THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 25
tributed copies of it to buildings around
the city. By the time I met him, Elkind
and his co-founders had spoken to peo-
ple hoping to create Invisible Hands
chapters in San Francisco, Los Ange-
les, Boston, and Chicago. The group
was featured on “Fox & Friends,” in a
segment about young people stepping
up in the pandemic; the co-host Brian
Kilmeade encouraged viewers to send
in more “inspirational stories and pho-
tos of people doing great things.”
At the Fairway, Elkind, who has dark
hair and a chipper student-body-presi-
dent demeanor, put on a pair of latex
gloves and grabbed a shopping basket,
which he sanitized with a wipe. He was
getting groceries for an immunocom-
promised woman in Harlem. “Scallions
are the onion things, right?” he said, as
we wound through the still robust pro-
duce section. At the time, those who
signed up to volunteer for Invisible
Hands joined a group text; when re-
quests for help came in, texts went out,
and volunteers claimed them on a first-
come-first-served basis. They called the
recipients to ask what they needed, then
dropped the grocery bags at their door-
steps; the recipients left money under
their mats or in mailboxes. The group
was planning to raise funds to buy gro-
ceries for those who couldn’t afford them,
Elkind told me. While we stood in the
dairy section trying to decide between
low-fat Greek yogurt and nonfat regu-
lar—the store was out of nonfat Greek—
a reporter from “Inside Edition” mate-
rialized and began snapping photographs.
Elkind apologized; he hadn’t meant to
double-book media engagements. “Not
to be trite, but I feel like this is spread-
ing faster than the virus,” he said.
The next day, Representative Alex-
andria Ocasio-Cortez held a public con-
ference call with the organizer Mariame
Kaba about how to build a mutual-aid
network. Kaba is the founder of Proj-
ect Nia, a prison-abolitionist organiza-
tion that successfully campaigned for
the right of Illinois minors to have their
arrest records expunged when they turn
eighteen. “There are two ways that this
can go for us,” Ocasio-Cortez said on
the call. “We can buy into the old frame-
works of, when a disaster hits, it’s every
person for themselves. Or we can affir-
matively choose a different path. And
we can build a different world, even if
it’s just on our building floor, even if it’s
just in our neighborhood, even if
it’s just on our block.” She pointed out
that those in a position to help didn’t
have to wait “for Congress to pass a bill,
or the President to do something.” The
following week, the Times ran a column
headlined “Feeling Powerless About
Coronavirus? Join a Mutual-Aid Net-
work.” Vox, Teen Vogue, and other out-
lets also ran explainers and how-tos.
Mutual-aid work thrives on sustained
personal relationships, but the corona-
virus has necessitated that relationships
be built online. After meeting Elkind,
I joined a Zoom call with thirteen stu-
dents at the University of Minnesota
Medical School who had been pulled
from their classes or clinical rotations.
Their mentors and teachers were put-
ting in fifteen-hour hospital shifts, then
waiting in long lines to buy diapers be-
fore going home to their kids. The stu-
dents had rapidly assembled a group
called the Minnesota CovidSitters,
which matched nearly three hundred
volunteers with a hundred and fifty or
so hospital workers—including cus-
todians, cooks, and other essential em-
ployees. The students insured that
volunteers had immunizations and
background checks; they established
closed rotations of three to five volun-
teers for each family in need. On the
Zoom call, everyone was focussed and
eager, crisis adrenaline masking their
fatigue. One student held a mellow,
pink-cheeked infant on his shoulder.
Just a few days before, on Twitter, I
had seen a photograph of a handwrit-
ten flyer that a thirty-three-year-old
woman named Maggie Connolly had
posted in the Brooklyn neighborhood
of Carroll Gardens, asking elderly neigh-
bors to get in touch if they needed gro-
ceries or other help. Connolly, a hair-
and-makeup artist, was newly out of
work, and figured that many older peo-
ple might not see aid efforts that were
being organized online. The picture of
the sign got attention on the Internet,
and Connolly ended up on the “Today”
show; soon afterward, she began arrang-
ing pharmacy runs and wellness checks
for her neighbors and getting e-mails
from people around the world who’d
been inspired to put up flyers of their
own. “My mom’s always told me that if
I feel anxious and depressed I shouldthink of how I can be of service to some-
body,” she told me. “Hopefully, when
we control the virus a little bit more and
get back to regular life, this will have
been a wake-up call. I think people aren’t
used to being able to ask for help, and
people aren’t used to offering.”T
here’s a certain kind of news story
that is presented as heartwarming
but actually evinces the ravages of Amer-
ican inequality under capitalism: the ac-
count of an eighth grader who raised
money to eliminate his classmates’ lunch
debt, or the report on a FedEx employee
who walked twelve miles to and from
work each day until her co-workers took
up a collection to buy her a car. We can
be so moved by the way people come
together to overcome hardship that we
lose sight of the fact that many of these
hardships should not exist at all. In a
recent article for the journal Social Text,
the lawyer and activist Dean Spade cites
news reports about volunteer boat res-
cues during Hurricane Harvey which
did not mention the mismanagement
of government relief efforts, or identify
the possible climatological causes of
worsening hurricanes, or point out who
suffers most in the wake of brutal storms.
Conservative politicians can point to
such stories, which ignore the social
forces that determine the shape of our
disasters, and insist that voluntarism is
preferable to government programs.
A decade ago, the writer Rebecca
Solnit published the book “A Paradise
Built in Hell,” which argues that during
collective disasters the “suspension of
the usual order and the failure of most
systems” spur widespread acts of altru-
ism—and these improvisations, Solnit
suggests, can lead to lasting civic change.
Among the examples Solnit cites are
tenant groups that formed in Mexico
City after a devastating earthquake, in
1985, and later played a role in the city’s
transition to a democratic government.
Radicalizing moments accumulate; or-
ganizing and activism beget more orga-
nizing and activism. As I called indi-
viduals around the country who were
setting up coronavirus-relief efforts, I
kept encountering people who had par-
ticipated in anti-globalization protests
in the early two-thousands, or joined
the Occupy movement, or organized
grassroots campaigns in the aftermath