Before working as a nonpartisan election protector in Georgia this November, I took a training that stressed the importance of making a visual inspection of people’s faces and physical demeanor as they exited the polls. Did they look distressed? If so, maybe something had happened inside to obstruct their vote: Check it out and report any irregularity. On Election Day, as I floated between Dacula and Suwanee, in Gwinnett County, things turned out to be less straightforward. Be mindful, I’m doing this split-second visual inspection while social distancing, trying to read people’s eyes, looking for stress above their face mask as they walk at a steady pace to get to work or home, or simply go about their day.
Where people wore masks, visual observation was virtually impossible. In one large polling place in Suwanee, traffic was nonstop. People got out of their vehicles, put on their masks, entered the community center, and hurried out when they were done. For a minute, my fellow protectors and I thought about stopping people who weren’t wearing an “I voted” sticker to ask if they’d had difficulty. If they were anything like me, though, they would have rejected the sticker, a clear problem with this strategy. Where people didn’t wear masks, like the mostly white voters at an elementary school out in the sticks in Dacula, I didn’t spot signs of distress. Did that mean no one was distressed?
I didn’t find any major irregularities, and as of November 9, Biden lead Trump in Gwinnett County 241,827 votes to 166,413. As I write, Georgia is doing a recount; the news is focused on that and the latest spike in coronavirus infections and deaths. But people always have a lot more going on in their lives.
Late last year, around the same time that we in the United States started hearing news about Covid-19, I rekindled a relationship with a love interest. I had fallen ill with flu-like symptoms during December and felt sick the entire month of January. In February, the relationship evolved as we articulated to each other that at our age we are in the autumn of our lives, with winter rapidly approaching. We thought it would be a good idea to pool our resources and cohabitate, especially because we spent so much time together on weekends. We thought we matched.
Until then, I had lived as a true bachelor in D.C., with satin pillowcases for the ladies and a fully stocked bar, with no children or pets in the house. My lady lived in Baltimore, with her young daughter.
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The plan! I would move to Baltimore and start living and working in “Charm City.” So around the second week of February I rented out my house, packed my belongings, including the satin pillowcases and fully stocked bar, and moved.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out. For anyone who doesn’t catch the reference, that’s the line in I, Claudius where Claudius, the Roman emperor, lets his court know that he has decided to marry for a third time. My lady and I discovered we had fundamental differences early on. I mean, try living with someone who does not believe in the thing that has forced everyone in the country into isolation. I am a news junkie. She avoids the news like the plague and relies on Instagram and Facebook. I vote, and planned to work with an election protection civil rights organization. She does not vote, mainly because of her citizenship status; however, I get the feeling that if she could vote, she would not.
I love her free spirit, “Grand Central Station,” social butterfly attitude. That is what so attracted me to her, right? But now, it’s a pandemic, and people have died, and her personality is a liability. Her favorite phrase is that the pandemic is a “Plandemic.” I am sure she got the phrase from her Instagram feeds.
I took the pandemic seriously from the start, and gave her daily updates. The city and the entire country were heading for shutdown, I said; we should stock up on supplies and wait this out. At first, I commuted to my law office in D.C., which was occupied by me and my associate. We had separate offices, and when meeting clients, we wore face shields as well as masks. When we stopped allowing clients to visit, I was, for the most part, alone all day; then I would return home to Baltimore.
Contrariwise, my lady felt she was not going to be “mind controlled,” as she would often say. “We are all operating out of fear.” On occasion, when I would return home, she would be entertaining guests—no one wearing a mask, no social distancing. Lesson: You never know someone until an emergency hits. What a way to discover differences!
I am in Atlanta now, waiting to start work as a public defender in Macon, Ga., expecting, as any criminal lawyer must, that nothing is a sure bet. What can be said is that no matter the best-laid arrangements, if you want to make the gods laugh, just tell them your plans.
Scenes From a Pandemic is a collaboration between The Nation and Kopkind, a living memorial to radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, who from 1982–94 was the magazine’s chief political writer and analyst. This series of dispatches from Kopkind’s far-flung network of participants, advisers, guests, and friends is edited by Nation contributor and Kopkind program director JoAnn Wypijewski, and appears weekly on thenation.com and kopkind.org.
