Every night at 7 PM in New York City people cheer to thank the essential workers who are on the ground caring for COVID-19 patients and keeping the city going.
Quickly, exponentially, more people caught on to the meaning of the cheer and it became louder and increasingly synchronized - with more diverse expressions like car horns and pots or pans. It was the most heartbreakingly human thing: terrible, beautiful, spontaneous, loving - all of it. It reminded me of the Whos down in Whoville when they learn that the Grinch stole Christmas, but they sing anyway. Many times the sound of sirens threatened to dampen the cheer’s rolling crescendo and birds chirped their hearts out in interspecific unison.
The cheer has gone on for half of the month of March, all of April and now it is May 25th. In the beginning of April the deaths reached a peak here. On April 9th, 800 deaths were recorded in New York City alone. (see 7 PM video below from that day)
Data was king as the world learned together about epidemic curves and exponential growth. Home schooling, at its most unfortunate. Together, we checked the curve rising exponentially each day, the line looking more horrifyingly vertical. And after the mercifully narrow peak, the curve came down on the other side. But it did not fall at the same rate that it rose. Of course it didn’t. But this is something that did not occur to me back in March. It fell more slowly than it rose. The graph of new deaths per day in New York City looks more like a rollercoaster than it does a bell. It is asymmetrical.
I wonder about the 7 PM cheer data too, was it louder at the peak? Is it louder in those neighborhoods most impacted by the virus? What are the varieties of sounds coming from different neighborhoods? I hope a resourceful nerd out there has recorded these data in a systematic way. Many articles have been written, like this one, some people have praised the ritual of the cheer, while others have derided it as meaningless. But it went on.
Night after night I looked forward to it because it helped me feel like I was saying thank you and marked the passing of time in a joyous way. It also taught me about my neighborhood through a new kind of metric of its humanity, its collective voice of resilience echoing off the built environment we call home. I shared videos of the cheer with family and friends. One evening, I perched my laptop out the window so friends on zoom could hear. I ended up seeing a Red-tailed hawk circling above during the cheer which seemed all the more chaotic. My faraway friends couldn’t really hear it, or see it, but they humored me anyway.
But as the pandemic wore on, I became tired of the cheer and on certain nights, I kept my window closed. What was it doing anyway? How did the essential workers actually feel about it? People were dying, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it - and with my one wild and precious life - I was restless and bored. Like a brat in a cage. I was a part of something, but also not a part of anything anymore.
I am fine, really. But some days are irrationally up and others are irrationally down. On the up days I think maybe the cheer should go on forever, because a daily ritual of gratitude and togetherness in this crazy city just sounds emotionally nourishing. But then, that seems more about the clapper than those that are being clapped for. Some think it’s time for the cheer to stop or change, and perhaps become a yearly ritual to remember those who have died.
People who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918 were not formally memorialized because World War I was the priority of politicians of the time. During the time the flu raged, politicians deliberately did not mention it because they didn’t want their country to appear vulnerable. And when it was over, the average person who needed to keep living wanted to forget, so they did.
But for those still working tirelessly to save lives, for those who didn’t make it down the other side, and because epidemiologically, it isn’t over yet: I am going to cheer again tonight, but I will not be opening a window - I am going outside.
#ClapBecauseWeCare #MemorialDay
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