Commentary

Now it ain’t so neat to admit defeat

There are three kinds of attitudes towards the spread of a disease like COVID-19. You can be indifferent to the suffering of others, you can

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Commentary

We’re not in this together anymore

Do you remember the first couple of months of COVID pandemic restrictions? Here in New York, all “non-essential businesses” were closed, then some stores and

Read More
Commentary, COVID-19

The end of the emergency

When I first heard that President Biden was going to announce the end of the COVID-19 state of emergency, I was not happy.  I was similarly uncomfortable about my employer lifting mask and test mandates.  Hospitalization and death rates were still very high, in the United States and worldwide.  They could have stayed high, and the end of the state of emergency would have been a disaster.  Fortunately, they didn’t, so the emergency does seem to be ending, for now at least, in the United States.

Death rates are now at their lowest since agencies started reporting numbers, in my hometown of New York, across the United States and worldwide.  Hospitalization rates are also at their lowest since the hospitals first started filling up.

There’s even more good news: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hosts a web page called RESP-NET that allows you to compare current rates of hospitalization for SARS-COV2, influenza and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), from the current “season” (October through May) with rates from previous seasons going back to 2018-2019.

In the week of March 11 of this year, RESP-NET shows that the combined hospitalization rate for all three dropped below the peak combined rate for flu and RSV in 2018-2019.  Hospitalization rates for all three respiratory diseases have continued to drop since then.  If that trend continues, we could wind up the way we ended flu seasons in previous years, with hospitalization rates below 4 people per million per day.

We did get close to those hospitalization rates in June of 2021 and April of 2022, but in each of those cases there was a new wave of COVID right after that.  We have to be vigilant, and we have to be prepared to reinstitute emergency procedures if the hospitalization numbers start rising again.

I’m pleased to say that my family and I are starting to wind down some of our own state of emergency, which we’ve maintained since our government started loosening restrictions.  Until this week we have tried to wear masks in indoor public spaces whenever possible.  With very limited exceptions, we have not eaten in indoor public spaces, and we have avoided vocal and wind instrument performances, and anywhere there are likely to be large numbers of unmasked people.

A trio of jazz performance students (singing, guitar and upright bass) perform at a staff party at the New School, May 4, 2023

From now on we will start dropping some of these precautions.  We have stopped wearing masks in our building hallways, and yesterday I attended a social event at work where there was food and live music.  We plan on attending more events, and traveling more.  I plan on organizing in-person karaoke events.

We are in no rush to get back to normalcy.  My mother is 84 years old and has multiple risk factors,  The rest of us have health issues which make us a bit more vulnerable than the average American.  We’ve read that airplanes are particularly high transmission sites, especially when on the ground.  And we like eating outdoors!

We also want to minimize our involvement in spreading COVID.  There are still billions of unvaccinated and under-vaccinated people.  New York is a global port city, and we regularly encounter people from all over the United States and the world.  On Monday I had breakfast with cousins from Georgia who were leaving on a transatlantic cruise.  My mother has several Medicaid-supplied home health aides, most of whom are from different countries all over the world, and who travel home periodically to visit family.

My family and I live in the epicenter of the first COVID outbreak in Spring 2020, and we saw how it hit our poorer, immigrant, nonwhite neighbors harder than us and our more privileged neighbors.  I also have several friends who are immunocompromised in various ways, and who have seen their lives restricted because others refuse to make spaces and events safe for them.

I thought back to times when I had upper respiratory infections before COVID.  Nobody ever suggested wearing a mask or eating outdoors when I was sick, and if people talked about staying home, it was usually for my own recuperation.  I have memories of sneezing on the subway, coughing in restaurants, and even singing karaoke while battling a sinus infection.

The author wearing a KN95 mask on a Long Island Railroad train.  The destination sign reads "Grand Central."

I’ve decided that in the future I want to be more careful about spreading infectious diseases, particularly influenza, colds and of course COVID.  I plan on doing the following for the rest of my life: 

  • Wearing an N95-type mask in medical settings, including pharmacies
  • Monitoring outbreak warnings
  • Monitoring hospitalization rates for COVID, the flu and RSV
  • Getting tested regularly during outbreaks

And when I’m sick or during an outbreak, 

  • Staying home as much as possible
  • Wearing an N95-type mask in indoor public spaces
  • Eating outdoors
  • Organizing events online/outdoors

The bottom line is that COVID is not over.  We have so far failed to eradicate it.  It can come back at any time.  And I do not want to be complicit in spreading it to vulnerable people.  If it becomes necessary, I plan on reinstating the precautions I’ve been taking for the past few years.  It will be inconvenient and annoying, but it’s a small price to pay for saving so many lives.

