300,000

As of today, a little more than 100 times the number of people who died on 9/11 have succumbed to COVID. That fact made me recall the days and weeks following 9/11. I knew then that the spirit of compassion and camaraderie that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the attack couldn't last, but never imagined that 20 years later, when hundreds of thousands were dying, that this nation could politicize so many deaths. While it may not have lasted, there was so much overwhelming compassion for those who died in that single terrible day, from every corner of the world. A catastrophe in New York City was seen as a catastrophe for everyone – not as, oh, those are just liberal New Yorkers, so who cares. It is very hard to reconcile that with the dearth of compassion today at 100 times that number of deaths, so many of whom would still be here with their loved ones had things been handled differently, compassionately, without turning common sense precautions into a political litmus test.

I vividly remember attending a meeting of the MTA Board some time after 9/11, wearing a "No War on Iraq" button in my suit lapel, the sight of which generated frosty looks from various members (mostly Republican) of the then MTA leadership as they passed by me in the hallway as the meeting ended. My thinking then, as now, was that it was absurd for America to rush out to bomb the shit out of hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. It would not bring back those who died such horrifying deaths. It would not prevent another attack. Better instead, to rely on the goodwill generated by the attacks to rally our allies to a concerted effort to track down the perpetrators of the attack, then to lose that goodwill by, as Americans tend to do, shooting first and asking questions later.

But that clearly wasn’t going to be. Instead, we almost immediately wasted the goodwill generated by the attacks. Why? Because Americans were desperate to act, even if intemperately, just to do something – and do something big. Instead of a carefully calibrated response, we proceeded to throw trillions of dollars at the problem, with often the opposite results of what we intended (no one escapes from the law of unintended consequences).

And today? When 100 times that number are dead with the same number as died on 9/11 dying every single day - where is our compassion? Why are we not coming together as a country, blue or red forgotten, and rushing to fix it? With the exception of Operation Warp Speed, which seems to have been a great success and a reason for hope, we are ignoring so much more that needs to be done to help people who are dying right now, people who are out of work, people who will lose their homes, people who are suffering. Instead of rallying to combat an on-going disaster, we are at one another’s throats, Congress is more hapless and ineffective than ever, and the current resident of the White House, with the support of nearly his entire party, is more focused on overturning the results of the election because it didn’t go his way than in saving lives.

I only hope that twenty years from now, if I live that long, I will look back on this moment in time as an aberration because after all this, America decided to get its collective acts together. The alternative, I fear, is that we become unimaginably worse. A little, selfish people, who cannot act in our own, collective, best interests.