It was gunplay, off Clifford Avenue, like so much gunplay lately and forever in the city of Rochester. A quick series of shots and wounded young men, the fire department washing down the scene a few hours later and a collection of bottles and Mylar balloons a few hours after that.
It’s been that way for decades.
But Sunday was different.
A dozen hours after a young life was lost, scores and then hundreds, over several hours, gathered near the scene and moving through the neighborhood.
Without masks, without social distancing. Mingling and talking and drinking.
While you sat home, unable to go to church, or have Easter dinner at your mom’s house.
Let’s put it another way. In order to meet government demands for social distancing, millions have had to lose their jobs, tens of thousands have had to die alone without family, countless high school seniors will have no graduation, and the entire nation has had to go without wedding receptions, retirement parties, birthday gatherings and worship services.
We have lost a third of gross domestic product, we’ve broken unemployment computers in several states, and families and the country will see their financial prospects damaged probably for years to come.
Because we have to to stop the virus.
Because we’re all in this together.
Unless we’re not.
And for several hours Sunday, we were not.
And from the safety of a video press conference Monday, the mayor defended it.
She said that her office consulted with the police department to allow the vigil, to accept it as a peaceful gathering, as something “the community” needed to do, and something which was safe.
In the middle of what looks to be the epicenter of the Rochester region’s coronavirus fight, in a neighborhood that is home to thousands of middle-aged and elderly black people with underlying health conditions, the mayor and police department of Rochester decided to allow an hours-long flagrant violation of social distancing.
It was like a chicken pox party for the coronavirus.
And on Monday, the mayor said that was fine. That was the same day that the county executive, after denouncing “incendiary” discussion of the Clifford Avenue gathering, urged kapos across the county to call 9-1-1if they saw any unauthorized gathering. You know, like people feeding the ducks along the canal, or jogging too close to one another in a park. Or maybe too many cars in a driveway.
All while excuses are made for hundreds of people who gave no thought to the irresponsibility of their actions and for a city administration without the backbone to actually intervene to protect its citizens.
Because if what we’re preached to about social distancing every day is true, that Clifford Avenue gathering will have a death toll – not due to violence, but due to stupidity and willful carelessness. With numbers showing that the deadliest cases of the coronavirus are among older black people, and that they have a mortality rate far higher than the national average, then that gathering of overwhelmingly black people can’t help but be a transmission hub for the disease.
Young people gather in large numbers in close proximity, and then go home, taking the virus with them to their parents and grandparents.
And the mayor, who lost her own uncle to the disease, says it’s ok.
Because of their address? Because of their color? Because it was Easter? Because of what?
If four people golfing together is wrong, if three people sitting at a diner counter is wrong, if two cops can’t even ride in the same car anymore, what brand of dishonesty is it to pretend that hundreds of people standing in a mass on the sidewalk is ok?
At a time when only immediate family members spaced six feet apart are allowed to attend funerals, and there are no calling hours, neighborhood gatherings of people coming and going for hours with no masks or social distancing is ok for certain groups of people in certain locations?
That’s how America works now?
That’s what we’re supposed to accept?
And the mayor is OK with that? She even got her office to coordinate with the police department to facilitate it?
Huh.
We should be surprised, but we’re not. Because it all comes back to the value of life. When the shots were fired on Clifford Avenue, life had no value. And when people gathered in a fashion sure to spread a deadly virus, life had no value then either.
The difference is that bullets don’t go very far.
But a virus can rage across a region and the world.
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