In lieu of brighter skies and calmer winds, the city of Los Angeles felt more alive today, yet it was still yearning to live, with more than half of its population nowhere to be seen. I know that this is what cities across America have looked like these last few weeks, but there was something different about today; whatever hope might have been taken from the sight of clearer sunshine felt marred by a great “settling in” of the fact that the emptiness will hold well into the foreseeable future, until this crisis is through.
I know that where business was already dreadful, it became only more barren. And I know that where the feeling was already somber, it fell still further to approach resignation.
The heaviest of the days are yet to come, but it already feels like the end of not one, but many Americas.
If feels like after decades of minimizing the issues of warfare, incarceration, and poverty and addiction in America as if they were simply the costs of running this consumer’s society, our way of life now screeches to a halt being entrapped by all of these costs at once. They have come to collect, to take us for everything we’ve got.
The pandemic has been called an invisible war, which says a lot about our way of processing a challenge, and which is also far from original; see the war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terrorism. Now the war is on every doorstep, and we can hardly touch the knob without fearing its germs will metastasize into a date with death.
The crisis feels like an incarceration. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Lebron James, Donald Trump, or one of the 3.3. million Americans who filed for unemployment these last two weeks. We are all on hold now. Our day in court is still not within range. We need to forget about it for a while.
The shutdown is also a great impoverishment of the whole of our society, like a great darkening where there was once light and openness. But if you were to ask Black families in Chicago whom were forced to make their housing in the ghettos due to the federal government’s Redlining, you may find a haunting similarity between what took place for them then and what’s happening to families in all of our neighborhoods now.
The pandemic is also like coming to terms with an addiction once it’s been torn away from our grasp. Our political landscape has become addicted to polarization, addicted to belittling the other side for merely having the time to do so. Now, reducing the other side with euphemisms is simply irrelevant, utterly wasting time and costing lives. Even the unlikeliest of presidents may be starting to see that.
To be sure, I don’t see this massive humbling of American power as necessarily leading to a re-balancing act, nor do I take any pride in the crisis as some sort of retribution, or–as Malcolm X once said–chickens coming home to roost. But I do hope that our communities can reflect meaningfully on what is at stake here when that time approaches, that is, in terms of what we want to save once we get through the worst it has to offer. I hope we do this not only for the moment, but as if our whole future depends on it. Indeed, I believe that’s just what we’re getting to.
Let’s have a better day tomorrow, even if it takes our damnedest best to get to it.
J.T.
Really enjoyed this one. A great piece of literature to resonate with the times.
Appreciate you NK!