Then there was New York.
Of course, there was New York.
The crossroads of the world was never going to avoid getting hit hard by the virus. The American city of state, historically, is always the epicenter of most apocalyptic scenarios in film, television, and literature, and so too did reality reflect its fiction. New York is the American barometer of both joy and malaise.
Covid-19 bit into the Big Apple like nobody’s business. Infections were getting off international flights at La Guardia long before they were suspected. As New York is so compact and dense, it was a foregone conclusion they were going to incur watermark numbers. With its elderly New Yorker boroughs like Brooklyn or Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island, cases were expected to spike even more than average, and so they did.
The awful first responder reports issued out accordingly, complete with refrigerated morgue trucks, ventilators, and cell phone good-byes in the ICUs, a wide range of horrific byproducts in a ground zero pandemic populace absorbing the first major viral salvo on American soil. New York was where we first heard about people dying alone by necessity, about the inability to hold proper funerals, about the abrupt aberration of sudden personal losses.
It was a quick fucker of a bug. Nasty. Unforgiving. Arbitrary.
The outcry was devastating, heard worldwide. At that point in the epidemic, New York was the flashpoint metropolis for the entire country, a litmus test, a breeding ground where the hands of a pestilent doomsday clock ticked and tocked even as it logged mercies of saving graces. New York stood before an event horizon, all the while considering an invisible foe from the comfort of grandmothers’ kitchens and the madness of Bellevue’s dark corners.
Yet New York was.
As such, it was good and proper its resident first responders rallied an initial American defense, and a valiant and epic effort it was. New Yorkers went out on their balconies at seven pm each night to applaud and cheer health service providers as they reached the ends of their long shifts. Wave upon wave of infection crashed over the city that never sleeps, doctors and nurses were overwhelmed, just as in Italy and China before.
Health professionals from other states were volunteering to assist, coming in by the planeloads and busloads. As numbers spiked, cases of mental health despair and despondence increased as well. A mood similar to post 9-11 darkness suffocated the city as stay-in-place orders emptied the once bustling streets of Manhattan. The loss of life was staggering. The long-term effects on survivors to this day still fall short of a full understanding. We may never get a satisfying closure, not in our Gen X era.
Still, New York prevailed.
New York is the city that identifies humanity to the cosmos and will likely continue to do so long after Gen X has dwindled out. I love New York, to quote a common coffee mug and tee shirt slogan. Thing is, I’ve never even been there. Heck, I’m such a local yokel Cali doof I’ve never step foot east of Kansas, but even from here in the West Coast sticks, I knew then, and still know now, what New York is. She stands for all of us, be they Californian, Korean, Russian, Chilean, Texan, or Canadian, rich or poor, left or right, Black or white.
New York stands.
After it falls to ruin, as we all do, as everything must, it will stand. It has made its indelible mark in history, until the sun goes nova, perhaps even beyond that last apocalypse waiting for us. New Yorkers are a hardy lot. There’s a reason they’re the most represented segment of Americans in television, movies, and general pop culture. It’s New York that serves up the gooey center of the American lava cake.
It is New York and California that most often lead the United States forward to its futures, in culture, in politics, in pandemic response, any of it, and all of it. There’s a sort of an unsaid ‘bro’ mentality between New York and California, a love and hate bipolarity. It’s those two states that were hit hardest in the pandemic’s onset, and those states whose responses by definition were most incisive…and at times, restrictive.
And speaking of California…
My home.
The world’s fourth largest economy, the chancellor of virtually all global pop culture, the Golden State, the land of milk and honey, home of the ‘hood and the bear, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oprah Winfrey, suburban sprawl and terminal traffic gridlock, the sage grassroots of Haight-Ashbury and the sun-toasted boulders of Joshua Tree, the little majesties of gold coast hamlets and the agricultural breadbasket of the central valley, the rainbow flags of the Castro district and the crumbled hopes of LA’s skid row, the purveyors of tamarind pulp candies on Olvera Street and the dreadlocked potpourri of Venice Beach, Steinbeck’s Monterey and Kerouac’s Big Sur, 49’ers red and Dodger blue, the old Brown Derby real estate of Pasadena and the new pot monies of the Emerald Triangle, the abandoned speakeasy dens of the Tenderloin and the backcountry meth labs of Lassen County, the Cal State collegiate sports bars and the Bohemian Grove, the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot and Knott’s Berry Farm, world class surf at Rincon and Mavericks, world class snow at Mammoth and Tahoe, the Hotel Del Coronado and the Catalina Casino, the purple sands of Pfeiffer and the world’s tallest thermometer in Baker, the sterile halls of Lockheed Martin and the arid oil fields of Bakersfield, the Skywalker Ranch and the Fabulous Forum.
