Post 357 - March 3, 2021
Day 357…
My walk yesterday took me across the Manhattan Bridge, through Williamsburg, Brooklyn and then back into Manhattan via the Williamsburg Bridge.
All of it was new territory to me.
While the Williamsburg Bridge was fun to walk over, the Manhattan Bridge really wasn’t. Several subway lines run over it and the walkway is right alongside of them. It was deafeningly noisy the whole way.
The Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge are right next to each other although they come into Brooklyn from slightly different directions creating a triangle when viewed from above. Between where they end in Brooklyn, lies the DUMBO area which is where many artists fled as SoHo became gentrified and they could no longer afford to live there. Unsurprisingly, DUMBO, itself, has now become gentrified. Its abandoned warehouses now house expensive condominiums. High-end clothing boutiques, and trendy restaurants and coffee shops line the streets.
St. Ann’s Warehouse, one of the best Off-Broadway theatres in the city, sits in its latest renovated home on the banks of the East River just a stone’s throw away from Jane’s Carousel - a beautifully restored 1920’s Merry-Go-Round that was originally installed in Youngstown, Ohio.
Rather than going into DUMBO, I instead avoided it and ventured north into Williamsburg.
Like walking into Chinatown, walking into Williamsburg feels a bit like going into another country. The area is largely inhabited by tens of thousands of members of various Hasidic Jewish communities. The television series Unorthodox is set in Williamsburg.
Living under strict religious rules, the people there have their own modes of dress. The women wear wigs and modest dark skirts, and the men wear long black coats and brimmed black hats and keep their hair and beards long.
In the early afternoon, when I was there, school was letting out. Older kids walked together in small groups chatting and laughing like kids everywhere. Younger kids walked with their parents - often with a couple of mothers strolling together. Men were largely on their own or in pairs, intent on getting to wherever it was they were going in good time.
It’s a bustling area with a lot going on. People seemed happy and often greeted each other as they passed. Stores were doing a brisk business.
Nobody was wearing a mask.
Not one Hasidic person that I passed yesterday had a mask on or was observing any kind of social distancing at all. I would occasionally see a person who was not a member of the community - a police officer or bus driver - and all of them were wearing masks - but nobody who looked like they lived there was.
If you want to know what life was like before the pandemic struck, you need only to head across the river.
It’s not that the virus isn’t there - it is and at much higher rates than anywhere else in the city. It is largely Hasidic areas that make the average of our city’s positivity rates as high as they are. It’s just that everyone there seems to be ignoring it. Large Orthodox community events, especially funerals, have become super-spreader events and allowed the virus to spread like lightning.
A somewhat less fervent Jewish journalist named Louis Finkelman tried to answer why this is in an article he published in The Jewish News.
He was a bit confused as well. The main tenants of Judaism all require their followers to put their health above even their customs and codes. An observant Jew must use a phone to call a doctor even on Shabbat, eat during a fast day or do any number of other things that ordinarily not be allowed if doing so will protect themselves or another from harm. Jewish law also encourages the following of Civil laws so as to respect those others with whom they live.
That is not what is happening now in Williamsburg. Regardless of how it looks to others or sickens their own members, the Orthodox communities are living by their own rules.
The Hasidic people consider themselves an insular community. Separate from the rest. They believe that laws that keep them from worshiping as they choose should be ignored. Elders rely on a strict interpretation of Jewish teachings and will dismiss so-called scientific experts with a wave of the hand, often without any consideration whatsoever.
Then we get to the crux of the matter. Orthodox Jewish communities tend to overwhelmingly vote Republican. In our last election, 83% of surveyed Hasidim said that they planned to vote again for the ex-President.
Given the party’s embrace of Ant-Semitism and use of Nazi-era imagery, I find this jaw-dropping. Nonetheless, the whole not wearing a mask thing then becomes somewhat less surprising.
Republican Governor Greg Abbot of Texas announced yesterday that he is lifting his state-wide mask-wearing mandate and is going to allow businesses to reopen at full capacity.
