Opening Boxes from 2019 | Frontpage Mag--Naomi Wolf:
"When, in Fall of 2019, I moved out of what had been my home in the West Village, I thought I was simply moving from one place to another. I was excited to build a home again, this time in the South Bronx.Brian and I ultimately lived in the South Bronx for only four months — until March 11 2020, when we looked at one another and realized we had to get into his SUV and keep driving North. As I described in my book The Bodies of Others, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that Broadway was closing — just like that, a CCP-style state fiat, not an American-style individuals-dealing-with-an-emergency announcement — we both realized that bad things were coming, though whether natural or political we could not yet tell.
So twenty years of my possessions had stayed for the past two and a half years in a storage unit. ...
I was opening boxes now that were not just from another place — as is usual when you move; not just from another time; but I was opening boxes that were from literally another world. I don’t know that such a thing has happened in quite this way in history before.
Some items memorialized normal losses and change. Others, though, revealed that long-revered institutions had lost all morality and authority.
Where was that society now? Artists, filmmakers, journalists — all of the people who are supposed to say No to discrimination, No to tyranny — they had scattered, had cowered, had complied. They had groveled.
The same people who had been the avant garde of a great city, had, as I have written elsewhere, gone right along with a society in which a person such as I am, cannot enter a building.
And I had fed those people. I topped up their drinks with my affordable red wines.
I had welcomed them into my home.
I had supported their careers. I had fostered connections on their behalf. I had blurbed their books, had promoted their gallery openings, because — because we were allies, right? We were intellectuals. We were artists. We were even activists.
And yet these people — these same people — had complied — eagerly! With zero resistance! Immediately! With a regime that is appearing day by day to be about as bad in some ways as that of Marshal Philippe Petain’s in Vichy France.
Unthinkable now that I had treated them once as colleagues, as friends.
I had been made into a nonperson, overnight. ...
The old world I left behind, and that left me behind, is not a post-COVID world.
It is a post-truth world, a post-institutional world.
The institutions that supported the world that existed when these 2019 boxes were packed, have all collapsed; in a welter of corruption, in an abandonment of public mission and public trust. I look at them now the way Persephone looked backward without regret at Hades.
I work and party now with people who love their country and tell the truth. The people with whom I spend time now are this era’s versions of Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Phyllis Wheatley and Ben Franklin. I don’t know how these folks vote. I don’t know that they know how I vote. I don’t care. I know that they are sterling human beings, because they are willing to protect the cherished ideals of this beautiful experiment, our native land.
Life experiences don’t unite these people with whom I hang out now; social status does not unite them — they come from all walks of life, from every “class”, and they pay little or no attention to status or class markers. Politics don’t unite these people. What unites them in my view is the excellence of their characters, and their fierce commitment to liberty; to the ideals of this nation.
Oddly, living now in the purple-to-red rural America that my former “people,” the blue-state elites, are conditioned to view with suspicion and distrust, I also have more personal freedom than I did as a member of the most privileged class. The most privileged class does not have the greatest privilege of all, that of personal liberty: it is a class that is continually anxious and status-insecure, its members often scanning the room for a more important conversation, its collective mind continually exerting subtle control, both socially and professionally, over other members of the “tribe.”
My former elite network paid lip service to “diversity”; but there was a deadening sameness and conformity in our demographics, and that conformity also policed our world views, our voting patterns, even our kids’ schools and our travel destinations.
In contrast, people here in deep purple-red country, the ones whom we know anyway, give each other the assumed permission to differ, to have uncensored opinions, to be free. ...
I spend time with people who love their communities, speak out for their actual brothers and sisters, meaning humanity; risk themselves to save the lives of strangers; and care about actual fact-based journalism, actual science-based medicine, actual science-based science.
These days I chat online with people who tell me, unfashionably but beautifully, they are praying for me. In spite of fighting an apocalypse every day, how can I help but be so much happier now?" .......
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