Covid, Crime, Chaos, and Silence

Our dysfunctional discourse threatens a destructive return of the represssed

Detail from the Carta Marina, a map of Scandinavia by Olaus Magnus, 1539. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

There’s a discomforting feeling in the air this January that I just can’t shake. Like the airborne aerosols we’ve been fixated on for close to two years now, it’s unlocatable and invisible. Like the mythical monsters that used to festoon medieval maps, it’s an apprehension of something ominous lurking under the surface of everyday life that can be felt but not seen.

This sensed apparition seems like a singular entity. But there’s no question it’s also a shape-shifter. When I’m down, it feels like some nightmarish force that unpredictably erupts to block every escape route out of a place that’s acutely yet amorphously dangerous. When I’m good, it’s like enjoying the experience of sailing on a sunny day while still being certain that somewhere, down in the depths, some massive sea serpent is lurking.

Compared to last January, when Biden’s inauguration in a heavily locked-down D.C. included 25,000 troops and the highest level of security “since Lincoln’s first inaugural when the country was on the verge of the Civil War,” the collective vibe is pretty calm. Yet it’s also become undeniably obvious that whatever “return to normalcy” many hoped the new Administration might bring has absolutely not come to pass.

Covid Crash

The relentless sense of crisis that characterized 2020 is well past. Yet when I think back to 2021, I’m struck by just how short the window of time was when I really felt like the country was off to a fresh start and headed in a better direction. Sometime last spring, just for a brief moment, I felt a buoyant sense of optimism start to take hold — not only for me but, it seemed, for much of the country as a whole.

I think it was only about two weeks, though, before that little bubble burst. The Delta variant hit. And the depressing sense descended that no, this summer wasn’t going to be one in which we collectively celebrated the good feelings of possibility, freedom, and fun that warm weather and vacation time normally bring, either.

In my Blue State bubble, mask mandates returned along with yet another cycle of endlessly repetitive conversations about Covid safety protocols. Just when it seemed like it might finally be over, every single social encounter once again required diplomatically assessing and accommodating every individual’s level of risk tolerance (whether based in fact or neurosis), over and over and over again.

To a certain extent, this was necessary and good. People do, of course, have widely varying levels of risk to consider depending on their age, health, regular contact with vulnerable people, on so on. Trying to understand and respect this is only right.

That said, much more of the voluminous Covid talk struck me as abstractly impersonal and frustratingly predictable. Rehashing the latest headlines and talking points from the New York Times and NPR. Obsessively reciting the latest case numbers reported. Reciting each and every precaution that had been taken when flying on an airplane, or whatever. All too often, it seemed more like a neurotic social ritual than anything else.

This was particularly true because so many vital aspects of the whole topic were (and remain) tacitly off-limits. If you move in progressive liberal circles, you know what the boundaries of acceptable social conversation are. For example: Definitely don’t bring up the fact that the theory that Covid came from a lab leak seems infinitely more plausible than its “wet market” alternative. Don’t point out how the legacy media and big tech platforms aggressively shut down any discussion of this issue until the vast majority of people who believed the party line would never want to question it, no matter what. And so forth and so on, down the whole list of issues that I, at least, am beyond sick of hearing about constantly.

This is not to suggest that any particular counter-narrative driven by the conservative media/social media complex is consistently superior. Although I don’t have first-hand experience, I’ve no doubt that parallel dynamics of social conformity and thought policing are going on in right-wing circles. The narratives are mirror images of each other: Whatever “they” believe is dangerous misinformation, or propaganda, or whatever. In either case, once you’ve latched onto some politicized narrative, any idea, information, or even curiosity-driven speculation that might counter it simply cannot be seriously considered. Whether you actually understand anything at all about what “they” are saying, it simply cannot be true.

Crime Spike

Another big positivity bubble burster: At some point last summer, I realized that a “new normal” of sharply increased violent street crime had suddenly been established. Living in an urban area, this wasn’t just an abstract news story. The number of carjackings, armed robberies, and drive-by shootings — even in “good” neighborhoods in the middle of the day — was like nothing I’d ever seen before. This was true city-wide, including in my own community.

