Post 243 - November 9, 2020

Day 243…

What a difference a few days make.

On Saturday I was going through the final video edit of West End Woofs! on the couch. The TV was on, but it was muted, and I wasn’t paying any attention to it. A small pocket of election returns had just been released in Pennsylvania. Steve Kornacki had added them in to the totals and confirmed that Biden was on his way to victory there. The next batch could be hours away, so I tuned out.

As I was working, Michael came into the room and said something that I didn’t catch. I was deep into what I was doing. I did notice then, however, that there was a great deal of noise coming from outside the window that I had unconsciously been blocking out for a couple of minutes. It sounded like the 7 o’clock pot-banging and applause for our health care workers.

Looking up, I saw a big picture of Joe Biden on the TV screen, but I couldn’t fully process what it meant.

And then it all came together.

Joseph R. Biden is now President-elect Joseph R. Biden.

Senator Kamala Harris is now Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and is the first woman in our history to be a part of a winning Presidential ticket.

New York City had erupted.

After screaming out of the window and banging pans, ourselves, we headed up to the roof. The sound of cheering was deafening and coming from EVERYWHERE. A garbage truck going down the street blasted its horn non-stop. We decided to go out.

People were dancing in the streets.

On August 15, 1945 Imperial Japan surrendered and thereby brought World War II to a close. New Yorkers took to the streets then, too. That famous picture of the sailor dipping his girlfriend and kissing her was taken on that day in Times Square. After four years of a war that took the lives of over four hundred thousand Americans and wounded over six hundred thousand more, it was time to celebrate.

I wasn’t there in 1945, but Saturday is what I imagine it must have felt like. It seemed like the entire city just exhaled after everything that we’ve been through. From four years of this President’s inaction amidst countless hundreds of thousands of lives lost to COVID-19 to, well, everything else.

As he used to do in the early days of the pandemic, Brian Stokes Mitchell leaned out of his window a couple of blocks over and sang, The Impossible Dream. People gathered at the intersection outside of his building and cheered anything and everything that happened. Taxi cabs lurched down the street honking their horns. People with sunroofs stood up in their cars as they drove down Broadway holding up Biden/Harris 2020 signs.

Michael and I walked down to Times Square. Every ten or fifteen blocks or so there was a gathering of people cheering and, yes, dancing.

At Columbus Circle, in the shadow of the President’s hotel, there was a larger group that got more and more organized as the day wore on. More and more home-made signs started appearing.

Times Square was also full of celebrating people.

The President, unsurprisingly, refuses to accept the results.

The President’s Press Secretary looking out from the White House at similar celebrations in our Nation’s capital, called what she was seeing, “super-spreader events.”

Unlike the President’s rallies where similar crowds were gathered, however, these crowds were different. First of all, they were all outside. Rather than being in the same location for prolonged periods of time, people were moving around. Most importantly, throughout the celebrations in New York City on Saturday, people were wearing masks. The Black Lives Matter protests did not cause cases to spike and I would be surprised if these did either.

In the 48 hours since the election was called in his favor, the President-elect has already announced a bi-partisan coronavirus advisory board made up of actual health experts. One of them is Rick Bright, the whistle-blower who was fired by the President early in the pandemic. Bright tried to warn the Administration of critical PPE supply shortages and was ignored.

In a speech to the American people this morning, Biden said, “We’ll follow the science. Let me say that again, we’ll follow the science and adjust according to what data comes in.” He warned that we have a long dark winter ahead of us. He was honest and direct - something we have yet to experience from the current Administration. It was a palpable relief.

“We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months… Do it for yourself. Do it for your neighbor… The goal of mask wearing is not to take something away from you, it’s to give you something back - a normal life.”

President-elect Biden has already done more in one speech to lead the fight against this virus than the current President has done in his entire term in office.

Instead, the President, who has spent the last two days golfing, just continues to tweet completely unfounded claims about election fraud. Georgia’s Lt. Governor, a GOP ally of the President has said that he has seen no “credible evidence” of any of the sort of fraud that the President is referring to.