As of now, only 6.57% of Texans have been vaccinated. The only likely result of this decision is going to be a spike in new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
A county Judge named Lina Hidalgo said yesterday, "At best, today's decision is wishful thinking. At worst, it is a cynical attempt to distract Texans from the failures of state oversight of our power grid."
Texas, the Lone Star State, is the one state in the union that, at one point, was its own country. It takes pride in being separate from the rest of us.
In his announcement yesterday, Governor abbot said, "People and businesses don't need the state telling them how to operate."
Both the Jewish community in Williamsburg and the state of Texas share a desire to be left alone by the rest of the country. They are, however, very much a part of the rest of the country and they each derive protections and advantages from their memberships in our collective society.
As dispirit as these two groups are, they share something with all of the rest of us - we are all Americans. As trite as it sounds, we are all in this together.
“America, Love it or Leave it” was a popular bumper sticker in the 1970’s. It was directed against all of the lefties who were protesting our involvement in the Vietnam War and other governmental policies. The idea being, that if you were critical of the government then that meant that you didn’t love the country. Anyone who tried to alter the insular, racist, and unfair policies of various American communities, the people who displayed the sticker thought, should just get out and go somewhere else.
The same stickers could be printed today with Texas and Williamsburg replacing the original America.
I don’t plan on going back to Williamsburg anytime soon. It’s a fascinating area, but watching an entire community reject simple and basic commonsensical measures to protect themselves just because they resent somebody else telling them to do so is tragic.
When I was a kid and being stupid, my mother would say to me, “You are cutting off your nose to spite your face.” In other words, doing something out of spite or revenge causes YOU more harm than it does anyone else.
There are plenty of people in Texas who will continue to wear masks and keep their distance from each other, but there are also plenty who won’t.
I cannot begin to fathom why wearing a mask makes so many people recoil in the way that they do. It is just not that big a deal. Is it a guaranteed solution to the problem? No, of course not, but it HELPS. It may not help you as much as it will help your neighbors, but shouldn’t that be how we live with each other anyway?
The reaction some people have against wearing a mask seems as absurdly out of proportion as our cat’s reaction to getting his claws clipped. It makes his life BETTER!
We finally knuckled down and got at the cat’s claws yesterday. I think that when all was said and done it took just about three minutes. The yowling and spitting and hissing were completely off the charts. The second we were done, he calmly and, with great suffering dignity, made his way to the kitchen to wait for the treat that he knew was coming. He got a whole extra portion of soft food.
I missed one claw on his front left foot which I discovered later on when he curled up on my lap. We waited until just before he was due to get his 2nd round of food at 11 (we call this, his “elevenses”), clipped it quickly and all was well. One yowl and a hiss and we were done, and he could eat.
We have vowed to try and do the stupid clipping every couple of weeks in the hope that he will just get used to it. The whole thing is ridiculous and I’m just glad that it’s over for now.
It is a stunning day out and I am very much looking forward to today’s walk. My journey through Williamsburg made me realize just how unfamiliar I am with Brooklyn, so I want to fix that. A whole new borough to explore - what a gift.
If simply wearing a mask and keeping my distance from other people will help stop this virus from spreading, then I can see no reason whatsoever not to do just that. I have yet to hear an argument against it that doesn’t boil down to’ “but I don’t wanna.”
Well, I don’t really wanna either, but I do wanna get back to our lives and if doing something that simple, makes that happen faster, then do it I will.
I don’t expect a thank you for it any more than I expect the cat to thank me for the fact that he can now walk across the carpet without tripping. None of us should expect to be thanked for looking out for each other. It’s what we agreed to do when we became a part of this community of extremely varied people.
Yes, we were born into it and didn’t consciously agree to look out for each other but that’s what a community does. We are the UNITED State of America, or, at any rate, that’s the idea. Honestly, if that’s too hard to deal with, then maybe going somewhere else isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Loving our individual views of America has sort of led us to where we are now. So, maybe, instead of loving it, what we should be doing is simply respecting America.
Right now, we need to respect each other far more than we need to love each other.
Let the love come later.
For now, some basic simple respect would be enough.