On a brisk sunny day, my wife and I set out with our walkers for one of our favorite places: the Union Square Market. My wife walks the 12 blocks at a steady pace to shop for organic vegetables, while I stagger and stumble behind her, with many rest stops, to reach a market bakery we love: Bread Alone. The market, founded in 1976, is filled with people of all ages, races, and ethnicities shopping and strolling. (In peak season, 140 regional farmers, fishers, and bakers set up stalls there for 60,000 shoppers.) It’s a parade of faces and bodies that I observe with great pleasure. They may be all strangers to me, but for a moment they make for a luminous collectivity—providing an affirmation of life that I ordinarily find hard t0 feel these years.
I don’t know anything about the shoppers’ personal lives or their characters, but their peaceful involvement in a quotidian activity only exhilarates me. That feeling tends to pass quickly—for my head is filled with the coming midterm elections and the possibility of that dangerously anodyne cipher, Kevin McCarthy, becoming Speaker of the House. He would be replacing the shrewd, tough, and courageous Nancy Pelosi, who has just had to endure a murderous attack by a conspiracy-obsessed, MAGA-adherent on her husband, Paul, at her home.
What is more disturbing is that, though leaders of the Republican Party, like Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, may ritualistically offer wishes for Paul Pelosi’s full recovery and horror at his being attacked, it does not the absolve the Party for its years of demonizing Nancy Pelosi. As Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) has stated, “We need to say it out loud … Militia maniacs, and other rightwing domestic terrorists have exploded because Republicans have spent years winking, nodding, and endorsing their extremism.”