Commentary, COVID-19

Now it ain’t so neat to admit defeat

There are three kinds of attitudes towards the spread of a disease like COVID-19. You can be indifferent to the suffering of others, you can be in favor of eradication, or you can give up. Recently I’ve noticed that more and more of the people I know have given up. At first I was puzzled that so many people refused to talk about our failure to eradicate the disease, but over time I’ve come to understand that this is just what most people do.

First, I want to talk about how we’ve failed on COVID. And when I say “we” I mean all of humanity, but specifically the United States, and more specifically New York State and New York City.

Before I get to our failures, I want to give a nod to our successes. Shutting down non-essential in-person businesses in the spring of 2020 allowed us to “flatten the curve” of hospitalizations. Our hospitals were under severe strain, but we did not get to the point where we needed to use the Javits Center or the Navy hospital ship. After that, the restrictions on indoor dining and avoidance of other indoor in-person activities helped us to keep hospitalizations and even deaths relatively low until the vaccine rollout.

Our record after that has been pretty dismal. Over 800,000 people have died of COVID in the United States since the first vaccine was administered on December 13, 2020, more than twice as many as had died before. Thousands of people have been reinfected with COVID again. Thousands suffer from long COVID. We have failed them.

Our worst failure, of course, is the failure to completely eradicate COVID. We live in an era where humans have eradicated smallpox from the world, eliminated polio and guinea worm from most countries, and are aiming to eliminate malaria and other diseases. We have successfully eliminated the first SARS coronavirus, the cause of the 2002–2004 outbreak, and have made progress against MERS. We had the power to eradicate COVID, and we failed.

I hope that one day we will eradicate COVID, and many of the other diseases that cause misery to humans and other animals on this planet, including diseases that we have not yet encountered. But for COVID, the possibility of eradication gets harder with every new variant.

The result is that many political and institutional leaders have told us we’ll be “living with the virus,” in ways that ensure that thousands will be dying with the virus for many years. The “reopening” of institutions to unmasked indoor activities is a cruel joke to immunocompromised people who are unable to participate. More than a billion people around the world are still unvaccinated or undervaccinated, most through no choice of their own.

What baffled me for months was the inability of almost everyone I know to acknowledge this failure.

Of course, people are plenty willing to acknowledge the failures of others. Here in New York, lots of people are willing to heap well-deserved blame on Donald Trump and his enablers. Some are willing to blame Andrew Cuomo, who deserves at least as much blame, and on other Democrats like Bill de Blasio, Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams. But I have yet to hear someone acknowledge their own failures.

Remember in 2020 how we were all in this together — wearing masks, socially distancing, getting tested, even washing our hands? Of course, a lot of this was a fiction, but many of us felt like we were contributing to the effort to stop the spread of the disease. I know lots of people who for months, if not years, were diligent about eating outdoors, wearing masks, working from home, avoiding indoor entertainment.

I know some people who have continued to this day with careful measures to avoid spreading COVID. As of this writing, my family and I are still avoiding eating in indoor public spaces, foregoing in-person concerts, and wearing N95-type masks when necessary. But many others just stopped at a certain point. And what struck me was how quietly they all did it.

I’ve seen some people on social media — and on mainstream media, and even in person — announce that they were going to their first party “since COVID,” or maybe attending their first concert or conference, or giving their first interview. Some have even gotten visibly emotional about it, and talked about feeling nervous. But nobody talked about why they decided to start attending parties or conferences, or performing in theaters. Nobody acknowledged that this meant they had stopped taking precautions to avoid spreading COVID.

Some people have parroted the bullshit put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — that COVID is now “endemic,” and we have to start “living with the disease.” But they pivoted awfully quick from “we have to stop COVID” to “we’ll never stop COVID,” without going through the stage of “we have failed to stop COVID.”

What I eventually figured out — and only recently — is that people just don’t like to admit defeat. Some people are okay with acknowledging setbacks — we’re retreating to the hills, but we will be back! But colossal, catastrophic defeat, the kind that means that a million more people will die, that we may see many thousands die every year for the rest of our lives? That’s something people don’t want to think about.

The key to my understanding this was a Mastodon post I made about the recent fad of Large Language Models. I had noticed a similar pattern: that some people who were typically critical of new technologies had started incorporating LLMs into their work. I posted a critical response to an LLM post from someone I considered a friend, and was shocked that he basically told me to shut up with the criticism.

