2020: A Look at the Year That Changed Everything

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, this time four years ago, schools were only beginning to shut down, as COVID changed life as we know it. In his new book, sociologist Eric Klinenberg examines the events of 2020 through the eyes of seven New Yorkers. And he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the tumultuous year and why we mustn’t forget its impact.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Eric Klinenberg, thanks so much for joining us. Your book, “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year That Everything Changed.” Now, there have been a lot of different books looking at COVID from kind of this large-scale policy perspective. You chose to personalize it in the lives of these seven different people who lived in New York. First, I guess, what did these people have in common?

ERIC KLINENBERG, AUTHOR: Well, what they shared is this experience of having really gone through one of the most challenging times of their lives. They come from different walks of life. There’s a person from every borough in New York City whose story I tell, and then also the story of an MTA worker and an activist who got involved in the Black Lives Matter protests. And I guess the through line is each of them felt the sense of being on their own with too many problems to solve and not enough help from the core institutions that they were looking for. And they recognized that there was some government assistance available. A lot of them used it, but they felt overwhelmed and they felt like they had to solve their own problems. And I actually think now we are still suffering from this kind of long COVID as a social disease where people feel like something’s off and they’re disappointed about the way in which they’re being treated by the institutions that matter, whether that’s the government or the private sector.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk about some of those characters you just brought up. The barkeeper in Staten Island. In the beginning of your conversations with him, you know, he says, I’m not really a political guy. And by the end of this arc, you’re not even able to get in touch with him.

KLINENBERG: No, it’s a man named Danny Presti who I came to like quite a lot in our conversations. He started a bar with his buddy because they just wanted a place in the community for people to hang out. He was adamant that he’s not a political guy. And I really believed him at the time. He knew that people liked to socialize. And you remember, in 2020, we were told we needed to socially distance and that was very hard for a lot of us. In fact, you know, I got into this project by writing an essay in “The New York Times” saying, what we really need is kind of physical distance and social solidarity, right? Not — social distance is hard. And his business was organized on bringing people together. It took nine months to get a liquor license in 2019. When they finally opened, COVID hit, they were closed. Presti was so frustrated with the situation that he decided to declare that his bar was an autonomous zone. He’d been listening to a lot of right-wing cable TV personalities. He was persuaded that the lockdowns were excessive. He wanted freedom. He wanted small businesses to do what they wanted to do. And he just announced he was not going to follow the law anymore. They made poster boards. They taped off the sidewalk. And the sheriffs came pretty quickly and arrested him. And the other thing that happened is hundreds, maybe more than a thousand far-right agitators came to Staten Island and they protested, including the Proud Boys. And by the end of the year, Presti went from being, you know, a pretty neutral non-political guy to a guy who’s posting on the internet that he’s a freedom fighter. He is going to anti-vaccine rallies. He is protesting mask mandates. He’s questioning everything about the government. And I think his story is important because, you know, for millions of Americans, 2020 was the year in which they got radicalized.

SREENIVASAN: You know, on the other end of the political spectrum, you also sort out a character named Nuala. What did Nuala have in common with the gentleman in Staten Island, and what did she end up doing?

KLINENBERG: Well, for Nuala, the story was her community wasn’t being taken care of. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, which is one of the most diverse neighborhoods on earth. There’s something like 160 languages spoken in Jackson Heights. A lot of immigrants, crowded conditions, density. People live and work in the cash economy. And a lot of people didn’t know that they were eligible for benefits or weren’t eligible for state benefits. Nuala knew very early in the pandemic that people were going to be in trouble. And she put up a sign saying, you know, if you need help, call me. And she used her real phone number. Within a couple of days, hundreds of people were calling her. She was overwhelmed. So, she put up another sign that said, if you can give help, call me. And then dozens and eventually hundreds of people did. So, she set up in her basement of her personal home, what she called the COVID Care Neighborhood Network. And it’s one of these amazing examples of a mutual aid network where Americans got together, our participatory association, you know, voluntaristic side is as strong as our individualistic one, and they helped each other. And they provided — they got food donations, they got diaper donations, they got cleaning supplies. They just kind of expanded out and out until they really had this amazing operation going. And it evolved over the course of the pandemic. 34th Avenue, they turned into an open street so people could have better access to the outdoors in this crowded place. And you know, a few weeks ago I checked in with her and it turns out that same basement that was a mutual aid network in COVID is now called the Jackson Heights Immigration Center. And Nuala and the same group of people helping each other out in COVID are working to get thousands of asylum seekers better integrated into New York City, get their paperwork filed so that they can become citizens or get Social Security cards. She really built a kind of invisible civic infrastructure. And at first blush, I think Nuala feels really different from Danny Presti. They clearly acted in very different ways but both of them shared the sense that no one here is really taking care of me and my community’s problems and they took things into their own hands. And one in a way of protesting and the other in a way of banding people together to help each other out.

