I think for many Americans NYC is an abstract concept, and for a lot of us, it's difficult to wrap our heads around the reality of such an immense place. Millions of people comprising 5 very different boroughs filled with people representative of nearly every ethnic and cultural identity you can imagine.
I remember in the aftermath of 9-11, it was fascinating to read all of the various accounts in the NYT dealing with the backstories of the people who lost their lives, and the families and friends they left behind. Now once again, the Times is providing that same window into the lives of various victims of the virus, in their own unique way of getting the job done and allowing you to feel a personal collection to strangers you never knew existed...
Here are a couple of stories I found particularly compelling and unbelievably tragic. The first deals with a half dozen random people who happened all to die during the two days that marked the most fatalities the City has seen. The one thing all of these folks had in common (besides the days they died on) was the fact that none were native New Yorkers and all had come from various far-flung corners of the Earth to find a better life in NYC.
The Nurse who seemed to be recovering, only to collapse later that evening...
"Every spring, Yaw A. Asante liked going home to Ghana with a barrel full of gifts. He would begin shopping weeks before, loading the barrel at his Bronx home with cereal and cookies, shoes and clothes.
This year, he was not sure when the pandemic would allow him to travel, but he still shopped. After all, you could not go home empty-handed, not if you had left behind a nursing career in Ghana, as he had, and worked at KFC while studying for the nursing exam in New York, and then, finally, landed a job in the medical surgery unit at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx."
Then following links in that original story I happened on another tragic, but even more frustrating tale of a (by all accounts) nice guy Trump supporter who was lured into a false sense of complacency by what he heard on Fox News. Particularly from a guy like Hannity, who he trusted...
"I have heard about Joe Joyce for as long as I have known his oldest son, Eddie, a neighbor and friend, a lawyer turned novelist who was at odds with his father politically but grateful for his contradictions. Joe Joyce was a Trump supporter who chose selectively from the menu of current Republican ideologies, freely rejecting what didn’t suit him. He didn’t want to hear how much you loved Hillary Clinton, as one regular at his bar put it to me, but he was not going to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged anywhere else.
I remember in the aftermath of 9-11, it was fascinating to read all of the various accounts in the NYT dealing with the backstories of the people who lost their lives, and the families and friends they left behind. Now once again, the Times is providing that same window into the lives of various victims of the virus, in their own unique way of getting the job done and allowing you to feel a personal collection to strangers you never knew existed...
Here are a couple of stories I found particularly compelling and unbelievably tragic. The first deals with a half dozen random people who happened all to die during the two days that marked the most fatalities the City has seen. The one thing all of these folks had in common (besides the days they died on) was the fact that none were native New Yorkers and all had come from various far-flung corners of the Earth to find a better life in NYC.
The Nurse who seemed to be recovering, only to collapse later that evening...
"Every spring, Yaw A. Asante liked going home to Ghana with a barrel full of gifts. He would begin shopping weeks before, loading the barrel at his Bronx home with cereal and cookies, shoes and clothes.
This year, he was not sure when the pandemic would allow him to travel, but he still shopped. After all, you could not go home empty-handed, not if you had left behind a nursing career in Ghana, as he had, and worked at KFC while studying for the nursing exam in New York, and then, finally, landed a job in the medical surgery unit at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx."
Then following links in that original story I happened on another tragic, but even more frustrating tale of a (by all accounts) nice guy Trump supporter who was lured into a false sense of complacency by what he heard on Fox News. Particularly from a guy like Hannity, who he trusted...
"I have heard about Joe Joyce for as long as I have known his oldest son, Eddie, a neighbor and friend, a lawyer turned novelist who was at odds with his father politically but grateful for his contradictions. Joe Joyce was a Trump supporter who chose selectively from the menu of current Republican ideologies, freely rejecting what didn’t suit him. He didn’t want to hear how much you loved Hillary Clinton, as one regular at his bar put it to me, but he was not going to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged anywhere else.
- Last year, Vice Media went to JJ Bubbles and other bars in Bay Ridge to talk to supporters of the current president and landed on some of these ambiguities, discovering for instance the guy who admired Pete Buttigieg as much as he loved Donald Trump. Where these kinds of voters align is not in the right’s hatred of the marginalized but in its distrust of the news. If the “liberal” media was telling us that a plague was coming and that it would be devastating, why should anyone believe it? Joe Joyce had his skepticism"...