An older woman in black stands at the front of a stage and looks towards the audience. A man about her age looks at her. Behind them, a group of people dressed in gray and yellow watch them. Everyone in the group is wearing bright yellow shoes.
A 2014 production of The Visit at the Theater of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Photo: Tine Edel

I recognized this pattern from other trends I’ve studied as well. It reminds me of a scene from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit (Das Besuch der alten Dame), where the character Alfred finds the entire population of his village turning against him. He realizes this when he sees them wearing new shoes, which are yellow, and in most productions of the play they are bright yellow. I’ve never seen the play performed, but my high school English teacher described Alfred seeing first one neighbor wearing yellow shoes, then another, and then looking across the stage and seeing everyone wearing bright yellow shoes. The image has stuck in my mind for decades.

I’ve also been listening to the History of Byzantium podcast, and the recent episodes focus on the capture and sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. I thought about the people of the city, seeing several emperors killed in quick succession, the harbor filled with Venetian ships, and Frankish knights parading through the streets.

It was too late to flee. What could they do but swear to serve their new lords? And once you decide to serve the new lords, why take the risk of pissing them off by showing insufficient enthusiasm?

On the television, anchor Kent Brockman speaks to the camera.  In the upper left hand corner of the television, a man lies on the ground raising his hand as an insectoid with human legs cracks a whip over him.
Screenshot of the “Deep Space Homer” episode of the Simpsons

In my Mastodon post I compared the new large language model fans to Kent Brockman, the news anchor from the Simpsons who, spooked by a magnified image of an ant crawling across the camera, immediately announces, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.” What I realized recently is that the only thing Brockman does differently from real people is to react a little more quickly.

It’s important for me to acknowledge here that I don’t think that these people gave up fighting the spread of COVID, or the imposition of large language models, because they stopped caring. I think that tomorrow if they thought there was as much chance of eradicating COVID as they thought there was in 2020, they’d mask up again and stop eating in indoor restaurants.

Clearly, they don’t think that wearing a mask again will do much. And they can see that most of our leaders and the institutions they control have come down against eradicating COVID. They’ve gotten their orders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or from the boss telling them to show up at work in person.

They’ve seen the announcements for in-person conferences and job fairs, with food and drink provided indoors. They don’t want to miss out on those opportunities while less scrupulous competitors take advantage of them.

So why do I care? Why did I expect anything else? Why do I think it’s important to acknowledge failure?

I’ve worked in tech support on and off for most of the past 28 years, either as a direct support technician or as a developer responsible for fixing bugs as they are found. One thing I’ve found to be essential to providing good support is acknowledging and documenting failure. If we don’t understand why we failed, we’re just going to keep making the same mistakes again.

Normal conditions great need

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
An excerpt from Warren Harding’s “Readjustment” campaign speech, June 29, 1920

I remember my eighth grade Social Studies teacher telling us how in 1920 the American people were so hungry for “A return to normalcy” that they voted for a cretin like Warren Harding. But he only told us that they craved an end to involvement in World War I; I don’t remember hearing or reading anything about the flu epidemic in that class.

We need to talk about what happened: the people who wanted to sacrifice the vulnerable to preserve their profits organized and won. We need to remember how they did it and figure out how to overcome that. And we need to preserve that knowledge so that the people who are looking out for humanity in the next pandemic can be prepared.

We won’t be able to do that if we continue to live in denial.

Commentary, COVID-19, Queens

We’re not in this together anymore

Do you remember the first couple of months of COVID pandemic restrictions? Here in New York, all “non-essential businesses” were closed, then some stores and takeout restaurants were allowed to reopen. We washed our hands a lot because we thought it would help. We stood six feet apart. And gradually, those of us who hadn’t learned the value of face masks began to figure it out, or at least to suppose that the majority and the authorities were worth listening to for a while.

Those of us who weren’t “essential workers” worked from home when we could, and every night we cheered and banged on pots for the people who were stocking the grocery shelves, driving the buses, tending to the sick, disposing of the dead. We had support from the government: extended unemployment, eviction moratoria, cash payments, interest-free loans..

We also supported each other. We met up for walks, and later for outdoor dining and to-go cocktails. We organized events on Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams and Spatial Chat. We watched each other’s Twitch streams. We maintained Open Streets. We marched in masked, socially distanced Black Lives Matter protests.

When our city government loosened the rules around outdoor dining, restaurateurs and builders got creative, building shelters that protected from rain and wind and provided heat, but still allowed good airflow.

