I am leaving the city tomorrow morning, to head to Anne’s family’s house in Connecticut. I made it three weeks since that first Friday when we got the order to work from home, and while the weeks have felt short, it seems like I’ve been here for months, taking calls from home, pacing my room and drinking tea. Packing my bags this morning, I stacked and re-stacked my clothes four or five times (I’m a very inefficient packer) and laid everything out like I was headed for some long trip, which in a lot of ways I guess I am. Maybe because of the slight monotony of the past three weeks, I feel the same excitement that I do before a much needed vacation, as though I haven’t been away from my day-to-day in far too long. For a few minutes I sat looking at my pile of clothes, deciding whether or not to pack my camera, before coming to my senses and leaving it to collect dust in the same spot on my shelf where it has sat for the last year. Excitement makes me lose all reason.
As I write this, I realize I haven’t seen Anne in roughly four weeks. I maintain a physical calendar, where I pencil in my runs and try to keep track of upcoming events, and as I scanned through it this morning (the calendar is coming with me, of course), I realize that Anne’s trip began on the 10th of March, exactly twenty five days ago. Not since the days of us living in different states have we spent that long apart, and it has been odd to get accustomed to the separation. I imagine that’s a huge part of these past weeks feeling monotonous. I’m not having the fun I’m used to and I miss having her companionship when I wake up and go to bed each day.
I’m also realizing, as I prepare to leave the comfort of one safe setting for another, that I have absolutely no concept of what it would be like to be truly scared during this whole disaster. What if my work put me at risk? What if I didn’t have the money to buy food at the place with the shortest line, or to order delivery? What if I couldn’t afford Clorox? I won’t even try to empathize because I don’t think I can; the virus has affected us all so differently that for me to imagine my worst case scenario I would end up offending the vast majority of New Yorkers, who are truly struggling to deal with all of this. Who don’t have secure jobs and whose WiFi signal is irrelevant to them right now. The other day I ran past a homeless person asleep on a bench, and I realized: I had been so confined to the nicest parts of Brooklyn that I had largely forgotten there were homeless people in the city, and hadn’t given a second thought to how terrible this all is for them.
Two things have struck me over the past few days, and both seem to have a lot to do with resources and how we deploy them during a time like this. The first is the federal stimulus check. I most likely will receive one, and it is absolutely incredible that I would. If anything, my life has actually gotten easier since I was forced to stay at home. My cost of living has been lowered and my workdays have become less stressful. Receiving over one thousand dollars from the government is one of the clearer examples of misappropriated resources I can think of: Why not send twice as much to the lower half of the income bracket? Or why not just put that money towards unemployment claims from people who really need it? I can’t accept the money, and I’m sure others will feel the same. There will be privatized solutions to redeploy the funds in ways the government could have done in the first place. It’s extremely frustrating.
The second thing is the other half of the same coin: Why couldn’t the government seize private resources and redeploy them as needed? As I write this, a notification popped up on my screen from VICE that read “Homeless People Need Shelter. Hotels Are Empty. Why Aren’t Cities Acting?” It’s a good question. The same goes for all sorts of problems we’re facing today. It feels like a great country like ours would respond together, would use what infrastructure and skills we have to plug the holes this virus has made in our society.
Our country is run by people who aren’t fit to lead in a crisis like this. They don’t say anything to inspire us; won’t tell us the truth of our collective situation. Hopefully, when this is all behind us, we’ll start to judge our candidates by their ability to weather storms like these, and take decisive action when necessary. Maybe that means that Biden won’t be the nominee come the convention in August. Maybe Cuomo’s infectious energy through the last few weeks will become a model for the type of figurehead we want to lead us.
I’ll end on this. I’m actually going to really miss Brooklyn, all the terrible news about the place be damned. For me, in my extremely lucky, protective bubble, Brooklyn was a really great place to be quarantined. More than anything else I’ll miss these views:
