The pandemic ended; we went on with our lives. Yet by considerable margins, people still say they feel alienated, vulnerable, unsafe. It's only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us.
Disasters have a way of revealing things. Who we are. What we value. Whose lives matter. But 2020 was no ordinary disaster. Americans experienced cascading crises, all at once: a pandemic, an economic free fall, the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath, the spike in violent crime, the flight from central cities and the fight for American democracy. The dire situation overwhelmed our capacity to make sense of things and process the traumas we were living through. Instead, our collective response was marked by the "will not to know." When the pandemic began, my first instinct was to shut out the world and protect my family, but my second impulse pointed in another direction. As a sociologist, I've spent most of my career studying what happens when institutions break down and everything goes sideways. I decided to track as much of the year's social and political drama as I could, doing interviews, crunching numbers, making maps, analyzing social media posts and policy reports, and exploring how ordinary people dealt with the crisis. My guest essay for Times Opinion this week focuses on one of these people, featured in my book "2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed." Daniel Presti, a bar manager from Staten Island, became something of a celebrity when he and his business partner declared their new establishment an "autonomous zone," defied local closing orders and attracted hundreds of right-wing activists to protests supporting their cause. In our interviews, Presti told me that he had never been political. He respected the initial lockdown orders, but over time, he came to feel abandoned, as if city and state agencies cared more about shutting him down than helping him stay afloat. After he kept the bar open and got arrested, Presti declared himself a "freedom fighter" and railed against government overreach. Presti was the only person I interviewed who friended me on Facebook and the only person who unfriended me, too. My essay is about what I learned about America from his story of disaffection and radicalization. It's also about why we haven't resolved the conflicts that 2020 generated, and how the walls we've built to protect ourselves are weakening the country we still share.
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Saturday, February 3, 2024
Opinion Today: We were wrong about what happened to us in 2020
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