SREENIVASAN: You profile a teacher in Chinatown, Mei Li (ph). What were some of the struggles that were unique to her but I guess really kind of dredge up what was failing in the education infrastructure?

KLINENBERG: Yes. Mei (ph) is an amazing woman. She grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown. She actually is now the principal and she’s taught at the same school where she attended as a kid. Her husband went there as well. One of her children went there. So, she is part of the school but she’s also deeply connected to people in the neighborhood. And like Nuala, she has this mission, which is to make sure that her community is taken care of. The first big problem she had is the president, you’ll recall in early 2020, was talking about the China virus. He was talking about kung flu. He was whipping up this anti-Asian pretty racist hysteria, and people were following him into it. And so, even though she’s in Chinatown where you know you’re going to find Asian-American people, she was getting a lot of harassment herself. She was hearing it in the streets. And she realized, first she had to protect the children in her community. So, she actually stopped kids from going on field trips, January, February. And then, of course, schools got shut down and she realized, look, a school is not just a place where kids learn, it’s also a place where communities form. It’s a place where children in New York City get two and a half meals a day. It’s a vital hub of activity and connection. And so, she and her staff and her own kids decided they were going to take it upon themselves to make sure that they could hold things together. About 80 to 85 percent of her students are Asian-American. Many are immigrants. Many live in crowded apartments, and she realized they need help to do remote education. The Department of Education in New York was not really set up to provide the support they needed. Eventually they said, well, we’ll send tablets to students so they can work remotely, to school remotely. But nobody has a doorman, you can’t leave fancy computer equipment on the streets of Manhattan. So, Mei (ph) and her and her kids literally went door to door ringing bells, making phone calls until they made sure every single kid and every family was equipped to connect online. Then they fought the Department of Education, which wanted to close the school down and said, we have to continue to serve meals, even if we do it outside. And they were able to maintain their role as a meal provider.

SREENIVASAN: You wrote in a recent op-ed in “The New York Times” that, when everything was uncertain, everyone’s future was on the line, we walked right up to the precipice of a moral breakthrough, and then we turned back. What do you mean by that?

KLINENBERG: Many viewers will remember that in 2020, there was a lot of tough times, but there are also these moments where you could see the possibility of progress and change. Maybe we’d be better when we got through this. One example I like to give here is remember essential workers, when everything had fallen apart, when the economy was collapsing and millions of people couldn’t go to work and lost their jobs, the government said, some people are so important to the economy and society that we’re going to call them essential workers, right? And by the way, those were not the bankers and the lawyers, even the NBA players, right? We canceled the NBA season. They were the doctors and the nurses for sure, but also for the most part, working class people, right? Clerks, people working in meat packing industries, poultry plants, people working in infrastructure, our public transit drivers, delivery people, custodians. And in the U.S., you could imagine that calling them essential workers would mean we’re honoring them. We are going to compensate them well. We are going to make sure that they have PPE like masks or, you know, we’re going to make sure they have great access to the best health care. But, of course, in the U.S., what really happened is that to be called essential was to be deemed expendable. And so, all of these workers, they had far more exposure to COVID. Those who worked in crowded places then came home to crowded residential environments passed the disease on to people they lived with and loved. And so, they had much higher rates of death and disease. And these people are disproportionately black. They’re disproportionately Latino. And when I say we walk to the edge of a moral precipice, it’s because you could imagine that once this country said, these workers, these laborers are essential, that we would then follow up on the moral commitment that comes with that to really make sure that they are OK. And instead, we did the opposite. When things come down, we walked away and pretended like that never even happened.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that, you know, I don’t want to do for our audience is look at your book and think about it as something completely in the past, because there are still thousands of people who have long COVID, and they are living with this now. But our attention to COVID, infection rates, reported cases, all of that has waned so much. And I wonder, has our collective kind of attention faded, even though there are still actually more people dying from COVID today than would be from influenza?

