What will America be when this crisis subsides?
Slouching toward a monochromatic future
Me too Pete.
What I’m Reading
George Packer on the preexisting conditions that set America up for pandemic catastrophe — the best thing I’ve read so far on how our nation is a failed state, led by people who are both shockingly corrupt and deeply stupid, sent careening into disaster by inequality and exploitation enabled by a feckless, morally bankrupt conservative party.
Keenaga Yamahtta-Taylor on coronavirus laying bare the stark racial inequalities of American life — not just in health care service delivery, but in everything from where we live to the work we do that contributes to good health or ill.
We don’t deserve Esther Perel.
Joe Nocera in Bloomberg is very good on how Trump absolutely blew it on coronavirus.
Kids are losing it, parents are losing it, everyone is losing it.
Gabrielle Hamilton on closing her (and my) beloved Prune.
The View From Here
When I’m overwhelmed and too busy, I often find myself wishing I could just hit pause, like Zach Morris with his remote control on Saved by the Bell. What if all of the other demands of life just stopped? I could finally catch my breath.
The pause is here — halfway, kind of. So much of life has ground to a halt. Other aspects of it tick on, but the clock has gone wonky. I have stories to report, pieces to file, a book to finish, a body that needs moving and feeding, all ridiculously lucky things to have in a moment of vast unemployment, illness and death. Without anything to do outside of these four walls, I have a lot more time than usual (a privilege reserved, in this crisis, for the childless). And yet the hours and days glide by and I still feel overwhelmed and behind, and lazy and wasteful on top of that. When I turn on the news in the evening, or scroll through Twitter during the day, the ever-growing numbers of dead and infected are overpowering, devastating.
There are people to grieve, and that is the most important thing. But there are also places to grieve, and entire lives. So much of what makes us feel human — connected to place, to our desire to create, to each other — has vanished. What happens to the small restaurant owner who never reopens? Sure, when New York comes roaring back — and it will, even if it takes years — something else will fill that storefront; New York will return to being a city of fun and food and socializing. But that restaurant owner may not be a part of it. Their whole life’s work may never be rebuilt. Multiply that out by the hundreds of thousands across the country, to the small shops and family businesses, the restaurant that was never going to be in Eater, and a lot that were. The bed and breakfast. The music hall. The art space. The yoga studio. The store of the frivolous things, candles and day planners and nice wrapping paper. That one great coffee shop. Those aren’t just places. Those are places built by people. Someone brushed paint samples on the walls to pick just the right color. Someone loved something enough to want to share it. Someone took a risk to create the thing they wanted to see in the world.
That, I worry, is what we stand to lose: That willingness to take big risks in creating. Which leaves us with something more muted: Cities and neighborhoods filled primarily with the establishments of very few people who can afford to lose.
I don’t mean there will be an end to risk-taking. I do mean that if we let huge numbers of small business-owners get wiped out while we save Ruth’s Chris and Safeway — or even DBGB and Eataly — there will be few incentives for small-time creatives and talents to strike out on their own, even after this crisis subsides. A shrinking pool of celebrity chefs and national chain stores, grocers, and restaurants will fill the vacuum. That doesn’t mean large businesses, which are also large employers, should be left to flounder. It does mean that the businesses that are often the most meaningful to us are now the most tenuously-positioned, and what we do now matters not just to their future, but to the future of small, independent establishments more broadly — and the whole experience of living in our cities and our towns across the country.
A lot has been written about how the coronavirus pandemic revealed just how torn-through the American safety net has become. The individual stories are devastating, and as the initial shock wears off, government support lessons, and savings are depleted, they are only set to get worse. One of the most prosperous countries on earth has forever refused to take full and proper care of all of its people, and assistance has steadily lessened over the past few decades, even as the economy grew. Like many of you, I am watching with every-growing anxiety what is shaping up to be a financial catastrophe to rival the Great Depression, where the party in power has long ceded any obligation to help individuals remain fed and housed — and, now, even alive.
But while we’re in crisis mode, that same party is also stacking the decks against the people who want to make something small and good for the collective enjoyment of their neighbors. Big companies and chains are getting bail-out dollars; small businesses are not. One of the first things that struck me when I moved to New York as a teenager was how many individual, independently-owned places there were to go, how many shops that weren’t chains, how very little looked like the sprawling shopping parks of suburban America (and even, in many cities, urban America). After a few years away, this has been my greatest delight in being back: Shopping, as Gina Bellafante put it in The New York Times, “at six different twee places for 12 ingredients that make up a single dinner, as if it were the Left Bank in the 1960s.” My butcher shop is the oldest in Brooklyn; sometimes the handsome son is working behind the counter, sometimes his elderly father is sitting in the corner with the grouchy cat, complaining about this or that with the other old folks who pass through to pick up a pound of this or a jar of that. My landlord owns an iconic neighborhood bakery; his father, now pushing 90, grew up in the apartment I live in. This is what makes a place special: People, and what they choose to build and share and sustain.
The first order of business has to be saving lives, an obligation our government has already failed, spectacularly, to meet. It might seem unseemly to ask “but what about small businesses and peoples’ livelihoods?” when tens of thousands of people are dead in the U.S. alone, and hundreds of thousands are ill. But already, decisions are being made that will determine what our communities look like for years to come — that will determine if a person’s life’s work will make it through or be turned to dust; that will shape whether we live in vibrant spaces alive with creativity and the risks necessary to create, or blanched landscapes of maximized profits and mass appeal.
I wish I could end this with something uplifting, or even some call to action that would set us on the right track. I don’t know what that is. But I do know that as we talk about “re-opening America,” we must also make sure the America that eventually emerges is one we actually want to live in. That means a country we (and especially the most vulnerable among us) can physically survive in, which in turn means that America cannot re-open right now. Democrats and progressive politicians are focusing on that, and for excellent reason. But in the background, Republicans are hoarding resources for the wealthiest, and have already set up a system where the most-resourced are in turn awarded the greatest resources. No, that isn’t an immediate life-or-death threat. But it is a threat nonetheless. They see this crisis as an opportunity to remake America in their image. So should we.
xx Jill