In the dying days of May, I found myself sitting in my childhood bedroom in rural Ireland, doomscrolling on my phone and waiting for something to happen. New York City, my adopted home, had been on lockdown for months. My friends, particularly those who did not have the lucky option of moving to a cabin upstate or returning to The Shire as I did, were stuck in their apartments.
Feeling the heat on your skin, smelling the lotion and perspiration of your fellow protesters, tasting your own breath in your mask as you chant “Stand Up, Fight Back” with strangers to whom you are instantly connected.
The coronavirus had ravaged much of the city and had killed, at that time, about 23,000 people in New York (the total is now more than 32,000). The fear and grief ran deep. These emotions, coupled with a deep frustration with the city and the country’s leadership, were obvious to me, even though I was thousands of miles away and across an ocean.
Then, in Minneapolis, a white police officer slowly and publicly killed George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man and father of five. This set off a chain reaction that included massive nationwide protests that drove my determination to get back to New York as fast as I could.
I left Ireland just as it became the country with the lowest rate of coronavirus cases in Western Europe, and I made it back to the United States, the country with the world’s highest number of coronavirus cases. After two weeks of quarantining, I began attending socially distant vigils, marches, and gatherings. I have since been trying to understand why these protests are so important to me.
Honestly, I don’t even like being outside, particularly in the summer. Barbecues bother me, picnics are a problem. It’s always too hot, my hair frizzes up, and there are endless bugs that love nothing more than feasting on my buttery Celtic blood. When I must go outside, it’s generally just a way to get from one inside place to the next.
Moreover, like many performers with our odd mix of ego and anxiety, I don’t actually relish being part of a crowd. In fact, I don’t know anybody who enjoys being part of a large crowd of people during a pandemic, especially when coronavirus spreads from person to person through droplets in the air.
I like to think I pull my weight when it comes to my standing up to white supremacy and seeking racial justice. I read, I write, I discuss. I take action in my work to dismantle the small parts of the larger systems of oppression that I have access to. But protesting in the street represents a whole other level of commitment. Most people don’t.
A huge number of people have taken to the streets on foot, by bike, in strollers and wheelchairs, and even on roller skates these past few months, but we are nowhere close to the majority. There are a hundred valid reasons not to put your body on the line, of course, and I do not believe it’s right for everybody. Health concerns, immigration status, the danger of an attack either by police or by fascists—these are all very real reasons to stay inside.
But as for reasons to show up, there are a hundred of those, too. There’s nothing like the sense of community that comes when every other sense is also involved. Feeling the heat on your skin, smelling the lotion and perspiration of your fellow protesters, tasting your own breath in your mask as you chant “Stand Up, Fight Back” with strangers to whom you are instantly connected.
There are boring parts: the drudgery of getting there, the waiting around, the slight edge of fear and, of course, the not knowing of how effective it is to spend your day this way. But all of that comes together by some alchemy I’m not quite sure of to push me forward.
As I’m jostled along in a crowd of bodies, each just as frail and ineffectual as mine yet determined to make something much stronger, I feel myself moving away from the broken and painful past, toward something much better.