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The day after Memorial Day I visited a strange city that looked exactly like Manhattan except there were fewer people outside and most of them were wearing masks. The same buildings were there, or buildings that looked like the buildings of Manhattan, but the stores were closed. Maybe it was a movie set, where they could film stories set in Manhattan, but it wasn’t Manhattan, it was a strange city.

It took me thirty minutes to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge to Delancey, avoiding people, maintaining social distance, suspicious of the unmasked. I had an appointment to get a vaccination for pneumonia. Full disclosure: I am a pro-vaxer and I wear a mask and I tend to think Dr. Fauci has a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about and that he is not behind a plot to overthrow America by injecting microchips in all of us. 

The doctor’s office is on 8th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues at a Mount Sinai facility. It took about an hour and twenty minutes to walk there. The doors are locked and there is a note to ring the doorbell. Inside, someone has a box of masks. She says I can put one on over the one I’m already wearing, one I made from a T shirt. I didn’t see any other patients. A nurse gives me the shot and then he draws blood for the lipid panel and gives me a hearing test and a vision test. This was the most physical human contact I’ve had in two months. My doctor stops by. We had a tele-visit last week and had only met in person once before and now we are both wearing masks. I can see by her eyes that she was smiling under hers.

In Brooklyn, Manhattan is referred to as “the City” by old timers. Brooklyn is part of New York City, but Manhattan is “the City” you go to for work or to visit a museum or to go to a concert or bookstores or to just walk around looking at people and things and to be part of the City, to be a New Yorker. This trip to the City wasn’t like that. I had to go there to get this shot and do these other things the doctor needed that we couldn’t do in a tele-visit. I didn’t go to the Strand and I couldn’t eat breakfast at Cosy’s and I didn’t sit in Washington Square Park and write in my notebook.

After my vaccination I went to the West 4th Street subway station, took the latex gloves out of my pocket, put them on, swiped my Metrocard, and got on an M train. The car was clean and there were two other passengers. This Manhattan isn’t the City at all, it is a dream of the City, a memory, a souvenir of the City I used to walk to, a city now far, far away, maybe in the future.

That was the day after Memorial Day. On Memorial Day George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and by Tuesday the videos began to circulate. Now the cities are on fire. We (white people) need to examine ourselves and stop telling ourselves we aren’t racists. The virus is still disproportionately killing people of color. Most essential workers are people of color. I don’t know what to say to my black friends, let alone to black people I don’t even know. I go to book groups about white fragility and anti-racism, but I still don’t know how to be anti-racist. I have no doubt that the racist power structure will come to an end, but it won’t come soon enough. It should’ve ended 400 years ago.

Our system is still programmed for white supremacy. We (white people) are still the privileged race in this racist system. That system is coming down one way or another. The president is well aware that there is a multitude who would be happy to see his White House go up in flames right now, and there are more than enough people to make it happen. So he hid in his bunker and threatened us with “vicious dogs” and “horrible weapons.”

This City, not just New York City, but the American City, has always already been a foreign city. We were already strangers here. We were already trying to find our way to our home, but there is no Normal to return to. I believe there is a way to a City of Peace and we need to follow that way. The City of Peace is within us, among us, to the extent that it is possible to build community and take care of each other and abolish the system of estrangement that puts us against each other.

We are walking through a dark wilderness now that could become a forest fire and we need to summon all wisdom and courage to get out of here alive. Divine human grace, the clear light of reality, can guide our path, if we let it be so. So I believe.