In a hurry, I was about to cross the street when the light turned red, stopping me. Now paused, I became more aware of my surroundings. I noticed I was shoulder to shoulder with a cop, along with another cop at his other side. Police have been more visible than usual, the extra placement of security at random street corners, due to the tinder box that Manhattan had morphed into.
Our eyes locked. What I saw in these Asian cops’ eyes was unexpected yet unmistakable: vulnerability.
“Thank you,” I said to them quietly. “It’s hard right now. Please know how much we appreciate all that you do.” I was on my way back from the grocery store. I reached into my bag for the luxurious chocolate mousse I had just purchased. “Here. A little token of appreciation. It’s delicious.” I said it with a smile.
“Thank you!” They responded in unison. “We really do appreciate it. You keep it. Enjoy. Be safe!”
The light turned green and I was on my way to the next block, where, not even mid-block, as the cops and I were still in one another’s clear view, a homeless beggar was sitting scrunched up right by the door of a 7-11. His hand was outstretched for alms. He said, “Please help,” I handed him the chocolate mousse. The cops both shot me a meaningful smile.
This anonymous beggar just so happened to have been black. He wasn’t holding up a formal sign that read “Black Lives Matter.” With the subtext of the narrative that draws lines of police versus the black man, going from the cops to this black man was fleetingly imbued with a feeling of what a child of divorce might feel, split between their parents. Overwhelmingly, though, it just felt like silently here was a pack of caring between human beings, including with the cops who were just beyond the crosswalk, smiling, seeing the final destination of their rejected chocolate mousse.
Later that day, like I do multiple times a week, I was crossing 100th street from Amsterdam to Columbus Ave. It’s the neighborhood police precinct. The street was closed off. The road was filled by police cars and cops, quite a few of them black, each standing by his or her respective car. Blaring over a microphone were anticipatory instructions for navigating that night’s Manhattan riots, when the police would be out patrolling the churning city as the rest of us would all be on lockdown by 8 o’clock.
For months, it was just one hour earlier, 7 o’ clock, that ritually marked a special time of day. I waited for it each evening. As I slid my window up, my eyes met those of my neighbors across our shared courtyard, who would just be finishing sliding their windows open.
Black, white, Asian, old, young, native, foreign, single, or coupled, window frame by window frame, a living quilt of different people unfolded. Whether they wore a cross around their neck or prostrated themselves on a rug to Allah; be their icon a Buddah or perhaps they were atheists, in those moments, right there in a New York City concrete courtyard, there was a palpable sense of humanity. My Jewish soul suffused with theirs, while we each sent out our gratitude to the health care workers we might each have specifically held in our hearts; and even more as we collectively sent out a great big embracing figurative hug to the thousands of anonymous healthcare workers fighting for lives struck by the coronavirus.
In those moments, I truly felt like I was living through a transformation. Although the pandemic itself, intrinsically, was a tragedy, and the price paid with human life incalculable and gutting, it felt like we — the world — were somehow getting another chance to re-start, and to get it right this time; as though each night’s 7 o’clock outpouring of love, support, and unleashing of healing energy, touched the next night’s, and the next’s, slowly but steadily re-sowing the sinews of a newer, stronger, kinder, world.
The manic depressive slap that came in its place, the diametric opposite from those emotional highs, symbolized by the new, 8 o’clock curfew, was jarring. Not only was the acute silence of 7 o’clock suddenly stopped as the coronavirus lockdown drew to a close, but all that it symbolized was instead replaced by something so dark.
Just as I’d never before experienced anything so extreme in America, as coronavirus was, now I found myself experiencing for the first time another kind of extreme I’d never before experienced as an American.
And more and more, it’s starting to terrifyingly feel like two Americas to me. Like a collision course that I hear myself ask, “how is America going to come out of this OK?”
It seems the narratives have been carved out by the radicalized left: You either value black lives to be equal to any other life and therefore condemn the police, or you are excoriated as a racist.
The narrative that can encompass knowing quite simply that no one’s right to life, intrinsically, is more or less valued above or below anyone else’s, is a given. Therefore we must fight on behalf of those who are unfairly not given that human accord, knowing that yes, there is a definite problem with police overreach and police brutality that must be dealt with aggressively; yet also, simultaneously, knowing that the bad cops are outliers by comparison to the overwhelming majority, that most police are upstanding, responsible guardians of our society who ensure public safety.
This dialectical narrative seems to have been replaced by simplistic identity politics whose fires were stoked in places such as Ferguson, and we now seem to be heading toward a new peak.
Another tension: For months, we were all sequestered because of coronavirus. Now, for the sake of rioting, the scientific data that propelled that policy in the name of flattening the curve seems to have been thrown out the window. Should a second wave hit, how can a lockdown that did in fact help to flatten the curve, thus guarding many lives, ever be taken seriously again? When it has been conveniently suspended for what seems like a political agenda of sowing and fomenting a maelstrom of chaos, how could a lockdown ever be taken seriously again?
So much of these big tensions feel embodied to me in the small moments of life, such as in passing the police precinct, or crossing a road with two cops flanking a street corner, heading toward a beggar, or even in the space of one hour, between 7 o’clock and 8 o’clock.
