I walked, must have been just a half-mile, with a couple of DVDs to the post office. I live in NYC. The street was empty with a few others here and there sadly masked, but out on similar, mildly essential tasks.

It was a year ago that I kept seeing red-tail planes when out and about. Every time I looked up, over and over, there was one of them. I had to stop my day and write it out to think. What was this subconscious taunt on top of the evidence of my senses? I managed a little of the answer then. My walk on this cold, last day of March, where everything was canceled, brought me to this table to write because it needed the same treatment.

There were no planes or other kinds of hectic, busy things chasing about my large distracting city. My neighborhood was following orders. Public investment in getting our attention was working with noted success. The traditional media practices brought to us, the predictability of specific medical concerns that we have shared before, like AIDS. SARS, now COVID-19. Our leaders successfully transmitted the seriousness of this threat. The science aimed at solving the big national problem, on the other hand, seemed helpless in ending the rise yet another life degrading process. I don’t worry about that for one reason.

The startling thing to me is how easily we accept and stand aware of these threats in dense city life. Commercial food production is regulated like plutonium, understanding bacterial and viral contagion is well managed from grade school. We recently had mayors who canceled tobacco everywhere, tried to kill giant bottles of concentrated sugar called soda, ended vaping, and recently got us to close the city. On average, we have less wealth, but better health for a thousand big-city reasons. On a per-capita basis, the city is more energy-efficient and more likely to be net-zero on carbon only for the challenge of it. The pressure to be so is reasonably understood, although I have one concern.

All may be lost if there is a lack of “trust” in the crisis of masks I saw today. If I can come to any conclusion at all, I believe the investment in the sciences of medicine, planning, art, and architecture are all practices that continue to produce the forever-beat of this city’s resilient heart. Every time this happens, I swear we discover and accept how to live in a categorically new way. On this, the last day of March 2020, a virus may be killing some of us slowly and with deadly precision, and it may only be a few at a time. It may be in sadly separated multiple room huts across the American landscape of misleading independence, but I know one new thing. The task of getting on track is right now in my city, and I saw it working well in my brief walk to the post office.