A friend of mine used to say that the best words in the English language are “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our descent into JFK Airport.”
That friend lives in Florida now.
For the last four and a half months, so did my family. There’s a divide between people who stayed in New York City through the Covid-19 pandemic and those who have left. Our family doesn’t really fit on either side of it.
A semi-satirical piece by Luke Winkie in the New York Times in March argued that returning New Yorkers should be made to pay a “resettlement tax” and noted, “I’ve never identified more with this place than I did in 2020. All the values I was taught about New York, from elementary school onward, came true last year: the solidarity, the saltiness, the stubborn resilience whenever outside voices declare the city dead and buried.”
We, too, stayed in New York all through 2020. We lived with the sirens in the spring, and I was on the frontlines of the fight to open schools in the fall. We were never going to leave. We had moved into our dream home in March 2020. We were going to raise our kids in Brooklyn and then retire to Manhattan. I had grown up in Brooklyn, my husband in Queens. Unlike Winkie, though, we saw a city transformed for the worse. People acted horribly. Mask-wearing became religion, not science, and people would scream at one another in the streets over it. Schools became irrelevant, and few seemed to mind. It was also the era of extreme virtue signaling, of “Defund Police” signs in the windows of multimillion-dollar homes in safe neighborhoods as crime spiked all around us. We didn’t love this New York. The “New York Strong” slogan sounded like a joke. For two New York lifers, this was the weakest New York we’d ever known.
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