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Who You Insult When You Call This a ‘Wasted’ Year
Many Americans have long had limited opportunities for recreation. Think of them before you complain.
Hi, it’s me, your Connecticut friend who loves the foliage, hates the ticks, is from Brooklyn but from from Ecuador. I live in a predominantly upper-middle-class white neighborhood in New Haven, a transitory town with a rotating door of Yale graduate students. Because of Yale’s Covid-19 rules regarding campus living this year, there are some undergraduates podding together in houses in the neighborhood, so when I leave my attic apartment to walk my dog, it’s very, very Yale.
I’ve been living in New Haven some 10 years, and I’m still struck, as a city kid, by how green it is. How many trees. For the past 10 months, and especially recently, I am now struck by the number of undergrads and graduate students who are not masked. And when I escape them, find refuge in my home, and look on social, I can’t escape seeing able-bodied American citizens talk about how 2020 was a “wasted” year of life or planning the first thing they’ll do when they’re vaccinated, which tends to involve vacations and parties.
A life. What makes up a life. Jonathan Larson, who wrote Rent, was very clear that when your life is at risk and mainstream society considers your death a vulgarity, little things make up life, intimate moments make up a life. I saw Rent in New York when I was around 14, and it made sense to me, because I too had a secret, I too was treated like an animal, and I too felt like I was on borrowed time. At the time, I was undocumented.
My parents have spent 30 years in this country doing very little other than going to work, coming home, showering, and falling asleep in front of the television or with a Bible in their hands. Is that 30 years lost in their lives? How many of their years have they spent alive according to a calculation that measures life by metrics that center capitalism and experiences we feel we are owed? Have undocumented immigrants or people who live paycheck to paycheck ever lived? If the type of Americans who could comfortably work from home during this pandemic without worrying about food or evictions and could afford therapy and medications consider us not-alive, then it makes sense that…
