One year ago Americans learned that everything was about to change.
 | By Max Strasser |
The email from work saying your office would be closed starting tomorrow; the empty shelves in the toilet paper aisle of your local grocery store; the quiet feeling of dread as you noticed more and more people on the subway wearing masks. What was the moment you realized that the coronavirus pandemic would change your life? |
My colleagues in Opinion recently asked readers to tell us about their personal memories of that moment. Thousands of people wrote in. We've published about 30 of them today, as part of a package of articles marking the one-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic in the United States. Reading them now is chilling: It throws me, immediately and viscerally, back into the frightening feelings of one year ago. |
These snapshots do something else, too. They remind me of how in those earliest days, the pandemic wasn't just terrifying, it was also unifying. "The virus doesn't discriminate," we were told as the likes of Tom Hanks and Boris Johnson got sick. Flattening the curve — remember when you first learned that phrase? — would be the work of all of us. We were all in this thing together. |
A year later, the picture is more complicated. Yes, we have all suffered and sacrificed. Yes, there is much that we all miss from life before March 2020. The poet Yolanda Wisher, for one, pines for the exhilarating human connection of prepandemic nightclubs. Leslie Jamison might, too. "We all miss forms of closeness made perilous by the pandemic," she writes in her essay about the pandemic, nostalgia and the stories we tell ourselves about how much or how little we share of this experience. But she is quick to add that over the past year "I've grown increasingly distrustful of my own impulses toward projection and identification — have tried to stop assuming I know what the pandemic has been like for other people, that I can understand what they've lost." |
Some people have lost more than others. If you remain unconvinced, take a look at these charts from my colleague Yaryna Serkez: They painfully visualize how uneven the burden of this pandemic has been when it comes to unemployment, education and much else. If you really want to understand how much more some people have given of themselves, read Jennifer Murphy's essay about being an E.M.T. in New York over the past year. Meanwhile, Luke Winkie has some thoughts on what New York should do with the people who abandoned the city for the comfort of their country homes. (A hint: The Upper East Side will look pretty different next year if Luke gets his way.) |
But there may be reasons to be hopeful. Amid the confusion and chaos of last spring, hints of something better emerged: The reporter Rachel M. Cohen talked to dozens of advocates, activists and policymakers who told her about policy initiatives, for example to release prisoners or protect tenants, which were only made possible because of the pandemic; Zachary D. Carter, an economics journalist, writes about how the past year has taught America the role of the economy in society; and Maira Khwaja, Trina Reynolds-Tyler, Dominique James and Hannah Nyhart, who are activists in Chicago, explain how mutual aid has helped build the foundations for a new, community-based politics. |
It will be a long time until we can fully reflect on what kind of tipping point March 2020 was for America. But this March, we have a chance to reflect on how we felt one year ago, to try to recapture a bit of that "all in it together" spirit. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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