John Minchillo/AP Photo
A body is unloaded from a refrigerated truck at Brooklyn Hospital Center last week.
I don’t know about you, but I’m outraged.
Though I’m not surprised that Trump has failed to stem the greatest crisis of our lifetime, I remain outraged. Outraged that he ignored the severity of the virus for 70 days and gutted the infrastructure that could have prevented this national disaster. He failed to institute social distancing early enough to flatten the curve and sadistically undermines governors at every turn. Trump alone is responsible for our country’s unnecessary descent into mass death. And it feels like no one is stopping him.
During a pandemic, earnestness is a vice, and anger is a virtue—or at least according to essayist Masha Gessen’s rules for surviving autocracy. “Be outraged” clocks in at number four. But the complacency of so many of us, online and at home, posting subtweets, replying all, and sharing nostalgia for public spaces past, is a cause for alarm. I’m fatigued from hearing about exploitative zoology shows on Netflix, sourdough starters, and Zoom-call etiquette. Because of these exceptional circumstances, or in spite of them, we must make noise.
But how, in the face of strict social-distancing statutes, can Americans protest? When the strength of numbers is no longer a possibility, it’s time to turn daily acts of resilience into resistance.
Quarantined comrades in New York and elsewhere across the nation are using the seven o’clock hour to clamor pots and pans in appreciation of frontline workers. They have the right idea. The spectacle serves as an admirable celebration of the bravest among us, but I fear it reinforces a sense of resignation to sheltering-in-place. Those bangs to me sound like a whimper.
We could take a lesson from the activists of Turkey who, during the Gezi Park upheaval of 2013, used the same tactic New Yorkers are deploying, but with a different meaning.
Istanbulis reached for their loudest tools and percussed out windows every evening—in protest of the autocratic Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a country where authorities were targeting and punishing protesters, the solidarity of nightly clamoring served overlapping purposes. It expressed the prevalence of demonstrators while protecting individuals in a sea of noise. The commotion reinforced solidarity even as tear gas swept up activists in public squares. And just as importantly, it was an outlet for an angry nation in a time of clampdown.
Social distancing mustn’t steal from us the capacity to object to Trump’s criminal negligence.
It’s perhaps why, in recent weeks, Brazilians have banged crockery nightly to call for President Jair Bolsonaro’s ouster.
The new policies of social distancing—essential to address the severity of the public-health crisis that Trump himself is solely responsible for—nevertheless present a unique challenge to taking the streets.
I was reminded of Egypt’s stringent laws against public gatherings that General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi implemented in the fall of 2013 after his military overthrow of the country’s first democratically elected president. Convening more than ten people in public was banned, and remains so. The reason may be different but the result is seemingly the same; demonstrations of public anger, of registering dissent, became illegal.
Yet Egyptians have forged work-arounds. The comedian Shadi Abuzeid handed out balloons that turned out to be condoms to police officers in Tahrir Square, humor being the weapon of the weak. Cartoonists too slipped trenchant satire into the heavily censored press. And from time to time, protesters covertly organized and staged demonstrations, like last September while El-Sisi traveled to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, exposing the fragility of his rule.
If Turks, Brazilians, and Egyptians are willing to defy dictators to protest their nefarious incompetence, what are we waiting for? Trump demands our undivided anger.
Those of us who have cars must storm the streets of downtown Washington and lay down horns until Trump hears them. And those of us who don’t might toilet-paper Lafayette Square till the president sees that he has driven us to be a shithole country.
Let’s demand that our public spaces protest for us, too. The Empire State Building shouldn’t use its bright lights to mimic an ambulance’s siren, but to expose the Trump administration’s abject failure.
Walking alone on the empty streets of our cities, we are all suffering the same fate. But social distancing mustn’t steal from us the capacity to object to Trump’s criminal negligence, his devastation of our nation’s health. In fact, it’s a call to urgently find new ways to protest. Against Trump’s high crimes, collective inaction is not an option.
