After five months of whatever the hell these past five months have been, I finally broke last night. I don’t mean that I cried or called an enemy in a coronavirus-cum-shutdown-cum-riot triggered meltdown. No, instead, I sang.
After a socially distanced dinner on a restaurant patio, a friend and I met up at another’s for a socially distanced digestif, and that’s when it hit me, the brick wall dividing my patience and my limit.
For nearly half a year, we’ve all been relying on shoddy substitutes for the things that fuel us, be it livestreaming church services or book readings we’d ordinarily attend in person, running in 90 degree weather while our squat racks sit unused in closed gyms, pretending FaceTime is a suitable stand-in for actual face time.
But life is meant to be lived. After five months of listening to Spotify in solitude in whatever socially distanced walk I can map away from my studio, I turned on Chicago, yes, the musical, not the band, and in a revelatory stupor, sang with more elation than I have since I was an insufferable high school theater kid.
All of this is to say that not only do I feel intense sympathy for the Southampton folks under fire from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for attending a concert by The Chainsmokers. It seems like imposing a Footloose-style anti-fun mandate is about as futile as teaching abstinence-only education. Sure, barricading yourself in a basement is the most effective way to mitigate coronavirus transmission, but in practice, it leads to a lot of rule-breaking with limited harm reduction.
Cuomo, last seen gallivanting around Georgia without a mask while forgoing social distancing, took to Twitter to excoriate a crowd for attending a Hamptons concert headlined by the EDM duo. For context, note that Cuomo allowed unmasked protests and rioting to run rampant across his state.
The concert is now under formal investigation from New York’s Department of Health. The effort is as futile as it is indicative of the problem that public health and policy officials need to grapple with. We let totally peaceful protesters loot and incinerate cities across the country for two months. Meanwhile, the rest of us were told there would be no more happy hour, no more gym, no more parties, no more church, no more school, no more sports, and for millions, no more work. All of this for a virus that has not even killed 100 American children and won’t kill 0.5% of folks in their 40s or younger who contract it.
So naturally, people are upset. But perhaps more importantly, they’re yearning to do all the things that make life worth living. One of those is music — even if it’s by The Chainsmokers. Music is meant to be shared. It’s meant to be sung to and danced to and listened to as a part of a shared experience. Even the nicest set of headphones cannot replace the nourishment live and shared music gives the soul.
Lawmakers and law enforcement will have to grapple with this. First, we were told fifteen days to slow the spread! Then, flatten the curve! Stay home, save lives! We just need a better therapeutic treatment! No, we need a vaccine! Actually, a single life lost isn’t worth it — we all must remain friendless hermits indefinitely!
Enough. Given that The Chainsmokers concert wasn’t held in direct sunlight, which kills the coronavirus, and most attendees appeared to not be wearing masks, which we know significantly reduce your risk of transmitting or contracting the coronavirus, I wouldn’t have gone. But the experts lied to the public for months about the efficacy of masks and then cowered to the bitter babies robbing bodegas and claimed that because racism is a public health issue (uh, whatever), attending maskless riots was totally acceptable, because science. So why the hell wouldn’t stir-psycho Hamptonites not want one night to dance, sing, and scream their lungs clean of this toxic, lawless dystopia our reality has become?
People paid with their social lives and careers for nearly half a year because they were told they’d kill grandma if they refused to. But folks looking for a bootleg haircut didn’t kill grandma — Cuomo’s murderous nursing home policy and Anthony Fauci’s lies about the efficacy of masks did. So now people will either follow lax rules or invent their own.
So here’s a modest proposal: legalize everything outside. Shut off St. Marks Place and the WeHo stretch Santa Monica Boulevard, and give walking, drinking, and dancing space to the people. In D.C., restaurants have been fined thousands of dollars for playing music too loudly. To that, I say, screw Muriel Bowser, reverse the ban on live music, and have everyone dance and dine in the middle of 14th Street NW. The party will happen regardless. The question is, rather, if it’s in broad, coronavirus-killing daylight with plenty of space for social distancing or if it’s in a cramped house in the middle of the night.
So it’s time to get real and realize that we’re pushing people to their breaking point. Decent weather won’t last, but this pandemic might. So the time is now, not to shame the civilized people who’d rather party than protest, but to enable healthy socialization. Everyone has their breaking point, their spontaneous I-need-to-make-my-friends-sing-musicals or party or dance or scream with me moment. And when it happens en masse, it won’t be orderly. Then, normal people will decide the rules for the rest of us, and the experts won’t like what that looks like.