Of course we weren’t all really in it together. From the beginning there have been people willing to minimize the risk of COVID, to spread misinformation about it, and to use its presence as a weapon against people they didn’t like. Restaurants that were secretly open, raids on karaoke clubs, openly defiant bar owners on Staten Island. Servers who wore masks around their chins while taking orders to go. Shacks closed so tight only a meager draft made it inside

Our homicidal president at the time saw that feelings about pandemic responses could be used to divide the country and unite his supporters. Our self-absorbed governor was only interested in saving lives to the extent it supported his political ambitions, and our bumbling mayor was afraid to let saving lives get in the way of any other priorities.

A group of evil people (I can’t think of a better word for them) had the gall to worry that taking care of people might erode the public’s faith in capitalism, so they set out to undermine every protection against COVID, and call, over and over again, for “reopening” and “return to normal,” no matter how little evidence there was that the danger was past. They named their evil plan after a lovely little town in Massachusetts that doesn’t deserve to be attached to it.

COVID has touched all sectors of society, but if you look at the statistics it’s clear that it has had a much greater impact on people who were poor, people who weren’t white, people who couldn’t afford bedrooms of their own to isolate in, people who didn’t have jobs that allowed them to work from home, or savings to keep them going until work picked up.

There was a particular point, I believe some time in April 2020, when the news media in the US reported that the disease was disproportionately affecting poor people, nonwhite people and immigrants. A number of people observed that there was a marked increase in the clamor for “reopening” immediately after these reports. And of course it came from people who were mostly wealthy, white US citizens with large houses and jobs that allowed remote work.

Despite all that, on the streets of New York, and with my friends, I felt a sense of caring. We were all in this together, and we were looking out for each other. Eventually we got a new president who decided to put all his eggs in the vaccination basket, and he and our self-absorbed governor started rolling back the protections that were keeping us safe. The most significant one, I’ve come to realize, was the ban on indoor dining.

Let’s be very clear about this: indoor dining was completely unsafe before vaccines, and is not particularly safe now. It continues to be a vector of COVID transmission among vaccinated people and between them and unvaccinated people. There was no epidemiological justification for lifting the ban on indoor dining. The only possible justification was economic, and that has been undermined by the cost of the subsequent outbreaks that could have been avoided.

What I’ve observed is that here in New York, allowing indoor dining has divided us. Allowing indoor performances, dancing, karaoke and other entertainment has deepened the divide. Even though I knew about the bars and restaurants that defied the indoor dining ban, I was surprised at the number of people who were willing to eat indoors as soon as it was legal.

Shortly after Andrew Cuomo allowed indoor dining in New York, I went to pick up some takeout and saw people eating in the restaurant. All I could think of was the scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith takes Cypher out for a steak dinner.

Agent Smith: Do we have a deal, Mr. Reagan?

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

Agent Smith: Then we have a deal?

Cypher: I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I want to be rich. You know, someone important, like an actor.

Agent Smith: Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.

Even more people began eating indoors after vaccines became widely available. Organizations began holding conferences and seminars in person again. Employers began ordering office workers to stop working remotely.

Of course, there are only so many people, and people only have so many active hours available. As people began participating in work and play indoors, there was a noticeable reduction in the amount of restaurants that offered any outdoor options. While many Open Streets and pedestrian plazas have continued to offer outdoor entertainment and activities, and many meetups, conferences and activities have continued online, we don’t see the same energy, creativity and enthusiasm for exploring outdoor and online activities.

For me, this has broken the feeling of unity that I felt in 2020. For me now the world is divided into three groups. The first is the group of people who avoid indoor group activities as much as I do or more. Maybe they share my unwillingness to be a part of the transmission chain or my fear of long COVID, or maybe they just prefer outdoor and online activities.

The second is the people who participate in some indoor group activities but are also interested in outdoor or online activities. They’re available, but not as much as they were before, because sometimes they’re doing stuff indoors. And then there’s a third group who I see on television or social media, who just don’t do much outdoors or on Zoom at all.

So we’re not in this together anymore. There’s a group that’s decided that COVID is over, that anyone who’s not vaccinated deserves what they get, and that anyone who gets seriously ill is just an acceptable sacrifice. And then there’s the rest of us, but we’re getting smaller every day.

Here’s the most ironic thing: the normalcy crowd complains about how difficult it was to take precautions to keep others safe from COVID: wearing masks, eating outdoors, avoiding long-distance travel and indoor meetings, performances and parties. I miss eating indoors in bad weather, long distance travel, and indoor conference, performances, parties, but it never felt horrible or unsustainable.

