Seraphic Strangers

Two days before the election was called, I called the election. I listened to the playlist that had been brewing in my head for four years, danced in the streets by myself, had a moment of doubt by the Hudson River, and returned home feeling not quite satisfied.

The first thing I heard on Saturday, November 7th was a smattering of applause outside my Manhattan window. At first I thought it was something else to be forgotten and I rolled over in my sleep. Then Alex, my flatmate, came in playing Frank Sinatra’s unapologetic anthem from her phone: “Theme From New York, New York.” The race had been called and at that first moment I was unaffected, but agreed to go out at Alex’s urging. After getting dressed and coffeed, we went out to soak in the occasion. Even from the stoop in that late morning heat, the streets felt bubbly with the rising feelings of release. The music of people banging pots and pans was enough to turn a political agnostic into a last-second Biden devotee. 

The first person we saw was a man who was confused by the ruckus. We explained to him that the race was over and he asked if it was official. He supported Trump. I had no clue what to tell him. I told him that the results were beyond doubt and to please take care of himself, before skipping down the street like I had just discovered ice.

 It was somewhere around noon when we reached Sheridan Square. This was where the first hint of a party and the resulting COVID-19 indifference revealed itself. Seeming strangers shared wine arm in arm on a park bench. There was a man dressed in cutoff denim shorts, a white tank top, and aviator sunglasses, carrying a tote bag and shooting off confetti at every passing car. He would reach into his bag to pull out popper after popper as cars promenaded by with hands hanging out of windows. USPS trucks blared their horns and were applauded like they had just scored the winning run in the World Series. At this moment, as the day was just starting to take a hold of us, but before it fully held us in its grasp, there was an understanding that in some not-so-distant places, people were mourning. Frankly, we didn’t care. 

The most mild celebrations that day would have been considered outrageous at any other time during the pandemic: a window designer canceling work for the day to enjoy Prospect Park, a cyclist sacrilegiously ending a ritualistic ride mid-workout to race back to the city, Senator Chuck Schumer leaving his office to stop by Barclays Center to enjoy the festivities. Every server was called in from their lives so that restaurants could keep up with the carousing. 

My uncle gleefully sprayed champagne at people eating their brunch and then immersed himself in an hours-long lunch with family and friends where we toasted the sky, the sun, the fact that Stoke City F.C. won today, doctors and nurses, and talked for unrushed hours, where different groups of people sitting around tables burst into applause again and again, causing the street to erupt as if the news just broke. The whole day, the city was a cacophony of noise ranging from waves of applause and bellowing horns to masses of people attempting to sing “Empire State of Mind.”

 The day definitely had elements of a self-celebration, as if New York City swung the election at the last possible moment and we were the heroes of the day. But the victory had nothing to do with us; it had everything to do with the exhaustive work done by Black and Brown organizers across the country. No one was under the pretense that Joe Biden would save us. Even in the midst of celebration, we were all keenly aware that only the people around us might save each other. 

Every passing stranger was seraphic for the day. The sense of community with people who yesterday were random strangers and tomorrow would be once more, is something I wish upon everyone at least once in their life. Cars cutting off pedestrians were forgiven and forgotten without a second glance, every wave of noise was a call and response asking if we would be okay, always answered in the affirmative. Everyone was thanking the bus drivers, the delivery people, the street sweepers, each other. Chants oscillated from “U-S-A” to “U-S-P-S” back to “U-S-A” and back again to “U-S-P-S” and then faded into the background as people re-remembered the reason for their revelry. There was not a universal moment when the city’s rising feelings of release were uncorked, but somewhere between the outstretched arms of strangers fist-bumping in the streets, the breaks between the words in chants of—“FUCK TRUMP!”—“WE JUST DID!!” and nightfall, the city had combusted.

Jazz in the streets. DJs on balconies. Violins and flutes that made every step feel like a pirouette forward. Open brownstone doors and an overserved actor inviting anyone from the street inside for a drink or five. It was easy to find quiet streets but just as easy to stumble into a party. It was the type of day where you might see a DJ playing on a second-floor balcony and you would start dancing and within five minutes, there would be fifty people in the street all dancing alongside you. 

