Megan markly12/18/2023 “Don’t worry, somebody on that corner will ask her if she’s OK.” “We love in the city, we cry in the street, our emotions and stories there for anybody to see,” I remember him telling me. He explained that New Yorkers live out their personal lives in public spaces. At the time, the city was new to me, and I asked the driver if we should stop to see if the woman needed help. She was standing on the sidewalk, living out a private moment very publicly. I looked out the window and saw a woman on her phone in a flood of tears. When I was in my late teens, I sat in the back of a taxi zipping through the busyness and bustle of Manhattan. That polarization, coupled with the social isolation required to fight this pandemic, has left us feeling more alone than ever. We are at odds over the value of compromise. We are at odds over whether an election has been won or lost. We are at odds over whether science is real. We aren’t just fighting over our opinions of facts we are polarized over whether the fact is, in fact, a fact. On top of all of this, it seems we no longer agree on what is true. In places where there was once community, there is now division. ![]() George Floyd leaves a convenience store, not realizing he will take his last breath under the weight of someone’s knee, and in his final moments, calls out for his mom. He tests positive for the coronavirus and within weeks, he - like hundreds of thousands of others - has died.Ī young woman named Breonna Taylor goes to sleep, just as she’s done every night before, but she doesn’t live to see the morning because a police raid turns horribly wrong. A man wakes feeling fine, maybe a little sluggish, but nothing out of the ordinary. We’ve heard all the stories: A woman starts her day, as normal as any other, but then receives a call that she’s lost her elderly mother to Covid-19. Loss and pain have plagued every one of us in 2020, in moments both fraught and debilitating. ![]() Sitting in a hospital bed, watching my husband’s heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine, I realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, “Are you OK?”Īre we? This year has brought so many of us to our breaking points.
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