By Daniel Foster
Thursday, April 16, 2020
9/11 was my senior year of high school. It happened 20
miles in a straight line from the physics classroom where we were when the
principal came over the loudspeaker, and when you went to the McDonald’s on
Route 17 during sixth-period lunch, you could see the black column of smoke on
the skyline where the buildings had been. Our town of 14,351 lost two men in
the attack — including my lab partner’s father — and eventually three more to
the wars it started.
I was not an especially brave 17-year-old, and I remember
being pretty well freaked out for a couple of weeks there. Particularly at the
sound of the loud, low-level F-16 passes over our condo that evening, and over
the next few days watching the live camera they kept trained, in anticipation,
on the Empire State Building each time it was evacuated because of another
anonymous bomb threat.
I went off to college the next fall in Washington, D.C.,
and just before midterms the Beltway sniper — snipers, as it turned out
— started murdering people up and down the I-95 corridor, including four in one
day in October. Sometime that week I caught myself half-consciously walking in
a serpentine and random fashion across a quad in Foggy Bottom and was so
embarrassed I would have welcomed a .223 to the butt cheek for being such a
wuss.
After the customary four years, I took my bachelor’s,
then spent an abortive couple of semesters at graduate school back in New York,
and right about the time I dropped out to get a (relatively) real job as a
writer, the subprime-mortgage market collapsed, setting off the Great
Recession.
That one I experienced with an almost French absurdity.
It set my single mother — a loan officer — back nearly a decade, but for my own
part it was like Dylan said: When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to
lose. My student-loan forbearances came and went, I hawked my meager wares at
several publications, and I lived on a series of futons atop any number of
staircases with a rotation of roommates in several Manhattan neighborhoods —
interrupted by a couple of furloughs to my childhood bedroom in New Jersey, the
less said about which the better.
Eventually, things improved, as they usually but don’t
always do. I paid off my student loans about a year before abolishing them
became the official position of the Democratic Party; met my wife; married her;
bought a house; and sometime about six weeks ago I thought, “Hey, things are
not terrible. I mostly have my crap together. Maybe it’s time to start a
family.”
No doubt God had a good laugh.
A fellow Millennial caught hell online the other day for
saying we’re a generation that has “never known stability.” Her many critics
are of course right that previous generations had things a whole lot worse
(that’s basically always been true), and I haven’t dedicated the first half of
this column to autobiography just to bitch and moan.
Instead I relate all this because it occurred to me that
the present crisis — the virus — is a weird mash-up of those several fears and
anxieties from the last two decades. Like 9/11 it’s a collective trauma and a
collective tragedy. If you don’t now, you will probably soon know someone who
dies in this pandemic. Like the financial crisis, it has knocked tens of
millions of working Americans on their asses, upended their best-laid plans,
set them back a year, a decade. And like a sniper on the loose it has us all
taking weird routes on the sidewalk, probably more scared than the numbers
dictate we ought to be, engaging in rituals that make us feel a little bit
safer and not a little bit more ridiculous.
But there are also unwelcome novelties in this experience.
For example, it’s the first crisis of my lifetime to occur under a complete and
total lack of trust by the public in the institutions tasked with guiding us
through it.
Don’t get me wrong. Ordinary Americans have been pretty
great. Our doctors, nurses, truck drivers, and deliverymen have buoyed us. And
together we’ve distanced. Homeschooled. Donated. Volunteered. Built things.
Even hired.
But poll after poll shows that the U.S., almost uniquely
among countries dealing with outbreaks, has lost faith in both politicians and
the press at precisely the time we need competence from both.
So on one side we have governors and beat cops engaged in
petty and pointless acts of vindictive governance, taking down license plates
at church parking lots, shutting down “nonessential” aisles in big-box stores,
chasing lone joggers out of public parks. And on the other side we have “just
the flu” madmen, some of whom have the president’s ear, so angry that the
economy has shut down six months before their guy goes up for reelection that
they are setting out to disprove the old political saw that the Constitution is
not a suicide pact.
And in the middle we have a press that is determined to
do their worst when we need them at their best, spending half their time fluffing
CCP malefactors and the rest of it trying to goad the White House into making
decisions that confirm their low opinion of it, as if what the public needs
most right now weren’t information about treatment research or relief efforts,
but a story from CNN proving, at long last, that the president sometimes
behaves erratically.
This too shall pass, of course, and we may yet emerge
from these hard times stronger than before. But that will depend on the courage
of our neighbors outstripping the utter frivolity of our leaders.
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