On our weekly family call, my sister who's a mayoral aide outlines the post-pandemic cuts faced by her sizable Western city in the budget year starting in July.
Much of the city’s revenue comes from tourism (sales and lodging taxes), which have dropped to near zero. Six of the city’s top 10 private employers are in retail, hospitality, or tourism. The mayor’s making assumptions that revenues will drop by $150 million — about 40 percent.
About one in five city dollars is spent on insurance and debt service: untouchable (at least without screwing up the city’s bond rating, terrible long-term policy). Almost one in three dollars is spent on public works (roads, water, sewage, trash), one in six on fire and police: only so many cuts possible.
Other departments will be gutted. Two of three city libraries will likely close. Parks will close. Bus service will be cut. Youth and family service programs will be slashed. Those affected by every cut: primarily the poor.
“It’s horrible,” she says. “It’ll be a disaster for so many people. But there aren’t any good choices.”
My brother’s California business — wholesale flooring and custom moldings — is getting back to normal. That means he’ll resume traveling across the state, which means regular one-way drives of four or five hours, which means staying in hotels. He’s considering staying in more expensive chain hotels, which are being transparent about cleaning regimens. He’s likely to bring his own cleaning supplies, too.
My sister in Washington Heights took a vacation day Friday, went with an Upper West Side Friend to visit a couple of friends in Westchester County. The three-hour visit took multiple planning phone calls, she said, as if they were planning a weeks-long joint vacation.
The UWS Friend has taken a limited number of buses and subways but felt uncertain riding in a car. The Westchester couple didn’t feel comfortable about them arriving by train. They could all sit outside and remain socially distanced for a meal but needed to work out logistics for the food service. In the end one of the Westchester friends drove into the city to pick them both up, driving with the windows down; all wore masks throughout; they ate buffet style, taking care with all glasses and utensils.
“The planning takes so much energy, and it’s so weird,” she said. “But I want to socialize with people if I can do it safely.”
Later in the day she comes to visit me and The Kid; we climb in her back seat, masked, windows open, drive to Green-Wood Cemetery. It’s a gorgeous spring day; lots of folks are visiting, virtually all masked, and the almost 500-acre grounds offer plenty of room for distancing. It’s a fun Memorial Day activity, offering statuary, greenery, history, not least the dated, or recently resurrected, names. (The Kid, who loves names, says they move on 100-year cycles of popularity.)
We drive back, slice up The Sister's delicious chocolate cake, visit with my sister’s dog; we try to stay six feet away from The Sister, mostly successfully.
My mother got a haircut, a decision that surprised us all. She’s been using the same hairdresser since moving to the Bay Area from the Central Valley, about 15 years ago; during the pandemic, he’s seen a few select clients in his basement. Both he and she were masked, and he took what sounded like reasonable precautions. Still, she’s 89, at high risk for infection; it's better than a salon, but I thought it was a bad idea.
A better idea: Two friends from the East Bay drove to see her, visiting outside, socially distanced, in her condo complex’s garden. The friends are worried about the nation’s political future; one, who’s keeping a blog, wonders how to keep safe while voicing protest. (One group she’s supporting, to register and get voters to the polls: Reclaim Our Vote.) She recalls her mother in their Jersey City home typing protest letters to corporations she thought were harming the public; now she’s writing supportive postcards to journalists reporting information that rebuts administration lies. She wonders if it’s time for a physically distanced series of protests, as recently in Tel Aviv, so people can remain safe and register dissent.
“I worry — the least useful thing to do,” she writes. “Are we fooling ourselves that we can be safe, and that when it is safe to emerge that our democracy will still be there?”
Others are pondering the same question. So far it seems the big winners from the Covid-19 era are centralizing giants: the Big 5 tech oligopoly (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft) now accounts for more than 20 percent of the S & P 500 index; autocrats in Hungary, Serbia, Cambodia have instituted emergency powers; China’s President Xi has moved to end Hong Kong’s special status.
The novelist Marilynne Robinson sees our nation at a crossroads, noting declining life expectancy, not to mention national optimism, from before the Covid-19 era. She calls it "a crisis of civilization," writing, "We have been given the grounds and opportunity to do some very basic thinking. … We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.”
Among her candidates for reevaluation: the outflow of American capital, growing enrichment of a few, pervasiveness of poverty; the devaluation of humane studies, thereby freedom of thought; the entrenchment of notions of scarcity; and the diminishment of the public commons and ideas of public good.
“All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one,” Robinson writes.
A high school classmate responds to one of my posts with a meme accusing me of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” telling me to calm myself, offering me a binkie. In response I link to the digital version of Sunday’s New York Times entire front page, listing 1,000 of our fellow Americans who have died of Covid-19, along with a few descriptive words for each. It’s a journalistic triumph; it’s heartbreaking; it represents about 1 percent of American lives lost so far. The Kid and I spend time reading the brief descriptions, one by one.
(New York state numbers on Sunday: 362,764 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.3 percent; 97 dead, to a total of 23,488, up 0.5 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 646, to a total of 91,467, up 0.7 percent.)
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