KLINENBERG: Yes. I’ve been saying, I think our response to COVID is marked by the will not to know. It’s like we were so traumatized by what we experienced in 2020 that we tried to kind of box it up, tuck it under the bed or throw it into the closet and act like that didn’t happen. And the reality, as you say, is COVID is still out there. It’s still a very dangerous condition, especially if you’re older, especially if you have an underlying medical condition. And we haven’t beaten it yet. But what’s more — and I think what’s also important is to think about the social part of long COVID, right? The fact that what we experienced in 2020 has thrown us off. So, I’m the parent of teenagers. And, you know, truancy remains higher than it’s ever been in the United States. Rates are off the charts. Kids aren’t going to school. People aren’t going into the offices. Downtowns are still pretty empty. We still treat each other with a level of skepticism and disdain that I think is unwarranted. You know, for me, the image that comes to mind that I write about in the book are those viral videos we saw of Americans fighting in the aisles of Walmarts and on airplanes over whether we were wearing a mask. I mean, there’s this whole genre of viral mask videos.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

KLINENBERG: No other country really had this kind of anger and violence that got expressed in public spaces over this, you know, thin little piece of fabric. And I fear that that social long COVID remains with us in a powerful way. It shapes our politics today. It shapes our sense that people we disagree with are now our enemies, not just people we have a political difference with. And I don’t know how a healthy society can continue if we can’t resolve those things. And so, my book is really an invitation for us to take a second look and think about the collective social experience of this important year, a year that we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives, even if it’s hard to talk about now, and we’re not hearing much about it in this election.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder if this politicization of how you feel about COVID, how seriously you take it, prohibits us from even crafting policy that might be epidemiologically sound, but politically fraught.

KLINENBERG: Every health expert I know is concerned that we are actually pulling resources away from our public health infrastructure at the end of this pandemic. Vaccines have become more controversial, right? It’s not just the COVID vaccine.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

KLINENBERG: There’s a measles outbreak in Florida. People are walking away from vaccines at a level that they haven’t before. We have a Republican medication that you take if you have COVID, a Democratic medication to take from COVID. We have politicized the realm of public health in a way that is clearly dangerous for all Americans. And, you know, there is a little bit of a track record on this in this country. At the end of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920, there was a rush from the U.S. to kind of forget about this experience. One of the great books of history about this time is called “America’s Forgotten Pandemic.” Fortunately, at that time, the public health leaders of the country banded together and were able to develop better policies. And by the way, many of the countries that did the best in COVID in 2020 were countries that had learned powerful lessons from SARS in 2003. So, Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan. The scare of SARS got them thinking about the use of masks and how to produce them, how to distribute them, the power of tracking and tracing, the importance of closing borders and having temporary shutdowns. Those are places that had so much more success managing COVID than the United States did. My concern, and I think the concern of every person who cares about public health in America, is that this ideologically driven campaign to discredit all public health at the end of COVID could make this country fair — far worse when the next virus hits.

SREENIVASAN: We forget that in the middle of a pandemic, we also had a massive conversation in America about race and equality and the wake of the murder of George Floyd. And you also cover the rise of some of these protests. I mean, how did that kind of interface with what was happening in society?

KLINENBERG: Crises help us see ourselves and they help us see whose lives matter. And Americans were watching this and the George Floyd murder made it too much. So, I think the fact that so many millions of people poured out into the streets and demanded something different is deeply related to the fact that so many people were watching the inequalities of COVID play out on a daily basis. And here again, we have one of those moments, a flash point where it looked for some time like the United States and other societies might really do something different on racial justice. Like there might be a reckoning about our legacy of racial inequality. And there was a lot of energy to push for that reckoning but then the backlash hit hard, right? And the same governors who were trying to make sure that their states could let it rip and they got rid of the public health mandates, they also, in many cases, started to attack, you know, DEI programs and to block the conversation about racial inequality, right? We saw in Florida, Governor DeSantis take black studies, African-American studies out of the A.P. offerings for the school system, try to take books out of the library if they dealt with racial inequality. And so, here was a moment where it looked like there was going to be a tremendous opening in advance on racial justice and the backlash had shut it down in part of the country. And we’re still stuck in this problem. I guess what I’d say is that crisis of 2020, we’re still living inside of it in 2024.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.” Author Eric Klinenberg, thanks so much for joining us.

KLINENBERG: Thank you.