What feels horrible and unsustainable? Being one of a dwindling handful of people willing to take precautions while I watch my colleagues, friends and relatives flying around the world, singing, dancing and going to shows.

The main reason it’s unsustainable is that these precautions only work if they’re systematic and communal. It doesn’t do vulnerable people that much good if a small percentage of Americans are still wearing masks and avoiding indoor dining while the majority are happy to serve as a conduit for COVID to bounce around the world.

Commentary, Traffic calming, Walking

Appreciating the 39th Avenue Bicycle Boulevard

Dear Commissioner Garcia:

I am writing to tell you how excited I am for the new Bicycle Boulevard configuration on 39th Avenue, and how much I appreciate it.

A woman crosses 39th Avenue on foot pulling a child in a wagon, while another child rides alongside her on a bicycle

When my wife and I were looking for an apartment in the neighborhood, we visited one in Sunnyside Towers at 46th Street and 39th Avenue, and we decided to rule out the entire building because it had no marked crosswalk in front of it.  My wife was pregnant at the time, and we did not want to worry about our child crossing an avenue rife with speeding.

When my mother, who was 75 years old at the time and will be 83 this year, moved to an apartment on 50th Street and walked her dog across 39th Avenue, where there was also no marked crosswalk, to take advantage of the trash cans generously provided by the Phipps Corporation, I feared for both their lives.

When I found out that 39th Avenue was chosen as one of the city’s Open Streets, I was excited to incorporate it into my daily exercise routine.  That excitement was short lived, as speeding drivers ignored the barricades.  After I was menaced and harassed on 39th Avenue by a city employee in a Parks Department pickup truck, I found it difficult to work up the courage to walk outside in my own neighborhood.

Now I am excited once again to see the new Bicycle Boulevard improvements being installed.  There are marked crosswalks and pedestrian refuges in front of Sunnyside Towers and the Phipps Gardens, as well as in front of Sunnyside Gardens Park.  I feel safe once again walking 39th Avenue every day, and I have already lost a few pounds.

Have I been inconvenienced by the Bicycle Boulevard?  A little: when I call a Lyft to bring my mom to the doctor, the driver may have to take a slightly longer route.  Is it worth it to know that my family and my neighbors and I are better protected from speeding cars?  You bet.

I am looking forward to the completion of the Bicycle Boulevard configuration.  If I am dissatisfied, it is that there is still not as much space to walk as I would like.  I would love a design that would give walkers and runners more space on the two-way blocks, between 47th and 49th Streets, and between 51st and 52nd Streets.

I appreciate all the hard work that you and your staff have put in to making not just 39th Avenue safer, but Barnett, Skillman and 43rd Avenues and Northern and Queens Boulevards.  Please keep up the good work!  We all will be rewarded with lower crash and injury counts.

Sincerely,

Angus B. Grieve-Smith

Commentary, Empire Trail, Walking

Inn to inn on the Empire Trail

The Empire Trail passes the Ardsley Acres Hotel Court
The Empire Trail passes the Ardsley Acres Hotel Court

You may have heard of “inn to inn” walks.  It’s like backpacking, but with restaurant meals, beds and showers every night.  I’ve heard about it in Europe, particularly in England.  In California, Tom Courtney and his daughter Emily have published a series of books detailing inn to inn itineraries.

Some inn to inn walks are offered as packages by travel agents, and even include a service where you can pack more than you can carry.  While you’re walking you only carry what you need for the day, and somebody will drive all the rest of your stuff to the next inn.

That’s kind of a cop-out, but at least you do all the walking yourself.  One of the services here in the United States relies on a “morning shuttle” for each leg of the trip.  I’m sorry, if someone’s driving you partway, you’re not hiking inn to inn.  But that’s not as bad as the one that says with a straight face, “you’ll need a car to participate in the included innkeeper-assisted shuttling service for your inn to inn trip.”  Just nope.

Still, it may be a while before my wife and I have the time and money to fly to Europe for a trip like this, and with international travel disrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I got to thinking about possible inn to inn walks near our home in New York City.  

Years ago I read Christopher Wren’s Walking to Vermont.  When Wren retired from the New York Times to teach at Dartmouth College in 2003, he decided to walk from his old apartment in Manhattan to his new house in Vermont. He had a great time on the Appalachian Trail and the Long Path in Vermont, but the part of his trip through northern Westchester and Putnam counties was pretty unpleasant, walking between strip malls and speeding cars on Route 22.

