Post 253 - November 19, 2020

Day 253…

By the time I woke up this morning, Michael had already been up for an hour or two.

He’s shooting another episode of Law and Order later this afternoon, so I went to sleep listening to him muttering about due diligence and remanding someone to Riker’s. He also has an audition for something else that seems to involve a warm chuckle.

I woke up to him alternately chuckling warmly and remanding in the living room.

Neither Judge Serani nor the warm chuckler seem to have a cat in their back story because when I went into the kitchen, I saw that the cat’s morning routine had not happened. He had not been fed.

The cat was lethargic. The end was near. He seemed to have accepted the fact that he would never be fed again. An hour or two living without his morning food had allowed him to come to terms with the last moments of life as he’s known it.

As I got my vitamins out of the fridge, he looked at me in profound yet resigned despair. The delicate supply line had been broken, forever.

There was, of course, still food left in his bowl.

As I changed his water and replaced the dry food he sat and watched. Once it was in front of him, he inspected it out of habit. He ate one or two pieces then slowly made his way to the couch to sleep off the after-effects of the near tragedy. It will all be fine. In time.

New York seems to be heading towards new restrictions as our case rate rises. We have gone above 3%. The Mayor was on TV this morning saying that New York City schools have been closed again and that indoor dining and gyms would likely cease being able to happen within the week.

It doesn’t make much sense that everything wasn’t stopped at the same time. Whatever decision making that is happening is being affected by considerations other than just fighting this virus.

There are economic considerations. If businesses close down that can create a financial issue that could, in the long term, have some dire consequences.

There are political considerations. How much can people take? It takes a particularly adept cheerleader to get a whole city behind unpopular decisions. Our Governor did an amazing job of that at the beginning of the pandemic. Our Mayor is just not that skilled.

Cuomo has largely pulled back in recent months which was a very good decision. We didn’t get used to him so that we’d start to ignore him. If things get much worse, I am sure he will be back. After this long break, we’ll be ready to listen to him again.

I’ve noticed while walking around that many restaurants have enclosed their outdoor spaces to keep them warm. I’m not sure how this is a good idea. An enclosed outdoor space is somewhat by definition, an indoor space albeit with less effective insulation.

Some places have enclosed three sides of their space and left one open. One place I saw had an individual standing heat lamp at each table out on the sidewalk. Several places have erected individual tents or enclosed bubbles around each table. Each party will be in their own private, sealed area. That works for people who are living together, but not for friends from different households who are meeting for a meal. In that case, being locked in together would seem to guarantee transmission if one of them is ill.

It appears that there’s a lot of common sense being ignored as we head into the colder weather.

The reason that dining outdoors is safer is because air is circulating freely. You are less likely to transmit or receive the virus if there’s a breeze to dissipate the particles. The more you start to enclose a place, the more you are impeding that air circulation. The more dangerous it gets. Some restaurants have set up tables that are six feet apart, but when patrons sit at those tables, their backs are much closer together than that.

This virus is aerosol. It can be transmitted in the air. Do people really want to sit close to a strange group of others who are chatting and laughing in an enclosed space for an hour or two?

There is a risk to everything that we do in our lives. Nothing is ever purely safe.

Looking at each place objectively, it seems obvious which ones seem less dangerous than others. I find myself walking down the street and as I pass each restaurant I think, “yes”, “no”, “no”, “really no”, “maybe”, “no”.

These places are radically changing their seating areas overnight. I have no idea if the city is paying attention to any of these individual sites to see if they are complying with specific rules. I’m not even sure there’s enough clarity about what those rules actually are. There is still so much that we do not know about COVID-19 yet. How do you protect your customers from something that even the so-called experts don’t fully understand? On top of that, there can’t possibly be enough staffers to inspect them all anyway.

I took a friend’s recommendation yesterday and went across the East River to Roosevelt Island.

Roosevelt Island is a long thin island in the middle of the river between Manhattan and Queens. It’s about 40 city-blocks long and about one long block wide. The 59th Street Bridge passes over it. There is a bridge to the island from Queens, but not one from Manhattan. From Manhattan, you can access it via an aerial tram that runs alongside the 59th Street Bridge.

Built in 1976 it has the distinction of being the first commuter aerial tramway in North America.

Before I got to the tram, I had decided that if it was too crowded, that I would walk across the bridge into Queens and make my way over to the bridge to the island. It turned out not to be crowded at all and the whole trip only lasted about five minutes.

I don’t think that I had ever been to Roosevelt Island before. I have the dimmest possible glimmer of a memory of taking the tram over and back when I was in college, but I really can’t be sure.

The whole place feels a bit like the set of a futuristic city on an episode of the original Star Trek TV series. If you’ve ever been to Milton Keynes in England, it feels like that.

Milton Keynes is a small British town that was heavily bombed during World War II. They rebuilt it as a sort of community of the future. Unlike every other town in Britain, the streets are laid out on a small grid. Rather than having intersections, most of the times where the streets meet, one goes down underneath the other. Because of this, the town is often used as a test site for things like driverless cars.

I was there a few years ago with Jersey Boys and there were robots out delivering things. They looked like a combination of the Mars rover and a large white toaster. If you ordered a pizza, one of those delivered it. You’d pass them on the street and if you got too close they’d beep.

I didn’t see any robots on Roosevelt Island, but it did make me think of them.

Originally, Roosevelt Island was the site of several hospitals. The ruins of a Smallpox Hospital built in the mid 1800’s, are still there. Back in the day, an island was the perfect way to isolate patients.

These days, the island is full of modern-looking residential housing blocks with subsidized apartments. Most of them are rentals. There are a couple of blocks of stores running down a kind of main street in the center.

In 1969 the city leased the island to The New York State Urban Development Corporation for 99 years. The architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee came up with a master plan for it that would eventually house 20,000 people.

They envisioned a car-less island with residents parking in a lot then getting around using public transportation. They divided it into three separate communities with mini schools and other services created for each one.

The tramway was meant to be a temporary solution until a subway stop could be constructed. It proved to be so popular, however, that it has remained even though the F train now has a stop there. Cars are allowed now. At least one of the buildings has become a co-op and the whole place has started becoming gentrified. There’s a Duane Reade, a Gristedes grocery store and even a Starbucks.

At the southern tip of the island is the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. Designed by Louis Kahn, it was dedicated in October of 2012. It commemorates the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt outlined in his 1941 State of the Union Address.

The words he spoke as World War II was starting in Europe are no less applicable today.

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt used these four freedoms as the basis for the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The UN’s North American headquarters is directly across the river on the eastern shore of Manhattan. Another former First Lady, Hillary Clinton, officially launched her 2016 Presidential campaign from the park.

Those Four Freedoms that FDR articulated are still attainable now in our own time and generation.

The current President wants no part of any of them, but the one coming in, stands behind them.

We have two more months of the current President obstructing the transition in any and every way he can think of. He needs to be stood up to. He is a danger to us all.

In 1941, when Roosevelt made this speech, the war was coming. We weren’t in it yet, the attack on Pearl Harbor was still almost a year away,

In 2020, the war is here. It is raging all around us. It’s time we start to fight it.

It’s time that we commit to those Four Freedoms and make them a reality.

It’s time.