, 911, someone help, he is not breathing. His cousins heard all this from the apartment across the hall, afraid to open the door, afraid of transmission. When they later opened the door, it was to see the funeral home dragging the body down the stairs in a body bag.
Dragging the body down the stairs. At that point one can assume they were also quite tired.
We go back in time to this moment, and can recall that there was a shortage of tests in the hospitals, but to whom priority was given, and how — this is the consistent tragedy, the implicit racism imbedded and often ignored in this country. As if to shed further light onto the extent of this reality, a birder in Central Park, a Harvard graduate, mind you, asks a woman to please leash her dog, who was running loose and disturbing the wildlife. She refused. He repeated his request, which was indeed the rule of law, and she said he was harassing her, threatened to call the police. He said go right ahead, and began to film her, as she called the authorities and told them that an African American man was threatening her White Life. Within hours she was fired from her job, and as a final ironic twist, internet investigators found that she supported liberal Democratic causes. Seems if we are going to make America great (again), we need to start with a reality check.
Death by zip code, or by skin color, is just not acceptable. All persons are created equal, let us also live and die that way.
With that, the Governor rings the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. We are once again open for business. Memorial Day has always signified a changing of the seasonal guard in America, and God forbid you wear white before then. But now we can all celebrate the start of summer because today We Turn A New Page. The Governor even changed the oil on his car over the weekend, got his hands dirty, focused on something other than numbers for at least an hour or two. If we are going to start anew, let it be with fresh fluids, well-lubricated. Let’s make sure we have the basics in place before we embark on this next phase.
Re-Open. Open again. We were forced to go inside and see what is there in the darkness. Now we must return to the world and make changes. Now is the time to Act. Now is the time to Build.
First we DO, then we Delegate, then Decide, and finally, Design. This is how we are setting up our regional control groups, this is how we are moving forward with our coalition. Get everyone on the same page and keep updating the numbers, the facts, the figures, and calculations. As the General, he has his Lieutenant Commanders in place, and he is training them to do as he does, to keep watch, be vigilant. If you see movement, pounce! Resolve it.
Nobody told us, he keeps on telling us.
We were looking to the West ! It came from the East !
Like the sun, indeed, it came from the East. But if you go East long enough it turns back West again, for this is what it means to be a circle. This comes back to the facts that Columbus gave us. The Great Riddle — if you go long enough in one direction on this Earth, you end up where you started.
The Governor returns to the Crusade of the Mask, as we learn of the voter run-off in the PSA competition. To avoid any potential discrepancies over voter fraud, he makes the executive decision to run both of the top two ads, separated as they were by only 502 votes, and he states what is now becoming de facto rule —
“Wearing a mask is officially cool.”
Some people are even coordinating it to their outfits, the Governor says. But however you want to do it, this is part of our current fashion. If you see someone not wearing a mask, he says, Nicely, politely, offer some facts. Keep it friendly. In other words, don’t be too New York about it.
But of course, as we all know, God is like a waitress in a New York diner. You gotta ask for what you want clearly, quickly, and with no substitutions, otherwise she’s gonna go right on to the next customer and you might not get a chance to order a coffee for another hour.
When in New York, do as New Yorkers do.
(Which, in this case, means wear a mask.)
In all respects the Governor seems recharged by his Memorial Day weekend at the beach with his friends, and he has come back with all sorts of new ideas. Not only are we going to re-open, but now we are supercharging the economy, putting in all that infrastructure that leaders have talked about doing for years, but never did.
“When I say I’m going to do something,” the Governor states, “I do it.”
Like that they are already going ahead with repairs and renovations, new train stations, airports, etc. Make hay while the sun shines, repair roads when the traffic is low or, as they say in Queens, repair the roof when it ain’t raining.
We are anticipating the surge by building its very possibility into our future. We are addressing the overcrowding of the planet on every level, both voluntarily, as well as by tragic force. We have been given space, we have been made to take space, create space, both inside as well as out.
If you’re not ready to be back, that’s also okay. There are all sorts of individual decisions to be made. This is also an emotional transition. Even though we have all gone through this trauma together, we need to do what feels right for us, as families, businesses, and individuals. Some people are not ready for the next phase yet, and that’s also okay.
For the rest of us, take a deep breath and brace yourselves. Together we Renew, Repair, Invigorate. We have had our time in Quarantine, now it is time to rebuild our civic immune system. We need to restore confidence in each other, comfort.
This is all a measure of how engaged we all are. Because we should be, because we have to be. Because this is life and death.
You’re talking about my life. I’m going to make my own judgements TYVM.
(Thank You Very Much. Let us take a moment to bow our heads and just say that one more time. Thank You Very Much. Thank you for this life. Thank you for all that you have given us. Thank you for everything you have done. Thank You Very Much.)
Now we turn to the rebuilding of the economy of our shared world.
“The economy is like a football,” the Governor says. “If you drop it, you don’t always know which way it’s going to bounce back.”
In this new economy there are going to be winners and losers, a sifting out of the old economy and the new. This is already painful, but it is also a moment that shows the reality of perspective and foresight — where did we place our investments and energy before that are no longer viable? How can we learn from that about where can we grow from here?
As the Governor switches the focus to Public Works, he appears more and more like the backseat driver for the President, and the functioning of the entire country. Which is fine, really, seeing as no one had their hands on the wheel anyway. It’s like that little kid the police found on the highway some weeks ago, the one who was four years old. Took his Mom’s car and went out to buy cookies, got pulled over by the police because he was swerving on the road.
Now that we have a real adult at the wheel, we are all being taught lessons in a thing called fiscal responsibility. Which is to say, you don’t borrow money to pay for operating costs. That’s mortgaging your future. You borrow money for capital to increase future revenues.
We Need Help.
The Governor says it in more ways that one, in bold letters, and even gets on a plane to go down to Washington to speak in person about it, showing that tough guys can also ask for help. Seems he understands one thing about the President, and that’s that he is an In-Person kind of person. A guy who called up the leader of North Korea to have a meeting just because he was “in the neighborhood.” So if you want to get help for your state’s budget without making it political, go sit down with the President in the Oval Office.
Be real. Be candid. Be apolitical.
Let’s deal with the here and now, and we’ll deal with the future when it gets here.
He’s got big dreams about how to jumpstart the future. Cross-state transmission cables for renewable energy. New education infrastructure. Bridges! Roads! Put this guy in charge and we will DO THINGS. Hell, we already are. If we failed to realize the American Dream, let us pave the way for a New Reality.
“Supervised by your nice, easy-going boss — MOI.”
Today is Page 1 of a New Chapter.