In the weeks and months after the 9/11 attacks, New York City began to slowly recompose itself. The crater at Ground Zero smoldered, a great hellish cloud in the sky, but life needed to come back, and it did. Children went back to school, parents to work and baseball, after a short hiatus, returned to thrumming stadiums. If uncertainty bled into dread – when would we be attacked again? – New Yorkers weren’t going to show it for long. There was a recession, but the recession passed, and the 2000s roared on. The young continued to flock to New York’s glittering promise.

After he nearly died from Covid-19, Michael Flor probably thought he couldn’t be shocked by much else. He had survived a battle with a deadly virus that had killed more than 100,000 people across America.

On May 15, House Democrats passed a far-reaching $3 trillion stimulus bill aimed at rescuing the country from a looming economic depression. Senate Republicans shot the bill down, and Evan Hollander, communications director for the House Appropriations Committee, told me that “while we hope to begin negotiations soon, so far the White House and the Senate have been unwilling to negotiate.” The legislation included Democratic priorities in the age of COVID-19: significant aid to state and local governments, new funds for Medicare and Medicaid, and increased hazard pay for frontline healthcare workers.

Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo warned of devastating cuts to New York’s budget if federal aid isn’t delivered to combat massive shortfalls in the state from COVID-19 deaths and shutdowns. Cuomo said that school budgets could be decimated, losing half of all funding.

Before Coronavirus rendered New York a Dystopia, September 11 was supposed to be the defining cataclysm of our lifetimes. The Boomers got JFK, and we got two planes obliterating the Twin Towers live on television.