In the building where I live, a new senior complex, there are posting announcing that for an indefinite time, no gathering in the community room is allowed. No gathering in the halls, please! Or by the mailbox! No exercising in the exercise room! Please keep the traffic down, and if you have to have family, friends, if you think it's necessary and safe, then these guests should use the stairway, not the elevator! Please, let's think about the Other.
We are still a community. Still in this together.
But in the last week, I have felt cut off from the world in which the pandemic is a struggle for those who come down with it and those trying to recover and those family members who've lost loved ones. We know what's happening in the hospitals with doctors and nurses begging for PEP and witnessing the extinguishing of life on the ventilators.
Cut off is not the same as isolated. As a writer, I'm used to spending a good part of my day alone. I can fill a day easily with reading and writing, keeping up with the news, the art world and science. That's not isolation, it's solitude which I treasure.
But now, all of a sudden last week, I became cut off. Cut off from the world where my fellow human beings are wearing masks, latex gloves, washing and cleaning everything obsessively. I have been pulled into a world consisting of one individual, a woman, possibly in her fifties. But youngish. White.
After over a month of stay-at-home, cabin fever has kicked in, and there's a ready-made object to toy with, a subject obsessed with "race." In a "community" where people assume that an educated black (and woman to boot, with no children!) has had all the help from government programs, Affirmative Action programs, give-away programs, to talk about "race" is equivalent to talking about the greatness of "commies."
The target of resentment, I became an "enemy" in my home.
I went to bed one night, experiencing sharp chest pains. Earlier in the month, I had been told by my oncologist that the PET Scan taken a few days before revealed an aneurysm in the middle of my chest. But I suppose I was too disoriented that night as I shifted my attention from my health to that of my "life of the mind," a lifestyle now too bizarre to be normal in our "working class" community where people" retire" and refrain from even thinking about "politics."
I went to bed and tried to sleep. A sound system had been set to bass and low enough for me to feel it underneath my bed. It could only be emanating from below, I thought. I was told that the man was mentally challenged. Little did I know, my next door neighbor may very well have been responsible for the noise; she had been the noisiest person on the floor for months. At any rate, the man below is more physically challenged, and incapable to the disturbance I experienced for a week or so.
After a night of chest pains, I woke up and prepared to take my first Car-A-Van ride to pick up groceries.
I remember thinking of the conversation I had with my sister about being careful not to use too much curry or thyme in my food, and no sooner had I remembered this conversation, I felt my chest an arms feeling so heavy, as if someone was pressing down on my chest with another was pulling my arms by the hands down to the floor.
None of this matters in a building and in a town and in a country where I'm looked at suspiciously. I can't step out my apartment door and ask for help.
Sometimes I dream that Americans wake up one morning collectively decide with wrangling to read. To learn something about themselves. About the foundation of this country arising not of innocence and goodwill but, instead of sheer greed and brutal violence. To dream that Americans would one day wake up a collectively decide, yes, it's time, let's do it, let's read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Or read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Dunbar-Ortiz, or Slave Nation or Race for Profit . Just read and read. Learn.
How simple it would be to know and not turn away in anger, not attack with club, sword, bayonets, semi-automatics, drones? How simple would it be to not turn people into scapegoats to marginalize, to punish, to kill? How simple would it be to not commit to the same response to hearing the truth by "addressing" racism with a determination to see to the removal of black Americans asking for rights to be protected and respected?
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