Dahlia Lithwick: From 9/11 to COVID-19

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/coronavirus-new-york-september-11-national-unity.html

From 9/11 to COVID-19
The last time New York was the center of a catastrophe, America rallied behind it. The nation’s reaction to its coronavirus outbreak is a different story.
By Dahlia Lithwick
April 03, 2020
2:40 PM

snip//

As Masha Gessen suggests, New Yorkers are quickly finding themselves with no good options. They can stay hunkered down in tiny apartments and listen to the sirens all night, or they can be pilloried for fleeing, a sign of disloyalty and privilege. Those who leave are blamed and shamed for both spreading the virus and using scarce resources wherever they land. Those who stay will be blamed for using up scarce resources in the city. There is no right way to be a New Yorker right now—just as there was no wrong way to be a New Yorker after 9/11.

Some of this is the result of obvious differences between the two events; the coronavirus comes with a heaping side of shunning, though much of what we’re seeing now goes well beyond the kind of shunning the coronavirus medically requires. But as Gessen reminds us: Tragedy always needs others. Even as 9/11 led Americans to rally around New York, it also led to a forever war and a decadeslong policy of demonizing Muslims and travelers from Arab lands. In some ways, the event only superficially pulled the country together before ripping it brutally apart. Today, in the absence of clear “others” to blame, we are inventing them. For a while, the foreign “others” that seemed easiest to blame for COVID-19 were the Chinese, and then Asian Americans in general (and yes, this happened in New York too). But now, blaming any New Yorker will do. It’s no accident that the city is a long-standing American symbol of multiculturalism, ethnic diversity, and openness in ways that date back to the Statue of Liberty, itself a former icon that has only recently fallen out of favor as a national symbol of tolerance and refuge. Back in 2001, we all celebrated New York for being particularly tolerant in the face of narrow-minded fundamentalist hate from Islamic extremists. It is a marker of a uniquely Trumpist, “America First” fundamentalism that this isn’t a quality to be celebrated anymore, but a soft underbelly to the MAGA dream that now threatens to infect us all. What we loved about bighearted, tolerant New York in 2001 is what cannot be tolerated in 2020.

It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America. It was an easy myth to puncture, and he has deftly and rapidly ensured that no city or state will ever be America’s battered sweetheart again. We are all on our own.

New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity. That encompasses Ted Cruz’s sneering dog whistle about “New York values” in 2016, and Trump’s newfound loathing of the city he called home for his entire life—a city he was maligning long before the coronavirus came along. Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.

Nobody can blame the coronavirus itself on this president, though we must keep track of how his failure to take action will cost untold American lives. But even as we sit here, waiting, it is worth remembering that Trump has led a three-year project in which leadership consists of laying blame, constantly and relentlessly, on everyone and anyone, and the more inchoate that group is, the better. Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves. We haven’t had to do that; the president has still happily led the charge. The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.

[smirkymonkey]

1. K&R

[Stuart G]

2. K and R

[UpInArms]

3. No one and nothing will ever make me hate

All of the goodness that resides within each of us.

Conversely, no one and nothing will ever make me love those who evilly attempt to destroy that goodness.