How Long Must We Wait for a New America?

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I spent many childhood days in a Bronx welfare office a few feet away from the bustling shops on Fordham Road. The office was in a cement building painted over with gray paint. If you weren’t looking for the metal door that opened into the waiting area, you wouldn’t find it. Inside, the floor was dirty linoleum and there were rows and rows of mismatched chairs with tired, stressed bodies staring at a ticket counter displaying numbers in red LED lights.

You had to wait in line and then get a number, and then you had to wait for your number to show up on the ticket counter. Then you could go toward the back of the office, navigate the maze of cubicles, and sit in a dirty chair in front of a metal desk with a caseworker. You had to cross your fingers to make sure you weren’t missing some form of documentation, or else you had to leave and come back another day to start the whole process over again. If you weren’t missing anything it didn’t mean you could go home. There were always faxes to send, calls and copies to make. The caseworker would tell you to go back and sit again in the waiting room while they did something on their end before finally letting you go home.

When we went to the welfare office I knew that we would be there the whole day. No matter what day of the week we showed up, the waiting area was packed with women and children out of their strollers, and shopping bags, and a chaotic, dull buzz from the cacophony of office noises. The only men I could remember present were the security guards or cops that wandered in for one reason or another. No matter the time, it always smelled like someone was opening lunch from a delivery container that arrived in a warm plastic bag from the hands of a guy on a bike.

My sister and I always prided ourselves on knowing how to act in public. We’d watch the kids running around and losing their minds with the kind of disinterested judgment you’d expect from two latchkey children. We kept our eyes on the ticket counter and talked quietly between ourselves for hours.

You know how to make someone feel like less than nothing? You make them wait. You make them wait for a long time and don’t tell them when they’ll be finished waiting. You let them believe that you hold their life in your hands. You threaten to make a fist if they ask how long is left.

Eventually, they will break down. I promise.

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Just after the inauguration, Barack Obama published an essay called “A New Day For America,” in which he talked about the promise held by a future under the Biden administration. “While the work is just beginning,” he writes, “it really does feel like a new day for America — not only because of the President’s words but because of his actions.”

But how long has the United States waited — including eight years under Obama’s administration — to keep its own people from dying? How much time does the United States need to do “the work”?

In Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve’s “The Waiting Room,” part of the Marshall Project’s Southside story series, she details the significance of waiting in the experiences of those who are affected by Chicago’s Cook County criminal justice system.

“Waiting can be a weapon,” she writes, “Waiting is a way for the state to tell you that your time, and thus your life, is neither yours to control nor worth very much.” She describes people waiting for hours to receive their arrested loved ones from Cook County Jail. They are tortured by idleness and saturated by uncertainty. The possibility of being denied release after waiting for hours to post bond and waiting even more hours to be screened for outstanding warrants looms heavily over those just steps away from freedom. “I’ve seen seven hours…,” says a correctional officer. “I’ve seen a person turned back because they had unpaid parking tickets in Milwaukee.”

The day after the presidential inauguration, a public health professor ended our first class by asking us how we felt now that a new administration was in place. She asked us to put our hands up if we were feeling hopeful. But I don’t. I’m not. And I don’t see any reason why I should.

A shining empire that can rust and crumble in the span of just four years is built on a rotten foundation. It has bad bones. The ills that seemed so ugly and glaring to so many during the Trump administration weren’t new. They are old, re-infecting wounds. White supremacy. Lack of social safety nets. An iron-tinged disdain for poor Black lives. American exceptionalism. Violence in countries all around the world at the hands of the United States armed forces and intervention. Cages filled with migrants at our borders. Blood and blood.

What is different now that we, once again, bleed blue?

What am I supposed to be waiting for with bated breath?

America does not need “boldness” or to set an “example” for the rest of the world. America does not need to rise from the ashes. America does not need to heal. America does not need a “new day.” Not while so many of us, in crowded waiting rooms and next to phones and at tables with our heads in our hands, wait to live.

First published on GEN