Of course, what was happening in the “bad” neighborhoods was (and has long been, and remains) exponentially worse. People like me and my friends weren’t the ones suffering the most. Still, you’d have to be foolish or willfully blind not to see that with so much random violence, anyone who ever ventured out of their house was facing a higher level of everyday risk, no matter where they lived.

Regardless, the fact that the memory of the previous summer’s events and sensibilities — especially the George Floyd murder, Black Lives Matter protests, and “defund the police” movement — was still so fresh meant that acknowledging the crime spike was deeply uncomfortable, at least within my progressive liberal community. People understand, correctly, that increased fear of crime can be easily harnessed to legitimate precisely the sort of police abuses and mass incarceration dynamics that the BLM movement was, at its best, trying to abolish. And no one, for good reason, wants to support that.

Yet, it’s simply true that the vast majority of people want some sort of effective — and reasonably rapid — response to violent crime when they know it’s become much more prevalent in their own neighborhorhood, regardless of what their politics may be. For progressive liberals, however, this visceral impulse conflicts with the intellectual understanding that the root causes of such problems have been building up for generations, and need to be addressed. Yet even in the best of circumstances (which we certainly don’t have right now), this would be tremendously challenging and take a good deal of time.

The most common response to this conundrum is silence. Unlike in the case of Covid, there’s no predictable progressive party line to reiterate with regard to the crime spike. So, people quietly adjust their habits in an effort to feel a little safer (carrying a minimum of valuables when out walking, etc.), think about moving out of the city (and in some cases, do so), and reassure themselves that the likelihood of anything bad happening to them is still low (or, if it has already, that they’re strong enough to get over it and move on). Then, they compartmentalize, don’t talk about it, and focus on the familiar routines of everyday life.

But the silence around what’s obviously a vitally important problem creates a vacuum that’s waiting to be filled. It’s not surprising that the New Yorkers most negatively impacted by crime (i.e., low-income people of color) voted overwhelmingly for ex-NYPD Captain Eric Adams for Mayor; he squarely acknowledged and promised to address it. Naturally, he’s roundly hated by most progressives and liberals (for a variety of issues, not just this one). Yet, they won’t grapple with this issue and offer a compelling alternative, either. This is happening nationally. And Trump and his followers, who continue to control the GOP, are eager to take advantage.

Street Chaos

Again last summer: It seemed like you could see the social fabric ripping in real time, if you only cared to look. Some of it was lethal. But some of it was just weird.

Most memorably, massive brigades of tricked-out motorcycles suddenly started roaring down major arteries on a regular basis — doing wheelies, weaving in and out of other vehicles, ignoring traffic signals, blocking traffic. (Of course, this is also quite dangerous, if less so than an armed robbery or drive-by shooting.) Local news reported that in certain neighborhoods (and particularly some “nice” ones near downtown), this was a daily occurrence.

Nothing remotely like this had ever happened before. I wondered: Where did all these people get the money to buy what looked like expensive new bikes? Who were they? Presumably, they were organizing what were obviously coordinated events on social media. But, if so, this should have been relatively easy for the authorities to track. If they were doing so, I never saw any evidence of it. Nor did I ever hear any explanation — or even a theory — of why this had suddenly started happening. A smattering of local news coverage reported what was going on, but offered nothing beyond that.

Curious, I conducted a brief online search yesterday to see if I could find anything further. And I did find one more in-depth article on this phenom from 2013. But back then, the biker flash mobs were isolated, one-off occurrences, not a daily occurrence in the middle of a major city. I checked the New York Times to see if they’d ever reported on it; the answer, unsurprisingly, was no. And in my circles, if it’s not reported in the NYTs or NPR, it doesn’t really exist, at least as a legitimate part of political discourse and cultural consciousness. So again — another majorly disconcerting new social phenomenon, relegated to social silence.

The fact that the swarms of Mad Maxesque bikers who regularly highjacked vital traffic arteries in one of America’s biggest cities throughout the summer received so little media attention is emblematic of the overall dysfunctionality of our public discourse. Back in the B.T/B.C. era (Before Trump/Before Covid) — that now hard-to-remember, oh so long ago time —it’s hard to imagine this wouldn’t have been a major news story. But it wouldn’t have been happening like that back then, would it? So much has shifted so fast. What was unimaginable only six years ago isn’t even remarked upon now.

