Last week, a stranger threatened to beat up my husband and me in the checkout area of a grocery store. What set him off was that my husband, en route to return an unwanted item, had brushed past him. The man announced that he was going outside to wait for us and — screaming, snarling, raising his fists — stared at us through a window.
Was I surprised that a muscular guy in his 30s was threatening to punch out two grandparents? The woman behind the checkout counter was not.
“Stuff like this happens every few days,” she said.
Indeed, not long before, in another supermarket in another city, an elderly man raged and shouted at me, claiming that I was standing too close.
“He comes in here and does this all the time,” the cashier said.
I thought of these incidents when I read that on Monday last week, a man had shot and killed a Georgia supermarket cashier when she asked him to wear a mask.
Violence is surging on airplanes, too.
As Association of Flight Attendants-CWA president Sara Nelson said last month: “We’ve never before seen aggression and violence on our planes like we have in the past five months.”
Just the other week, a flight attendant had two teeth knocked out by a violent passenger.
Gun violence, mass shootings and homicides have soared in the US over the past few months. In Miami; Dallas; Detroit, Michigan; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis, Minnesota — the list goes on — the rate of random and targeted killings has dramatically increased. Explanations have been suggested: the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the proliferation of guns. Right-wing pundits blame the Black Lives Matter movement for undermining police authority.
Certainly the communities suffering most from these tragedies are those that have endured high numbers of COVID-19 deaths and dispossessions. Violence is one way in which humans respond to grief, loss and unendurable pressure.
The shootings and homicides are registered and tallied as statistics, but unless they result in injury or death, episodes of road rage, street rage and — apparently — supermarket rage go unreported.
Along with gratitude to science and joy at being able to hug people, an underlying sense of menace and threat has made its way into our consciousness.
The manager of a midtown Manhattan beauty salon told me that she is terrified of the men who stroll into the salon and wander around, exuding hostility, before turning and leaving.
Our dentist’s receptionist said that “no one should have to see” the outbursts and skirmishes she routinely observes on her daily walk to and from the Port Authority bus terminal.
A friend compared a recent road trip to a manic video game, navigating among tailgating, speeding, honking, reckless, aggressive drivers.
One wonders where all this free-floating fury is coming from, exactly.
In our hurry to return to life as we knew it before last year, some of us have begun to behave as if nothing unusual or disturbing had occurred. On Saturday nights, in bars and restaurants, the massive collective traumas that the US has just experienced — the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection — might almost seem like figments of our collective imagination.
Watching crowds at bars and beaches partying — to quote Prince — “like it’s 1999,” who would dream that, six months ago, we considered our fellow humans as potential vectors of contagion? Although many still wear masks, the “new normal” looks — on the surface and in some neighborhoods — so much like the old normal that it is almost possible to forget that 600,000 Americans died, and that until a few months ago, we were confined to our homes, blindsided by the warp speed at which reality had changed.
I am not saying we want to relive the grief and isolation of lockdown, to revisit those horrifying hours spent watching the Capitol invasion on TV. I am not suggesting we live in fear of the next big bad thing, but forgotten trauma is the equivalent of an untreated wound — that is Psychology 101.
The intensive care units are quieter, for which we can be grateful, but at moments it seems as if the US is suffering a societal nervous breakdown, a mass episode of amnesia.
Meanwhile, for many, the nightmare is far from over. People are still dying of COVID-19. “Long-haul” COVID-19 can mean perpetual illness. Businesses are still shuttered. People have lost jobs. Evictions and foreclosures are resuming. Families are under great strain, and the children and young people know it.
Homelessness has reached record levels in cities like New York. Dickensian social stratification seems even more extreme. Encampments constructed of blankets and shopping carts sprawl just down the block from places where young masters of the universe Instagram US$30 plates of imported prosciutto.
Let us be clear: Something terrible and destabilizing happened to us, and something like it, or something else, might well happen again. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Our Capitol was invaded. Our democracy remains at risk. For millions of Americans, there has been no recovery, and for them the new normal is an ongoing state of panic. No matter what the charts show, people are still unemployed or fending off the creditors unleashed by the wreckage of their businesses.
For many Americans, the recovery is happening inside a pressure cooker. For others, a year of their lives was given over to something that cannot be mentioned, or that never happened.
Thinking about it that way, I am slightly less astonished that the neighborhood supermarket, the place where we go to find the necessities for our families and our future, a ordinarily pleasant place where ordinary humans gather, should have become, in this new normal, the new arena for combat.
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