Before the announcement came in on Saturday, there was a report that the President was going to hold a press conference in Philadelphia where the count was slowly trickling in. After Pennsylvania was called for his opponent, and thereby ended the race, he clearly changed his mind and sent his lawyer Rudi Giuliani there instead.

What happened there sounds like it came out of Saturday Night Live skit, rather than actual reality.

The President thought that they had booked the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. The truth was, what they had actually booked was a small business called Four Seasons Total Landscaping on a run-down street in Northern Philadelphia. It was right next to an adult bookstore and across the street from a crematorium.

It was a travesty. Giuliani held the conference anyway and used it to spew lies and conspiracy theories. All in all, it seemed a perfectly fitting end to their regime.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping has already become a major sight-seeing spot. They are planning on selling “Lawn and Order” tee shirts.

Meanwhile, back at the White House, Housing Secretary Ben Carson has now tested positive for the virus. He was at the same indoor, mask-less election party that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was. Several aides have also tested positive. It looks like the White House might have a second super-spreader event on its hands.

There has been a lot of news in the last few hours.

Pfizer announced this morning that they have had a 90% success rate with their new vaccine.

The President’s son immediately accused Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, of withholding the results until after the election. To be clear, the decision to announce wasn’t made by Pfizer, it was made by an outside independent committee who released the findings as soon as they had them.

While this is certainly potentially fantastic news, it is by no means a sure thing yet. Studies will continue over the next two years to figure out how long this potential immunity will last. They will also study the 10% of people who became infected anyway to see if the vaccine has any effect on the severity of their illness. The vaccine, if approved, would be a sequence of two shots taken three weeks apart. Pfizer will still need to ascertain how long after receiving it that antibodies form.

The President-elect, this morning warned that we aren’t there yet.

Even after it is approved, if it is approved, it will still take many months to produce and distribute the vaccine. One the difficult things about this particular vaccine is that it needs to be stored at -103 degrees to remain viable. That is going to make it challenging to get out there. Then people are going to need to be convinced to take it.

We will still have a long dark winter to face.

Two days after losing the election, the President has just announced, via a tweet, that he is firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper. It seems like a somewhat pointless and vindictive move with only two months left.

It is common knowledge that there has been a lot of friction between the two. The Secretary has repeatedly refused to allow the President to use the military to his own ends. For example, Esper refused to deploy the military to fight against the protesters who rose up after the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.

The President will not concede this election. He continues to foment discord and unrest by spreading baseless conspiracy theories in an attempt to undermine the vote. He is not going to leave quietly. Firing Esper with everything else going on guarantees an extra level of uncertainty and unrest.

The President’s campaign team has put out pleas for donations so that they can fight the election results in the courts. What his supporters might not notice, unless they have really sharp eyes, is that the Administration is reserving the right to use up to 60% of those donations to try and pay down their campaign debt.

There will be a transition of power, it is just not going to be easy.

Emily W. Murphy currently serves as the head of the General Services Administration. An appointee of the President, she is refusing to sign off on releasing transition funding to the President-elect. It is also through her agency that the incoming President and his team are given access to current officials, office space and equipment to help facilitate the transition. In any other election, this would be automatic. Not this one.

We might a long dark winter ahead of us, but today is gorgeous. Ever since the results were announced on Saturday, the weather in New York has been glorious. It’s warm and clear and bright beyond belief.

After the ecstatic joy of Saturday, yesterday settled into a different kind of joy - the joy of knowing that there are more people in this country who believe in the rule of law than don’t. Maybe not enough to be comfortable, but enough that we prevailed. Yesterday, it felt like the city was breathing normally for the first time in four years.

The most exciting thing about Saturday, in some regards, was the realization that it feels like we’ve gotten the flag back. In recent times, thanks to the white supremacist movement, the sight of the flag being waved could chill me to the bone. In the last two days, however, seeing Old Glory being waved from windows up and down Broadway, made my heart beat faster and gave me hope.

Yes, we have a winter to slog through, but spring is right behind it.

Here in New York City, you can feel that spring is coming.

And it feels good.