It would get to the point where you might be uncountable miles from sobriety and lie down on someone’s car, and the owner would glance at you and then burst out laughing and lie down on the car next to you and you would hug each other with the relief that the sky had not started to fall. 

Or your friends would be leaving and so you would go outside to catch a breath of fresh air and not thirty feet away, there they are with dozens of other people packed into an intersection where cobbled streets meet pavements and everyone is dancing to a group of musicians you think you recognize from the most scattered places—Jimmy the drummer from Washington Square and is that Adam from KGB bar? And they are playing Bon Jovi of all things and for a moment everyone is believing and everything is only happening because Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania grew beyond the mandatory recount threshold and all of that feels five thousand miles away because in front of you beautiful strangers are staggering to the music, and you are feeling sublime as heels get stuck in the gaps between cobblestones and glide across concrete. And the world is so vividly alive with the sense of possibility and you swear up and down that you are sober and only life-drunk and it is the piano that has been drinking.

At some point in the evening, Kamala Harris was going to speak. We found a laptop, a website, and put the speech on but nobody gave a damn what she or Joe Biden was going to say. Alex put it best, saying: “Who cares what they say? No matter what they say it’s fucking brilliant!” None of us caught a word of Harris’ or Biden’s speeches, but we raved about their poetry and sharpness and the intelligence of their vision. They were the best two speeches I never heard in my life. 

With the world coming and going, people lost and found, and one last taste of summer sweat and urine lingering in the air, we danced well into the morning before we returned to find Washington Square covered with what remained of NYC’s spontaneous race to drink itself dry: mountains upon mountains of trash lay next to overfilled garbage cans where we only slept after one final waltz through the village exhaling: exalted and exhausted. Even the streetlights were waning because they too had been up celebrating and needed their rest.

The next morning, there was just about enough jubilation lingering to soften the accusatory glares traded between pedestrians and drivers into glances filled with good-humored resignation.  

To be entirely clear: my actions that day were plainly irresponsible from a COVID perspective. I put myself and others at risk, as did everyone involved in these reckless mass gatherings. Despite knowing that there is a tangible possibility that others are suffering as a result of my actions, I still cannot completely cast the memory of the day aside. It’s the type of memory that you bring back when it’s been raining for a week and the last hints of possibility have seemingly all vanished, and you have just as many messages with or without do not disturb turned on and each moment of each day trudges on—and with the recollection, the promise of the unknown tugs you toward the next moment.

And so we wait once more for the next moment to come.

Faucet Theory: “After the passing of irresistible music you must make do with the dripping of the faucet.” -Jim Harrison. 

Drip. 

            Drip.

                         Drip.

In This House We Believe

I’ve been going on little walks since freshman year. I might be gone for 10 minutes or an hour because I’m never actually going anywhere. I’ll wander aimlessly through the Old North End listening to half a podcast, turning back towards campus when I get hungry or bored. My little walks have been a comfort, a coping mechanism, a form of escape that I have always clung to. My dependency has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The landscape hasn’t changed much in the past couple of years, except for this fall when yard signs suddenly became prolific. 

Make America Great Again signs, which feel old. Biden signs. Biden flags, which feel new. Yards with signs imploring passersby to vote one way or another on a state proposition, signs explaining local propositions. Lawns littered with signs for down-ballot candidates, sometimes including every single seat up for election, right down to county commissioner. I’m a senior Political Science major, and I’m still not quite sure what they do and why we vote for them. 

There are signs that emphasize the slog this year has been: Fauci 2020, Any Functioning Adult for 2020, Nobody, Everybody Sucks, We’re Screwed 2020. These I find flippant, absurd. Plenty of people thought Grab Him by the Ballot was clever enough to earn a place on their lawns. There’s a couple of Byedon signs — a riff on the name Biden that is so much of a stretch I had to say it aloud a few times to figure out what it means.

One enormous house on a corner, with a fence so tall it would obstruct any potential yard signage, flies a Trump flag from a twenty-foot pole. 