Dysfunctionality and Authoritarianism

And this, I think, is why I feel like something monstrous is gathering force somewhere underneath the surface of everyday life. The disjuncture between the dangerous dislocations that have transformed society so rapidly and the stunted poverty of our public discourse is too great. Life may be relatively calm compared to this time last year. But we’re at a stasis point that can’t last.

We’ve been focusing obsessively on Covid, Covid, Covid; talking, arguing, and grandstanding about it in exhaustingly predictable ways. Meanwhile, many other issues that impact people’s lives profoundly (and in many cases, much more so than Covid) are, comparatively speaking, ignored: Not only violent crime and biker brigades, but also inflation, homelessness, drug addiction, mental health, supply chain breakdowns, public education implosions . . . the list goes on. The underlying sense of dangerous unpredictability this engenders can only be masked by obsessively focusing on Covid for so long. The clock is ticking. Sooner or later, this weird dam in the collective consciousness will break.

Trump gave his first major political rally since leaving office in Arizona last week. I watched part of it and found it extremely disturbing. Of course, that’s part of what makes Trump so galvanizing for his followers: He’s just so good at pushing buttons and scaring people like me. Of course, it’s true, as a few liberal media commentators dismissively pointed out, that the speech was a rambling retread of what are by now oh-so-predictable insults and tropes (the “stolen” election, “fake news” media, “communist” Democrats, etc.). What they don’t see, though, is that it doesn’t matter what Trump says — what matters is how he says it and the feelings it generates in his follwers.

Trump’s speeches have a hypnotic quality. And for his fans, they clearly cast a welcome spell. Reality becomes neatly and self-approvingly divided up into the virtuous People (them) and the evil Others (basically everyone else, most certainly including Republicans who refuse to fall into line). Trump is a skilled demagogue who knows how to manipulate people extremely well. Like a cult leader, he has a preternatural ability to tap into a huge currents of emotion, channel them into a singular vortex, supercharge this concentrated energy further, and then direct it into a cult of personality tethered to nothing but his own will-to-power, ego, and greed.

This wouldn’t be so worrisome if it were a marginal phenomenon and there were effective counters to his malign leadership on the scene. But, at least at the moment, none are in sight. Professional commentators across the political spectrum agree that Trump retains an ironclad hold on the Republican Party. The Biden Administration is floundering. Bernie’s challenge to the Democratic establishment, which retains little credibility in most voter’s eyes, was quashed. Andrew Yang launched his new Forward Party, but there’s a long way to go before it gets anywhere, if it ever does.

Looking at this dismal picture, choosing to protect your mental, emotional, and spiritual health by checking out politically, taking a news break, and focusing on whatever’s good in your personal life makes perfect sense. Put your own oxygen mask on first and so on. What’s to be gain by wheel-spinning anxiety and impotent frustration? Nothing.

But it’s also true that we humans have a driving need to make sense of our world in ways that feel compelling and meaningful. And in the past six years, there has been far too much dislocating societal change to ignore. It’s shattered many of our former ways of explaining the world to ourselves — and necessarily so. Because a lot of our old stories no longer ring true.

We need better narratives. But to develop them, we first need much more open, honest, curious, thoughtful, and well-intentioned discussions about what’s been happening and how we feel about it. Achiveving this will require breaking some deeply ingrained social habits. There’s been a sense in the country for many years now that it’s virtuous to stick to some politically approved set of talking points, loyally defending them no matter what. The result is a flattened culture dominated by shallow, hashtag-driven ideas that are far too one-dimensional to speak meaningfully to the true complexities of life.

The thought policing that takes place within ourselves is the most powerful and therefore the most pernicious. Of course, we need to be cognizant of what is safe, appropriate, and wise to talk about with particular people and in different situations. But we should never feel that it’s a good thing to shut down reasonable questions, authentic feelings, or heterodox ideas within our own minds. And I may be imagining it, but my strong sense is that far too many people have been doing just that.

We are also social creatures. So we really need other people that we can share our questions, thoughts, and feelings with openly. For our sense of the world to grow and develop in ways that nurture and support us, we must be able to share it with others who will listen and respond in good faith. Having such healthy conversations won’t save the world. But they will definitely make it a better place for us to live in, no matter what.