Another moment of ‘now’

I have already written a bit about the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on ordinary life, or at least my very ordinary life. For the most part, I’ve found it relatively easy to be insular, isolated. I no longer have Tim’s life to worry about during the pandemic. Instead, I felt owed it to my mama to live and thrive, to look after her needs and help her caregiver however I could. I empathized with my neighbors as their jobs melted away in the consequent economic collapse, and contributed to our local food bank. I did my best to help my workmates, as we Skyped, shared, and plugged away at our tasks.

I stayed away from crowds, kept my nose to my job’s grindstone. I stopped reading the headlines from the Washington Post and the New York Times after 7 o’clock. It was the only way to sleep.

Welcome to the 1930s

Isolation may make folks fretful, but for me, it made it easy to focus. I found myself comfortably strolling down America’s Depression-era memory lanes as I revised Tim’s book, 40 Ways of Looking at Manhattan. I can’t be the only Boomer-aged person whose parental stories of the Great Depression informed their own tastes and views growing up?

When I was 12 years old, I think I listened to more LPs of radio programs recorded in the 1930s than I did contemporary DJs on an actual radio. I watched more movies from the 1930s (Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It Happened One Night.) than I saw modern flicks playing in my Local Itch. My family absorbed every evening news program as they did the daily newspapers — that is, religiously. But I also absorbed antique newsreel footage alongside the Vietnam War. I watched, riveted, the destruction of Hoovervilles, the people beaten for organizing a labor union, WPA documentaries on the Dust Bowl.

And there the similarities begin

Isn’t the phrase more commonly “and there the similarities end”? But the more I reread America’s 1930s history, the more I saw parallels with the world today in 2020.

All this past week, I’ve watched protests in the streets of American cities that resemble all those past times when honest people have protested injustice. People were beaten back by officers wielding truncheons, firing tear gas, just as they charged the poor of the Bonus Army.

I’ve watched in horror as police and National Guard troops — our military reservists — beat back protesters marching for justice. (I refuse to get sidetracked into arguments about how necessary their presence is to stop looters or arsonists. Yes, there are bad actors. But the thousands worldwide who have marched and protested peacefully far outweigh them in numbers if not media coverage. If you charge at people violently, they will likely react violently.)

Watching the president’s phony “Jericho walk” from the White House to a church he’s barely set foot in made me, for one, sick. This video, from the Washington Post, summed it up for me.

Pride, and hope

Pride. Damnable pride. That’s what I read in Trump’s strut to the doorstep of St Michael’s Episcopal Church. (I gather the Bishop in whose parish this church stands wasn’t best pleased either.)

How very different was one of Timothy’s proudest yarns about his bright and reckless youth. How he’d been tear-gassed, as collateral damage, while photographing a protest march in the early 1970s for his college newspaper. What a badge of honor: to have been part of something so much larger than himself. And doing so as a journalist! Tim was right to be proud of that action, so many decades ago.

The only thing that kept me from feeling even worse was a subsequent news story that emerged about Rahul Dubey. This DC resident sheltered more than 60 protesters from police in riot gear the night of Trump’s personal procession. When Dubey saw people — many young, of all colors and lifestyles — bottled into his little side street, he flung open the door to his house and called them in.

Don’t you like to think you would do the same thing? I know I hope I would. I have Tim’s big shoes to fill.