Driving home from King Soopers, I saw a slew of anti-abortion signs along a stretch of busy road that backed into brush. Only when I tried to figure out how I could take them down (Sprinting across the street during a lull in traffic? Pulled over with hazards on? In the middle of the night?) did I realize how much effort it must have been to put them there in the first place.

Yard signs advertising political candidates have been around since the 1800s — John Quincy Adams was the first presidential candidate to use them for an election. They boost name recognition and can be a worthwhile fundraising tool but aren’t all that effective at swaying results. A 2015 study found that yard signs could (at most) give candidates a 1.7 percentage point boost. In qualitative terms: not a very big one. In a presidential election, it’s highly unlikely that a yard sign (clever, or not, or trying to be) would swing an observant pedestrian’s vote. But with an election as fraught as 2020’s, it’s not surprising that folks are taking to their lawns. What is surprising is the variety of signs I saw walking around the Old North End.  

Most neighborhoods in cities tend to be politically segregated. Much of this has to do with forced racial segregation, the product of decades of racist housing policies. But this alone cannot account for partisanship along neighborhood lines: there is evidence that people’s lifestyle preferences — such as employment, school choice, and recreation — affect where people choose, if they have a choice, to live. 

I grew up in Washington, D.C., a city that overwhelmingly fits these trends. Biden easily won the city’s three (granted, measly and inconsequential) electoral votes by 92%. I knew approximately zero vocal Republicans growing up, but that’s not to say that they didn’t exist. The point is, if you are conservative in D.C., you likely aren’t going to advertise it. Certainly not on your front lawn. 

D.C. is also one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country. Since 2000, more than 20,000 people have been forced to move from their neighborhoods due to rising property taxes and rent. Public funds have been poured into “revitalization” efforts, mostly commercial and residential real estate developments, across the city. At the same time, little has been done to address the high rates of displacement, a direct result of these initiatives. The city government, cozy with developers, continues to fail to provide adequate and affordable housing for many of D.C.’s long term residents.  

The neighborhood I grew up in has been majority white for decades, ever since the federal government displaced the then-integrated community to redevelop the land in 1926, less than a hundred years ago. 

Exclusionary housing policies have endured. In 2017, a city proposal to build transitional housing in the area was met with significant backlash. The building was eventually opened in 2020, after negotiation with existing community members placed increasing restrictions on the structure and its residents. 

This isn’t unique to D.C.; systemic housing inequality has shaped how and where people live across the country since its founding. Today this is often fueled by a largely white, wealthy antagonism towards affordable housing. And while the majority of city-dwellers tend to be liberal, the “Not In My Backyard” phenomenon persists. 

In every way, my neighborhood in D.C. is visibly more uniform than the Old North End. Each street is dizzyingly similar, each house a red brick colonial, most yards featuring signs with liberal affirmations that are some spin on the same message: All Are Welcome Here.

Given the history of the neighborhood and its current demographics, I find these signs to be one of  the laziest statements a person could make. You don’t need a lot of time or energy, you just kind of stick it where you want. As a form of performative allyship, it’s about as impermanent as you can get. Signs leave no lasting trace: a manicured lawn will be just as manicured when the signs have been removed. At least bumper stickers show more resolve — then you have to contend with scratched paint. 

Even when signs have been stuck in the ground, they don’t really seem to mean anything. Sure, you can say anything. Yard signs now aren’t just limited to candidates or ballot measures. Allyship signs allow people to publicly profess their values, cement allegiances, declare what they claim to think and feel. These have ostensibly nothing to do with voting (which is okay!),  but there’s nothing tangible about these signs. Okay, I see that your lawn ornament states in a confusing array of fonts: Black Lives Matter Women’s Rights are Human Rights No Human is Illegal Science is Real Love is Love Kindness is Everything. But as statements smushed together on a piece of reinforced cardboard, it just seems like a self-aggrandizing move to prove you have surpassed the lowest bar in the world: you believe in human rights. 