Wren’s account didn’t leave me with a lot of hope.  But then the State of New York opened the Empire Trail.  I was skeptical about how usable it would be, but it turns out that over the past few years the New York State Department of Transportation has been actively pouring asphalt, and there’s now a continuous walkable path from Whitehall Terminal in Manhattan to a spot on Route 32 that’s about a mile south of the nearest sidewalk in Kingston.

Some of the trail incorporates existing trails maintained by other entities.  I’ve already spent many hours walking and cycling on the Wallkill Valley Rail-Trail in Rosendale and New Paltz, the Hudson River Greenway in Manhattan, and the trails built on the old New York and Putnam Railroad in the Bronx, Westchester and Putnam counties.

Adding up the estimated trip times given on the Empire Trail website, it would take 40-65 hours to walk from the Battery to Kingston.  If we assume eight-hour days, that’s five to eight days’ walking.  You could just do it as day trips, accessing each trailhead by train or bus, and I’ve already done that from the Battery to Elmsford.

Even as I was planning day trips, I remembered that I’d seen hotels and motels from the Putnam Trail.  I thought about inn to inn walks, and realized that you could do at least some of the trail this way.

Look for some more posts from me this summer about inn to inn walks, potential and actual.  And let me know if you take an inn to inn walk in North America!

Commentary, COVID-19

Our society is just prepared to accept some deaths … or is it?

I have a confession to make, and it’s something I feel terrible about. I was prepared to let hundreds of thousands of people die of COVID-19.

The stores on my block were shuttered in March.

In March I was prepared to go right back to work after a mysterious fever that ran through my family for a few days, and keep going in to the office for the rest of the year. I was prepared to continue eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, sleeping in hotels, shaking hands and hugging people right through the pandemic, without masks or social distance, even as people around me were dying.

I was prepared to lose a friend to the disease, since they say the mortality rate is about one percent. I was prepared to lose my mother, my sister, my wife, my child, even to die myself.

I was prepared to carry on through the deaths as though nothing was happening, but then all of a sudden we weren’t carrying on. I got an email that we’d be working from home for a week, and then the rest of the month, then the rest of the semester, and now the rest of the year. I heard the mayor and the governor announce that restaurants, hotels, shops would be closed. I got the orders to wash hands, keep social distance, wear masks. I guess we’re doing this then, I thought.

My first face covering, April 2020

I was prepared for everyone to march on without caring for the dying because I’ve tried to buck trends before. I’ve been the only boy in the class who cried, the only kid who didn’t say the “under god” part in the Pledge of Allegiance, the only person in my social circle who didn’t own a car.

I knew that these kinds of anti-pandemic measures require widespread participation to be effective, and I knew how hard it is to get that participation. I’ve tried to organize people to make relatively modest changes, and I’ve seen the resistance that people can summon to even the most minor inconvenience. I had little hope that things would change.

But things did change, and I changed to go along with it. I worked from home, organized Zoom get-togethers, did karaoke over Twitch, avoided going shopping, ordered takeout from restaurants and cancelled travel plans. And I started wearing a mask, keeping distance from others and washing my hands more frequently. Since we got past the curve and started “reopening” I’ve gotten together with friends, but stayed outside, kept my mask on and avoided physical contact.

My work-from-home setup

Still, sometimes I think back to things I said back in February and March, and remember how I was prepared to change nothing. I’m not happy about that. I’d like to think that I’m the kind of person who always tries to do the right thing. But what is the right thing for one person to do, when the right thing requires widespread collective action, and that one person doesn’t have the power to compel collective action?

I didn’t have much power, but I discovered that other people did. My department head had the authority to order us to work from home. Our mayor and governor and state legislature had the authority to order offices and restaurants and shops closed, and to impose curfews, and to require mask-wearing. We had the power to resist to some degree, but there has been a lot of compliance. Congress and the President passed appropriations to essentially pay people to stay home.

Over the past several months I’ve learned that we already had traditions of social distance, lockdowns and mask wearing that have been used in past pandemics over the centuries. Why do so many histories focus on innovations in science (germ theory, mosquitoes) and technology (sewers, drainage, vaccines), and on How Stupid People Were Back Then (theories like miasma and night air, and the infamous 1918 Philadelpia victory parade), and not on masks, lockdowns and outdoor dining?

A visit to my deserted office in July

A lot of the shutdown of offices, shops and restaurants was facilitated by the widespread adoption of remote work, online learning and delivery of all kinds of objects, including food and medicine. These practices in turn have been prepared and encouraged by employers, college administrators and the owners of delivery companies, and to some degree by employees, students and shoppers, out of a belief that they are cheaper and more convenient. It’s not obvious to me that that belief is well-founded, but if it weren’t widespread, would there have been as much compliance with the lockdowns?

