March 16, 2020
A Gazette Editorial
Around twenty years or so ago things started getting weird. We were all a little giddy about the new century and new millennium about to dawn on us. And a little worried too as we recall. Something about everything going straight to Hell when the ball dropped on New Years Eve because supposedly our computer-controlled world would break when 00 was higher/lower than 99. Or something. The lights would go out, trains would stop, TV remote controls wouldn’t work, and so on.
We had a year or so to worry/joke/prepare for Y2K but then it came and nothing happened. We worried for nothing! Silly us! We had to learn something from this – don’t be so fearful, welcome the future, catastrophizing is a waste of time and energy. Soon we settled into our new century, perhaps a little cocky having survived our first crisis so easily.
Then came the election that November. Unlike any in living memory for most of us, we didn’t know who won. Not the next day, not the next week. Not until like a month later and after a detour through the Supreme Court did we find out our new President’s name: George W. Bush. And, as if that wasn’t strange enough, we also found out that he got half a million fewer votes than the loser, Al Gore.
It had a very wtf just happened feel to it from top to bottom, but once again we settled in and moved along with our lives now having gone through two Big Deals already in the new year/century/millenium. OK, we might have thought, these are weird times we’re sailing into. But we’ll be fine. Look at us – we had a hotly contested election but it all worked out somehow, without bullets or bloodshed. Damn, we’re good some of us must have congratulated ourselves.
Then in September the race for Stanley Michaels’ City Council seat was heading for the finish line up here with about a dozen and a half candidates in the Democratic primary. Michaels had held that seat so long (23 years) that a tsunami of ambition followed his retirement announcement. Whoever won the September primary would be the next Council member because there were so few Republicans here. But instead of finding out who’d be the next person to represent our district, we heard that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. We were just beginning to process that – wait, what? Did a knucklehead pilot fly his Cessna too close or something? – when we heard another plane hit the other twin tower. This was a wtf moment for millions of New Yorkers, and as we would soon learn, for billions of people around the world. They were all New Yorkers now apparently. It helped though.
9/11 was terrible beyond words, for so many reasons. The people who were killed that morning, the ones who died from it since. The loss of those two iconic buildings that everybody hated at first but suddenly realized they loved and couldn’t imagine the city without them. It changed everything is what people always say about that day. There were wars and new security procedures that followed, but the loss of our arrogance surprised us. The presumption that it can’t happen here, whatever bad thing ‘it’ is. Wars, famines, monsoons, you name it. They always happened far enough away that you didn’t have to think about them if you didn’t want to. And mostly we didn’t want to.
The pile, as it was known, smouldered for months. People were really nice, earnestly asking one another ‘how’re you doing? Are you OK?’ Horns stayed mostly unhonked, pedestrians were significantly more patient with slow walkers and sidewalk blockers. When planes came back they all seemed to be flying waaay too low but that was our PTSD talking. Eventually, over a few years, things returned to normal or to a new normal anyway.
And that was that. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? Stronger, a little sadder, and a bit less sure of ourselves after falling through a totally unexpected trap door and somehow surviving.
Then came this novel coronavirus and the weirdly named sickness it brings, COVID-19. For the past few months it’s been one of those far away horror shows we’re so good at tuning out. But like a slowed down time lapse of sunlight crossing a landscape, it slowly and steadily worked its way here somehow. There had been warnings that we breezily ignored. Who cared if a dozen or maybe ten thousand Chinese people caught this weird bug that may have come from handling God only knows what bizarre animals? Not us! We had more important things to worry about! Like banning flavored vapes and plastic bags.
But in the past few weeks everything changed once again and now this thing we really didn’t want to even think about was clearly heading our way. In fact it was here already. Buzzkill. Some sunnily reasoned that it was just a flu so there was no need to think about it after all. Others saw it as the usual hype we’ve come to expect whenever snow is forecast here. An inch means a blizzard and six inches is a life threatening emergency. Then things began moving really quickly – the warnings became more alarming and more frequent, and the civic responses more severe. Actual experts lined up on one side saying this bug is no joke. And an assortment of social media celebrities, internet crackpots, and cable tv pundits assembled on the other side, pooh-poohing it away.
Now it seems the chickens have come home to roost. While some still insist it’s much ado about nothing, others – people in positions of responsibility and authority, experts – are closing schools, cancelling entire sports, and warning us to keep our distance from one another. We’re on the verge of another Election 2000-9/11 mindfuck and what makes it so damn hard is this time we can see it coming.