This statement seems especially performative when all of your neighbors are doing it too, when it’s the neighborhood norm, the unspoken status quo. In my neighborhood in D.C., yard signs professing allyship stand in stark contrast to the vocal hostility to adding affordable housing in the neighborhood, despite the high need across the city.  It’s like using a leaf blower to move debris off your lawn into the street. It sure makes your yard look nice, but you’re ultimately just contributing to a mess that someone else has to clean up. 

So what does it mean to put a sign proclaiming that iN tHiS HoUsE wE BeLiEvE that you don’t care where your neighbor comes from or love <3 wins? 

I think it does mean more when your neighbors aren’t all on the same page. In the Old North End, some sign placements seem more intentional — reactionary, even. 

One yard offers a homemade sign that reads: My Biden Sign Was Stolen But My Vote Wasn’t.

A house with a Pride flag draped across its front sits opposite one flying a MAGA flag, in an emblematic show-down. 

There are still full yards that say very little. There’s Better Together, which makes no sense to me since, in this particular moment, we should all be taking steps to be apart. There’s a house with a BLM sign placed right next to a CSPD sign, which feels the same to me as putting no signs up at all, since the statements cancel each other out. 

On one block, every single house has gotten in on the game. A sign in support of the CSPD is flanked by a Black Lives Matter sign next door. The alternating allegiances continue with every other house, where CSPD signs mingle with those that have more liberal commitments. The whole thing is comically tit for tat. The house at the end of the block had a yard sign asking dogs to Please Not Shit Here, as if they wanted to get in on the game but didn’t want to make too strong of a statement. Apolitical enough to get invited to all the potlucks.

In the Old North End, certain signs have been cropping up that seem to have more depth. Signs that all start with “I am ready” and continue with statements like “to engage in the work to uproot, dismantle, and end racism” or “ to tell the truth and hear the truth.” These signs are made by Truth and Conciliation, a Colorado Springs organization committed to dismantling systemic racism. These signs stuck out to me because the language is active and personal, when so many other slogans sound passive and removed. I thought that folks who chose these signs would be willing to talk to me, so I left notes at their houses. Only one person got back to me, an older white man who didn’t want his name to be published, and we spoke over the phone. His sign read: I am ready … To transform our nation for all our relations and generations to come.

I told him I was interested in the assortment of signs in the neighborhood and what a stark contrast it was from my own back home in D.C. I wondered if he had put his signs up because of this variety. “Our signs aren’t up favorably or antagonistically,” he said, “it’s just sort of our statement. We tend to be private people. We are in our mid-sixties and this is the first year we’ve had a sign up in 40 years of marriage.” 

So why this particular sign? “In part because of the election and because of Black Lives Matter, I don’t want to call it a movement, but an awareness that, to these white eyes, are a bit more evident. That’s not the word I want to use, but I’m not sure. We’ve both been in the military and we believe in protecting all Americans. Was it [the sign] a promise to myself? I think so. We’ve talked more with neighbors and family. Contributed way more financially and wrote more to elected officials. We need to do a lot more than we’ve been doing. We work full time, so it’s difficult to contribute time.” 

On whether he would take the signs down after the election: “None of our signs are affiliated with a political party. They will come down when they are tattered and worn out. To be replaced with what, I’m not quite sure.”

I got to hear about this particular man’s intent, and some of it surprised me. I’ve spent this whole time belabouring the timidity of yard signs, but here is someone for whom putting up a yard sign took a lot. Some of the things he said reminded me of a lot of the people I grew up with in D.C., who contribute financially to liberal causes and express their tolerance publicly on their lawns, but whose work ends there. An article I’ve been citing throughout this piece is entitled “Liberal Guilt is Official’s Latest Tool to Build More Affordable Housing in D.C.’s Wealthiest Ward.” 

This declaration (which almost reads like a headline from The Onion), might signify a possibility—and starkly highlight the need—for more tangible change. This man knew that he had been falling short, a sentiment I think many white liberals would be quick to agree with. If yard signs do indicate the motivation to do something more tangible, how can that energy be appropriately leveraged towards action?