Plague Journal, Day 50: Feeling very Brooklyn

“Look, Dad. It’s the official motto of Brooklyn.” 

“‘Spread Love — it’s the Brooklyn Way.’ Really? That’s the official motto?” 

“Sure. Haven’t you seen it on that building with Not Ray’s Pizza?” 

“You mean on Fulton? Yeah, I’ve seen that. But I don’t think that’s anything official. I think it’s from a song by Notorious B.I.G. It’s his face on the side of that building.” 

“Then what’s the Brooklyn motto?” 

“I’m not sure. Maybe ‘Go F Yourself?’”

“Dad.” 

“Yeah, probably not. But that’s more how a lot of people think about Brooklyn. And maybe even how Brooklyn thinks about itself. There’s a certain toughness here. A chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. We’re not Manhattan, and we don’t want to be. But maybe that’s changing now there’s so much money here.” 

I look it up. The official motto of Brooklyn (named for the Dutch town of Breukelen): “Eendraght Maeckt Maght,” early modern Dutch for “Unity Makes Strength.”

Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.), Clinton Hills raised, released “Juicy” in 1994, which includes the lyric now painted on the side of what’s known as The Brooklyn Love Building, in nearby Fort Greene, at the corner of Fulton and South Portland. 

In October 1989 I was living in Santa Cruz, Calif., 10 miles from the epicenter of the Loma Prieta earthquake (63 dead; $6 billion in damages; delayed World Series). One of my most vivid memories: the ground didn’t stop moving for a week. At least I couldn’t tell if it was moving. On occasion we’d feel an aftershock that would get our hearts pumping. More disconcerting were the thousands of continuous tiny shifts I felt (or imagined feeling) through my shoes; my calves, thighs, hips, back stayed tensed for days. Not trusting the ground on which I stood: the sense of dislocation was beyond unnerving. After a week I called my parents in the Central Valley, hopped on a bus, rode a train to a station where they picked me up, fed me, let me sleep for hours until, after a few days, I regained equanimity. 

In CoronaWorld our biggest common experience is uncertainty. No one knows anything. The virus’ characteristics? Symptoms? Reliability of viral tests? Reliability of antibody tests? Should we wear masks? How long after we’re sick are we infectious? Can we get Covid-19 twice? How long should we quarantine to flatten the curve? How many will die if we reopen for business? Answers shift. We’re driving pitons of policy into mountains of factual sand.   

Much of this is of necessity. Epidemiologists know any new virus means confronting an enormous amount of data that can only become more certain with research, testing, trials: with care, with time. 

Much of this has been exacerbated by federal leadership that is uniquely combining ineptitude, corruption, and self-interest in ways that will be fatal for, likely, hundreds of thousands. A New Yorker story on the differences between responses in Seattle and New York City (where failure to listen to scientists has resulted in thousands of needless deaths) notes a core principle of a program called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (“America’s shock troops in combating disease outbreaks”): “a pandemic is a communications emergency as much as a medical crisis.” Consistent, reliable messengers build trust, save lives: “Information brings relief.” To say that our president has been an inconsistent, unreliable messenger is to say little more than that he breathes. This is by design; chaos — flooding the media zone with shit, in the words of an early advisor — obfuscates reality, serves his purposes.

This combination creates the biggest difference between my unsettling Loma Prieta experience and my experience of CoronaWorld: no one I knew disbelieved what the media reported from the 1989 epicenter. Everyone agreed the ground was shaking. 

In Sacramento on Friday 1,000 people participate in a coordinated protest pushing California to reopen. I see folks like these on my social media feeds; I grew up in the Central Valley, much of which, contrary to the stereotype of California blue politics, remains staunchly right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, libertarian, Trumpist. 

Some say the virus doesn’t exist; people may be dying, but it’s an elaborate government plot to control us, a wish to inoculate citizens with identity tags, a plot dreamed up by Bill Gates. (The overlap with anti-vaccine advocates is sizable.) 

My cousin’s wife in the Central Valley posts on social media seeking stories of Covid-19 victims; she only knows one person who’s been sick. Many of her friends, including anti-quarantine protest supporters, don’t know any victims. I could post obits from The Times and The Post, but those sources are worthless to such skeptics. Within hours, almost 50 people from across the country chime in with personal stories of illness and death. 

Others acknowledge the virus’s existence but say the economy needs to reopen so we can build herd immunity. If people die? Well, that’s Darwin’s law in action. 

“These people have old folks in their families,” says my nephew. (He lives in the Central Valley; he's immunocompromised, working from home, getting groceries delivered.) “They have high-risk people in their lives. What they’re saying to their grandmothers, their uncles, their sisters: Your lives are worthless. Of zero value. We need to get to back to normality, which will take 70 percent herd immunity; if that takes 1.2 million dead people, so be it. I can’t process that lack of empathy.” 

Mid-afternoon Friday I drop The Kid back at The Co-Parent’s. She’s been with me for two weeks, after five weeks at The Co-Parent’s in the shutdown’s early days, when The Girlfriend and I got sick. The Kid, The Girlfriend, and I quickly built routines that worked. Now we’ll readjust, probably on a week-on, week-off schedule. 

At 6:45 on a gorgeous spring evening, warm but with a touch of cool that makes mask-breathing almost pleasurable, The Girlfriend and I walk to Fort Greene Park. At 7 p.m. we’re climbing stairs to the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument when people begin the ritual cheer for front-line workers. It’s nice, but muted; most folks are up here for exercise, eager to get back to it. We walk toward home. 

Three minutes later we hear a rash of sirens. After seven weeks, the sound sparks trauma.

“Is that connected to the cheer, or is something bad happening?” asks The Girlfriend.

“I don’t know.” 

We follow the sound to the park's southwest corner, near The Brooklyn Hospital Center. A phalanx of a dozen police cars follows two or three fire trucks, lights on, sirens blaring. They stop in front of the hospital. Cops and firefighters emerge to applaud the hospital workers, dozens of whom step through the front doors, applaud back. Scores of us watch from a park hillside, socially distanced, applauding, whistling, hollering. Unlike the briefer window cheering we do each night, this cheering lasts for close to 10 minutes. It’s moving. 

“My stepdad was in the Air Force — I grew up in a military family,” says my nephew, whose mother is a nurse. “When you enlist, you know the possibility of dying is what you sign up for. People who are saying that’s what doctors and nurses and EMTs signed up for — that’s a fabrication. Utter bullshit. They signed up to treat people, not to put themselves at risk because the government isn’t providing equipment they need to do their jobs safely.”

The Girlfriend and I walk home, emptied. “That was sad,” she says. 

I feel a blend of emotions: rage at the disbelievers and the callous (Go Fuck Yourselves!); respect for the caregivers (Spread Love!); connection with the people of this borough, this city (Unity Makes Strength!). I feel very Brooklyn. 

(New York state numbers on Friday: 308,314 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 1.3 percent; 289 dead, to a total of 18,610, up 1.6 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,793, to a total of 58,943, up 3.1 percent.)