Violent crime is up in New York, but it is up all over America and in areas where criminal justice reform is a third-rail shunned phrase. Don’t we get it? Don’t we see?
COVID-19 has knocked the living hell out of us. It has caused shutdowns, bankruptcies and business failures, isolation, unemployment, work and school from home, millions of early retirements, the “Great Resignation” with millions quitting their jobs, supply chain disruptions causing shortages and inflation, an orgy of anti-government uber-individualism, hundreds of thousands of “excess” annual deaths and thousands suffering long-term disabilities.
In 2021, we saw a 1.5 year drop in our life expectancy. That is huge, and it wasn’t just from COVID-19. It may sink even further when 2022 statistics are released. There were 101,260 drug overdose deaths in 2021. Suicide was the second leading cause of death in people ages 10 to 34. Deaths from car accidents, up shockingly in 2020 with so few people on the roads, rose another 12 percent in 2021. And murder and gun violence (both fatal and nonfatal) are up, as are domestic violence cases.
It is as if a large portion of American society has thrown in the towel and is wallowing in a despairing suicidal death wish.
But it goes even beyond that.
Young people don’t want to get married; they don’t want to have babies. The eradicating specter of global warming and rising seas, evident in the West’s fires, the collapsing Florida high rises, the Kentucky winter tornadoes, and “100-year” floods becoming the annual norm frightens them. Coupled with the increasing violent American political divide, domestic terrorism, and the shrill rhetoric of hundreds of thousands of politicians and media hate-savants, many young people are opting not to bring children into such a world.
What to do?
There are some things out of our hands. What COVID has in store for us by way of decline, new variants and new surges is not known. We don’t know how far Vladimir Putin and his thugocracy will go in Ukraine and what impact the West’s response might have on energy prices, the world economy, and the pale horse of Death.
But all is not bleak. Spring arrives just as mask wearing is petering out. Our portions of light and sun and human contact are about to greatly expand. Let’s curb the Meta and virtual for a time, and go real for at least the spring and summer. Let’s grow things, even it is only a house plant. Let’s double the number of urban community gardens. Let’s get our hands dirty with life-generating soil.
Let’s see the coming opportunities, rather than dwelling solely on the problems. Locally we are clearing out some long-term symbolic city blood clots — the Tobin First Prize complex and Central Warehouse.
I have a fantasy of Central Warehouse turning into vertical green space with marijuana farming and vertical produce farming for restaurants taking up most of the floors. The first and second floors would house the Metropolitan Marijuana Mart, a restaurant called Munchies, a brew pub that produces at least a few special beers infused with marijuana (I’ve sampled such beer in brandy snifters at a beer pub in Vilnius, Lithuania, years ago), and possibly a catering facility and produce store rounding things out.
All this would be a fairly cheap retrofit, but if we want to think big, the roof could be covered with an actual garden which, if it had a clear retractable dome, could be a spectacular “June in January” wedding venue.
In the Times Union, you have seen recent stories on huge increases in actual and likely jobs from Plug Power, GlobalFoundries, Amazon, Regeneron, the Port of Albany windmill facilities and the Albany NanoTech Complex. We have some good problems facing us, and we best get serious about new transportation and housing projects. And we should take inspiration from the new Sheridan Hollow initiative.
The nation has been drunk on an orgy of individualism, forgetting that the Constitution begins with “We” not “I,” and that we seek a “more perfect union,” not separation and division. An old soldier, Dwight David Eisenhower, in his book “Crusade in Europe,” noted that America had gotten similarly lost prior to World War II: “It seems to me that constant stressing of the individual rights and privileges of American citizenship had overshadowed the equally important truth that such individualism can be sustained only so long as the citizen accepts his full responsibility for the welfare of the nation that protects him in the exercise of these rights.”
Let’s face the spring and future opportunities with a new sense of hope and community, and let’s adopt the soldier’s sacred commitment to leave no one behind on the battlefield.
Karl Felsen of Guilderland is a retired public relations executive in government and the financial industry.