I can only remember a handful of jokes in sufficient detail
to get a laugh. (Did you hear the one about the photon checking into a hotel?) One
of my favorites is about a boy who didn’t speak. The parents were so excited to
welcome their beautiful baby boy, and as he grew he met or exceeded every
measurement—height, weight, responsiveness,--except for speech. Don’t worry,
said the doctor, boys don’t speak as early as girls. The boy entered
kindergarten, then first grade, then second, still silent. Don’t worry, said
the teachers, he’s managing fine. He did well in school, was cheerful, and
beloved by his more loquacious classmates, so by and by the parents accepted
him as he was. Then one morning, just weeks before he was to leave for college,
he said, “Mom, the toast is burning.” His parents looked at him in astonishment—a
miracle! He speaks! “Son,” they said almost in unison, “all this time you haven’t
said a word. Why now?” “Until now,” he answered, “everything was fine.”
Until now, everything was fine. We didn’t need to speak up. Now
we ask when can we get back to normal? We ask because until now everything was
fine. When can I get my hair cut? Eat at a restaurant? Go to a baseball game? Take
public transportation? Get my nails done? Hang out on the stoop with my friends?
Go bird-watching in the park? Walk down the street without being shot? Oh, sorry…This
was supposed to be about Covid-19 and, you know, getting back to normal. Until that happened, everything was fine. Now
it’s burning.
In Rebel Cities: from
the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, David Harvey writes about
the successive spasmodic expansions and narrowing of access to the benefits—spatial,
political, social, cultural, and economic—of the city throughout history. He
cautions, though, that we not romanticize some ideal state when there was such
a thing as an a priori “city” independent
of the heterogeneous actors who continually shape it. When we repeat the wish to
get “back to normal” we fall into that trap—that somehow, until now, everything
was fine, that there was a “normal.” When we envision that “normal” city as a
sequence of leisure spaces designed for consumption by people of means, when we
design public spaces without access to water, seating, and restrooms to anyone
but paying customers, when we estheticize one population and criminalize
others, when we fail to maintain public infrastructure, when we mistake our own
experience for a universal one, we expose the limits of the lenses through
which we have been looking. It was easy to stay silent as long as everything
seemed fine to me.
The city, such as it is, is under constant construction—literal,
physical, social, and cultural construction. It is assembled by each of its
inhabitants—each of them—and the
right to that city belongs to all. We shouldn’t be looking to getting back to normal but to making a better normal: an equitable, diverse, green,
healthy city to which we are all entitled. Everything wasn't fine.