I was impressed at the amount of influence certain people wielded at particular points. The early injunctions to more frequent and thorough hand-washing, along with catchy two-minute pop-culture songs to hum and mantras to recite (remember “Fear is the mind-killer”?) while washing drew people in and functioned as a kind of structure test. Viral posts about flattening the curve helped to convince people that behavioral changes were urgent but temporary. Influential people who set an example on the street and on social media allowed some of us to feel comfortable adopting practices like face masks that had been seen as foreign.

Of course, people can also withhold their power to compel and encourage collective action. The most tragic example is that of Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo, who could have saved tens of thousands of lives by giving shutdown orders a week earlier, but held back for whatever reasons. Donald Trump and his followers in the Republican Party, including Mitch McConnell and Lachlan Murdoch, have ended the unemployment and stimulus payments, and shockingly turned practices that could save thousands of lives into badges of political allegiance.

Some of these negative practices appear to have been motivated by a thirst for power on the part of people like Cuomo and Trump. Some stem from a fear that generous unemployment and stimulus benefits could lead people to ask why we don’t provide those benefits all the time. Others are driven by the news that those most at risk from the coronavirus are the same people that our society already takes advantage of — Black and Latinx people, American Indians, immigrants and poor people — and a reluctance to do anything that might disproportionally benefit them.

Fresh graves, New Calvary Cemetery, May 2020

It worries me a lot to realize how much of our ability to act in moral ways is constrained by the power of others. Especially by people who have amassed power for the sake of power, or out of greed, like our current leaders. It saddens me to see how I’ve learned to have such low expectations of our leaders. And how some of them haven’t even risen to those low expectations.

This is the first in a series of posts about COVID-19. Here is the second, and here is the most recent.

I originally published this on Medium. I haven’t been very happy with Medium recently, so I’ve started moving some of my posts from there to this blog.

Commentary

Border brutality

In the summer of 1998 I was on a bus from Montreal to New York.  At the United States border we were told to get off, get our bags and file through a building.  Inside I showed an immigration agent my passport, or maybe my driver’s license.

“Why’d you go to Canada?”
“For a conference.”
“What kind of conference?”
“A conference on computational linguistics.”
“So you’re a computer programmer?”
“Sort of, I’m-“
“Why’d you go to Canada?”
“For a conf-“
“Okay, bye-bye.”
“Huh?”
“Bye. Go on.”

It’s hard for me to put into words exactly what bothered me about this exchange.  It always upsets me to be interrupted, dismissed and silenced, but this particular instance has stayed with me over almost 21 years.

The logical incoherence of the conversation bothered me at first.  The agent clearly understood my first answer, and he couldn’t have forgotten it so quickly, so why did he ask again?  And then why didn’t he wait for me to answer again?

A few years later, someone told me that a common technique in psychological screenings is to ask the same question multiple times.  If someone gives inconsistent answers, that suggests that they’re lying or otherwise unreliable.  My best guess is that this immigration agent was trying to catch me in a lie.

If that’s what he was doing, he was really inept at it.  That technique depends on the subject refreshing their short term memory, which requires more intervening conversation and a change of topic.  It simply wasn’t possible for him to deploy that technique effectively while keeping the line moving, but he didn’t realize that.

That bungled interrogation tactic was disorienting, but the agent could have reassured me with a few words, or even a smile.  Instead, he compounded his manipulation with dismissiveness and contempt.

As I walked away from the desk, I was struck by the brutality of the interaction, at the feeling of being in the hands of someone who saw me as less than human.  I could have protested, but I had heard stories.  They could have found some reason to question me, hold me in the middle of nowhere until after my bus left, until after the last bus left.

Of course I was not physically harmed in any way.  I wasn’t detained or prevented from boarding my bus.  I was not even insulted or threatened. It feels weird to even talk about my experience in light of the much worse abuses that so many people have suffered under the Border Patrol over the years, especially since Donald Trump became President.

Somehow, it feels relevant. The casual nature of the brutality, even just in the tone, that that Border Patrol officer felt comfortable using in a routine interrogation of someone he saw as a privileged (but bus-riding) white male citizen who wasn’t challenging his power at all made me imagine what he and his colleagues were capable of with people who don’t look like middle-class white guys and don’t have citizenship papers.

I wrote most of this post last year, after reading articles about rank-and-file border patrol officers expressing satisfaction that they’d been “unshackled” by Trump, but I didnt finish it. Today, when the Acting Commissioner of the Border Patrol announced that they were being deployed to the District of Columbia (which hasn’t had a border since 1861) I remembered that incident in 1998, and felt I should share my story.

