On the Eve of Winter, Masha Gessen Considers “What-Could-Have-Been Fantasies” for More Creative, Socially Progressive Responses to the Pandemic in New York City
“But what if, once New Yorkers had made it through the grief and despair of the spring, we had seen in the pandemic an urgent call for creative problem-solving—for new, inventive thinking? What if we’d refused to settle for less in every area of our lives? Imagine what this September might look like then,” Gessen writes in the New Yorker. “Hannah Arendt once wrote that all that separates us from the ever-real threat of totalitarianism is ‘the great capacity of men to start something new.’ Little is new in this city now. Its office towers stand empty, its streets are once again full of cars, its schools are struggling (and struggling unequally), its unhoused citizens are getting kicked out of the Upper West Side hotels where they had been temporarily sheltered, the rich are getting richer, the wind is getting colder, and there is but one coronavirus-era invention that the city has decided to adopt: expanded outdoor dining.”
Post Date: 10-06-2020
Post Date: 10-06-2020