This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated May 10, 2024
Just over five years ago, in April of 2019, I began writing this weekly column. Much has changed in the intervening years, yet many of the things we are experiencing in the world today echo back to that time.
Today, the unemployment rate is under 4 percent. Unemployment was also below four percent five years back, though a year later it would reach nearly 15 percent, the highest it had been in 80 years.
Five years ago, the NYPD announced that crime again continued to fall and had reached the lowest rate since the CompStat era of crime index tracking began in 1994. Though crime saw increases throughout the pandemic years that followed, New York City, and the entire nation, have seen reductions in crime the past year that are some of the most dramatic ever recorded from one year to the next.
In the spring of 2019, we had no idea what lay ahead one year later when we would all be forced into quarantine after COVID-19 began to spread in the early months of 2020 and lead to thousands of fatalities. A year later, in early April of 2021, more than 200 million Americans had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, far exceeding the commitment President Biden made to reach 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office. Since then, the spread of COVID-19 has continued to ebb, allowing us to return to normal life and the economy to thrive.
In my first weeks writing this column in the spring of 2019 I wrote about many pressing issues of the time that are still at the forefront of debate today. I was unaware at the time how drastically things would change with regard to some of these hot-button topics.
In May of 2019 I penned a column that focused on the flurry of anti-abortion laws that had recently been passed in many red states, noting how they were of little consequence at that time because the right to abortion was settled law. Three years later, in May of 2022, a leaked draft was published revealing that the ultra-conservative Supreme Court majority would overturn Roe v. Wade, thus allowing these states’ restrictive abortion bans to go into effect.
In another column I wrote in May of 2019, I referred to how Trump again reiterated his “very fine people” description of violent white nationalists in Charlottesville during the 2017 anti-semitic, racist Unite The Right rally, saying they simply felt strongly about Robert E. Lee. I spoke about our own local ties to Lee, and how it was time that the White supremacist traitor’s name was removed from a street in southern Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton. Today, that street is now named John Warren Avenue, after the U.S. Army replaced RobertE. Lee’s name with that of a late, African American Vietnam War hero from Brooklyn in March of 2022.
I first wrote about pedestrian deaths on our local streets in May of 2019, noting that pedestrian deaths were up 42 percent compared to a year earlier. Though we have made progress with some pedestrian safety initiatives over the past five years, such as the recent passing of Sammy’s Law, allowing the city to finally have control over determining its own speed limits, sadly, we have continued to see tragedies repeatedly play out in our crosswalks and roadways. I have written about this topic far more than any other throughout the years.
In April of 2019, in one of my first columns, I wrote about whether female candidates for office were getting a fair shake. I noted how recent elections at the time had led to women reaching historic levels of representation at every level of government but how they still faced criticisms about personality traits and likeability to a degree that men just do not seem to have to contend with. By 2022, for the first time ever the New York City Council was comprised of a female majority.
A great deal has changed over the past five years, yet many issues of concern from back then still persist today. Though there are always things to gripe about, which we want to see change for the better, it can be instructive to reflect back on a time several years back, to gauge how far we have come and where we need to go.
