To the Editor:
This week’s Sunday Magazine features photographs of the city’s reopening taken by people age 25 and under (“The City Awakes,” 6/13/21). The introduction to the print edition explains, “We wanted to see all this from the perspective of the city’s younger residents, whose lives have been most upended by the past year and who will be the most profoundly affected by the renewal and rebirth of the next decade.”
Featuring young people’s work is fine, but your rationale for doing so is flawed. As your reporting has made abundantly clear, the people whose lives were most upended by the pandemic were the poor. It is their economic circumstances that will shape New Yorkers’ next decade, not their ages.
Ashton Applewhite
I think the people whose lives were most “upended” by the pandemic are the ones who were killed by the virus.
Sam Katz is 100% correct. Plus the friends and families of those who have died.
On an adjacent note, the ageism expressed during this pandemic is shocking and sickening. The cavalier attitude that “it is only older people who get sick and die, so who cares about covid” and “you should want to die to give your money to your children and grandchildren” per Lt Gov of Texas, Dan Patrick, have shown me the true nature of this country – disgusting and appalling.
Thank you, Ashton Applewhite, for launching the manifesto against ageism. (One could also mention the ease with which we accept ignorance, boorish behavior, and foolish language among our most famous citizens, as if “wise” were somehow anti-American and “wise elder” an oxymoron. May this moment, as we learn to emerge from the plague, embolden us to live more wisely and speak up!