THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 29
week’s worth of groceries to more than
thirty-five hundred people in the neigh-
borhood. The group had raised a hun-
dred and forty thousand dollars and
spent a hundred and twenty-seven thou-
sand dollars on food and supplies, such
as medicine. What was left would keep
the group operating for another week.
All the organizers I spoke to ex-
pressed a version of the hope that, after
we emerge from isolation, much more
will seem possible, that we will expect
more of ourselves and of one another,
that we will be permanently struck by
the way our actions depend on and affect
people we may never see or know. But
the differences among the many volun-
teer groups that had suddenly sprouted
were already sharpening. Some crisis
volunteers find their work encouragingly
apolitical: neighbors helping neighbors.
Some are growing even more commit-
ted to socialist or anarchist ideals. “Com-
munity itself is not a panacea for op-
pression,” Kaba told me. “And if you
think that this work is like program-
ming a microwave, where an input leads
to immediate output, that’s capitalism
speaking.” It will be a loss, Spade told
me, if mutual aid becomes vacated of
political meaning at the moment that
it begins to enter the mainstream—if
we lose sight of the fundamental prem-
ise that, within its framework, we meet
one another’s needs not just to fix things
in the moment but to identify and pushback on the structures that make those
needs so dire. “What happens when
people get together to support one an-
other is that people realize that there’s
more of us than there is of them,” he
said. “This moment is a powder keg.”
The difficulty of sustaining this more
radical vision was also becoming clear.
Bed-Stuy Strong has one week of run-
way at a time. When I asked Rebecca
Solnit about the evidence that disasters
have prompted lasting civic changes,
she pointed me to a number of specific
organizations, and described their his-
tories, but she also emphasized some-
thing less tangible, something she “heard
over and over again from people,” she
said. “They discovered a sense of self
and a sense of connection to the peo-
ple and place around them that did not
go away, and, though they went back to
their jobs in a market economy and their
homes, that changed perspective stayed
with them and maybe manifested in
subtler ways than a project.” She added,
“If we think of mutual aid as both a se-
ries of networks of resource and labor
distribution and as an orientation, the
former may become less necessary as
‘normal’ returns, but the latter may last.”
The coronavirus has already ushered
in changes that would have been called
impossible in January: evictions have
been suspended, undocumented farm-
workers have been classified as essen-
tial, the Centers for Disease Control
has proclaimed that coronavirus test-
ing and treatment will be free. There
are those who will want to return to
normal after this crisis, and there are
those who will decide that what was re-
garded as normal before was itself the
crisis. Among the activists I talked to
in the past several weeks was a thirty-
year-old named Jeff Sorensen, who was
working with the Washtenaw County
Mutual Aid group, which was first cre-
ated to help students affected by the
closure of the University of Michigan.
Some activists in the group had been
involved with an existing mutual-aid
network, in Ypsilanti, that was founded
last year with long-term goals and rad-
ical principles in mind. Sorensen said
that he was determined to be hopeful.
“These things that are treated as ridic-
ulous ideas,” he told me, “we’ll be able
to say, ‘It’s not a ridiculous idea—it’s
what we did during that time.’” MENWAITINGFORATRAIN
At first they stand, orphaned, like a line of birds,
First on one foot, then the other, in unison,
Like any other unnamed someones, as if poised
For a firing line, until someone thinks he knows
A train is coming in the sparrow-morning light,
And someone else taps a pack of cigarettes
Against his gloved hand, not exotic,
But it’s as if he’s slipped into captivity. One
Of those corner-of-the-eye, white-sky
Days, late winter a hammer against the
Platform, and gathered above the grave-
Line of the gap enough snow
To consider the blue clouds floating,
Like forgiveness, above us all. Only two
Are cresting at this moment, one a show
Of hands, an explosion of clapping, the
Other a mask of a baptismal face
Failing behind the city’s blood-brown
Skyline. Whoever screamed just then,
Then quieted, then shouted, high, like a crow,
Leaves me filled with absence, listening
For silences, cupping my ears. For
A moment, nothing is being celebrated,
Nothing undone, or measured, nothing
Moves, or rings, in the air, and in the next
Moment sirens are continually dying in
The distance. In the time it takes the train’s
Doors to open, and close, and for the train
To swirl us all off, half in, half out, of
Our own wills, underground, something
Like joy pours out of the cloudburst heart,
And whatever feelings each one of us has had
Goes off into the daylight without us.—David Biespiel