Home to all peoples, descended immigrants hailing from every corner of the world; from the north, native Pan-Asian migrants who crossed the Alaskan straits thousands of years ago, from the south, settlers from the Mexican-Aztec and Mesoamerican peninsulas, from the east, white colonists and expansionists, from the west, international port callers and sea travelers at San Francisco, each influx a grouping of expats from other lands eventually proliferating and evolving into the multicultural fusions of Californian citizens we are today, be they Silverlake coffeehouse hipsters, undocumented workers of the strawberry fields, corporate market shills in Century City, housewife Yoga-Pilates instructors, hoof-to-mouth Hollywood Boulevard street performers, Kern County land barons, San Jose tech giants, high desert rats of 29 Palms, Berkeley record shop gadabouts, Camp Pendleton fresh-cut recruits, Gaslamp District go-go dancers, dusty card sharks of Lancaster poker rooms, barking street cart vendors of Koreatown, raggedy feudal mayors of tent cities, wayward celebrity stalkers of Malibu compounds, roadside graveyard shift cashiers, broken starlets pitching reality TV shows, Slab City asylum escapees, door-to-door Sausalito prostitutes, Redding military survivalists…
All of it, all of them, all of us, one epic tapestry that is California.
I am California.
You are California.
Yeah, you, that muckity muck in Hoboken or Minsk or Rapa Nui or Cape Town.
We are all California, whether you live here or not.
Don’t believe me?
Wait a while.
On one hand, we handled the first wave fairly well thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom’s leadership and California’s natural tendencies of self-preservation. On the other, we botched the second wave, perhaps a fierce extension of the first, because folks were impatient and tired of quarantining. We missed the outdoors, which Californians take very seriously as they have a bounty of offerings from the beaches to the deserts to the lakes to the mountains. California’s got it all and Californians avail themselves of it, rightly so as they pay a premium to reside here.
American society was never going to adequately adopt measures taken by countries with more proactive methods, even progressive California (often a misnomer, as most of the blue in California dwells on the coast and as you can see on any map, there’s a lot of California, most of it is inland, and much of inland California bleeds red). It was no shocker it turned out Americans weren’t disciplined enough to practice what they deem to be draconian impositions, like the total lockdowns in China, Italy, and most of the rest of the developed world put forth.
Pop-up conservative enclaves organized small protests, particularly in Orange County, which wasn’t too surprising if one’s in the know about Californian, county-to-county districts. If there’s a more sheltered, entitled Caucasian community in Southern California, I’ve yet to come across it, and I’ve combed the state border to border.
The protestors likened public space restrictions to living under Nazi Germany rule, an offensive and obviously foolish comparison. Local police preventing folks from sunbathing on the sands of Orange County during the pandemic’s early stages were not remotely comparable to SS soldiers and the horrors of concentration camps. It was wildly audacious any would go so far to use that contrast simply because they’d been inconvenienced.
Proponents of Orange County’s anti-lockdown sentiment attempted to steer away politicization of their efforts by reminding reporters on the scene that the OC was more blue state these days, but it was a middling conceit. Orange County is historically one of the most neo-con regions in the entire United States.
The backlash wasn’t limited to conservative bastions in south Los Angeles regions. There were a number of rural northeast Sierra towns refusing to comply with lockdown orders. Surf cats up and down the California coast were incensed at being unable to access their favorite wave breaks because of beach closures. Spoiled middle class hotheads entirely unused to community sacrifice continued to lambast Governor Newsom for his ‘totalitarian’ statutes.
Newport Beach and Huntington Beach staged their own milquetoast rallies. Amused online observers deemed the participants’ unofficial title Vanilla Isis. The gatherings were more of a spoiled whine (wine?) fest, lamenting tyranny, as if white Americans at large knew the slightest thing about true tyranny, decrying blocked access to beaches and their infringed rights to congregate in houses of worship, touting hollow nationalist rhetoric as they waved flags and sported MAGA gear.
Not so coincidentally, every anti-closure protest seemed to be composed of an almost entirely white populace, revealing our continued Californian class divisions, as the majority of our citizens are not, to wit, white. Few Blacks, Asians, or Hispanics attended these protests, though there were some. And not so coincidentally, there were a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths among impoverished Black and Latino populations.
The Los Angeles Times reported low-income community residents were three times as likely to die from coronavirus complications than those in wealthier neighborhoods, and that Blacks and Latinos under fifty years of age were dying in significantly greater numbers than whites. Many of those most at risk worked in essential service jobs, or jobs that couldn’t be done from home. Translation: the folks who worked the factory lines, food distribution hubs, and backbone infrastructures were being hit the hardest as they ensured the general masses were fed and sheltered, despite earning some of the lowest wages in the country.
It was suggested the anti-lockdown protests were another example of white privilege, and it was hard to argue against that, as folks like the president of that time and his cronies were remotely supporting the race-baiting and rabble-rousing, likening it to righteous rebellions defending white rights much as Rosa Parks did for Black rights – a bit of a stretch, as that administration often wielded fear-based rants to fuel social media trends solely designed to keep a bid for reelection alive.
Conservatives were predictably going to be less inclined to back stay-at-home orders. Historically, conservatives tend to resist changes to the status quo. Armed white men showing up at statehouses in Michigan and Arizona protesting lockdowns were blatant reminders of how a good portion of the country lied entrenched in their securities derived from past eras of subjugation. Some of them carried nooses or confederate flags, some displayed swastikas emblazoned on their tacticool gear.
Several pundits posited the possibility that alt-right fringe groups were using virus restrictions as opportunities to exploit pandemic chaos and widen their influence. YouTube videos were posted online of white supremacist cells hosting celebrations of coronavirus mortality rates affecting minorities on a larger scale.
Who would have thought this country was still so fucking racist?
Yeah, that’s right. Everybody. Except us whiteboys.
*Compiled from May 1, 2020