Glorious Fourth, Inglorious Fourth —

Remembering the Spirit of ’76 in 2020

This 4th of July finds me at my parents’ house, in Northern Virginia, instead of in my own apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. In the first week of June, one week before New York City’s COVID-19 lockdown was to ease, my neighborhood was besieged by protests over the murder of George Floyd — an impassioned civic response to the institutionalized racism that deforms our nation; a second pandemic.

I live on a police block in New York not far from Union Square, and both ends of my street were barricaded to protect the precinct. Storefronts on the surrounding avenues were smashed and helicopters hovered overhead for days, buzzing like leaden wasps. Video footage of the unrest in my neighborhood played on national news that first Monday in June; and when my 78-year-old father saw it in Virginia, he drove five hours straight to New York City, extracted me and my cat from Manhattan, and drove us straight back to the Shenandoah Valley. For months, as the Coronavirus held New York City hostage, he and my mother had urged me to come stay with them for a while — I could work remotely from Virginia as easily as from New York, they said — but I’d refused, fearing I might unwittingly infect them and their region with COVID-19. But on June 2nd, he overrode my objections.