Commentary, Queens

We shouldn’t pay for a deck over the Sunnyside Yards

Mayor de Blasio, the CEO of Amtrak, and the leadership of the Queens Chamber of Commerce want to build a series of decks over the Sunnyside Yards, that would then serve as platforms for new apartments, offices and possibly parks and attractions.  Some of my neighbors have expressed opposition on various grounds, and have tried to recruit me to join them.

When I was first approached, I was sympathetic, and there is still one very good reason the city shouldn’t build these decks: they’re not worth it.  Decking advocates claim that the project will allow new affordable housing, bring in more tax revenue and connect Sunnyside more closely with Long Island City.  Those are nice, but we can get them all without spending billions of taxpayer dollars on decks.

We can get more housing and bring in more tax revenue by rezoning our miles of single-family and attached house zones to allow for new apartments, and building new trains to connect these neighborhoods to Manhattan.  Modern, quiet elevated trains like those in Vancouver cost a fraction of what we spent on the Second Avenue Subway.

To the extent Sunnyside feels disconnected from Long Island City and Astoria, it’s because the bridges over the Yards are noisy and feel unsafe.  They are desolate at night, and filled with speeding cars at most hours. Shops and homes along the route would make them feel safer, but that doesn’t require giant decks; it could be done by doubling the widths of the bridges.

The noise of the 7 train could be mitigated by extending the concrete cladding that shields us from the tracks in Sunnyside.  The noise of the roadway could be mitigated by removing the large metal barriers that reflect noise back onto the sidewalks and replacing them with fences.  These are expensive projects, but much less expensive than building giant decks.

I oppose the decking proposals on these fiscal grounds.  I do not object to them on any of the other grounds that my neighbors assert without evidence.  I do not believe that they would contribute to displacement or overcrowding in our existing buildings; if anything, the added supply would probably give us more room and bring rents down.

I also disagree with the claims by some of my neighbors claim that new buildings on the decks would add to construction noise, dust or car traffic, or significantly increase crowding on the 7 train.  I do not agree with the claim by one of my neighbors that these decks will result in a net increase in carbon emissions and heat simply by containing buildings.

These decks are not a worthwhile use of our tax dollars.  If private investors are willing to pay for these decks, I have no reason to oppose them.  I would much rather see the money spent on new subways, and the housing achieved by upzoning.

Background, Commentary, Queens, Traffic calming

How slip lanes make us less safe

Today I took a walk along Queens Boulevard in my neighborhood, where the Department of Transportation has been working to transform the medians into walking and cycling paths like those on Eastern and Ocean Parkways in Brooklyn. One of the most interesting changes is the closing of the “slip lanes” which allowed drivers to switch from the express to the local lanes and back. The slip lanes between 54th and 56th Streets are already closed (see above).

Back in January I attended a DOT revisioning workshop for the Boulevard. We packed the cafeteria at my son’s old elementary school, and in a very encouraging contrast to a similar meeting in 2003, everyone seemed to agree that we need to do something. Peter Beadle, a fellow pedestrian advocate who lives down the Boulevard in Rego Park, focused on the slip lanes when reporting his table’s recommendations. After the meeting, he pointed out to me that Ocean and Eastern Parkways in Brooklyn have no slip lanes, which is a major factor in why they feel so much safer than avenues that are otherwise similarly designed, like Queens, Woodhaven and Linden Boulevards and the Grand Concourse. Here is a slip lane on Queens Boulevard that has not been closed, between 58th and 59th Streets:

20150809_170236

Reviewing the presentation that the DOT gave to Community Board 2, it looks like they are not planning to close this slip lane. Instead, they will make it safer by putting a stop sign in the middle of it. Knowing how cavalierly drivers treat other stop signs, I’m skeptical about this, but it will be an improvement over the current slip lanes.

Diagram: NYC DOT
Diagram: NYC DOT

More importantly, it will allow for a continuous pedestrian path alongside the bike path on this entire stretch of Queens Boulevard. This afternoon I walked from 51st to 58th Streets on this path, and because there was only one lane of moving vehicles to my right it felt relatively safe. Once this path is continued all the way to 63rd Street (and hopefully beyond, one day), I think it will become a popular stroll, like the paths on Ocean and Eastern Parkways are now. The DOT has already painted crosswalks and put up signals for pedestrians:

20150809_165247

(If you zoom in on this picture, you can see that the last car that went through here was doing 38 in a 25 mile an hour zone. We’ve got a lot more work to do.)

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