Opinion: A New Yorker’s message to President Trump during the coronavirus crisis

I grew up in New York, with people that I love. And she is ours. New York is part of our DNA. She lives in our hearts and minds, and souls. New Yorkers understand that “class” cannot be purchased by relentless self- promotion, no matter how you gild your life in gold.

As children, we played stickball in her streets, skated in her parks. Our parents took us to her art and history museums, and to countless other places in our city that reminded us of the promise of our humanity, collective and individual. We watched “The Nutcracker” at Lincoln Center, we played in Central Park, we skated in the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. We rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building, and we watched the Yankees play ball. We ate the best pizza in the world. Real New Yorkers, Mr. Trump, never eat pizza with a knife and fork.

Our city is beautiful, generous and friendly. Ask for directions of anyone on any Manhattan street. One person will give you more than you asked for, and others will join them suggesting alternate routes, buses or trains. Some will even walk you to your destination.

You can’t begin to know how to help us to find our way.

We were living in New York on September 11. We watched the Towers fall in real time, and the plane hit the Pentagon, and another plane filled with heroes crash into a Pennsylvania field. My husband and his colleagues watched on a TV in an office at Cornell Medical College. Few survivors ever made it there. I watched from a television in the back garden of bookstore where I had just begun a new job.

It is a testament to humanity how tragedy can bring so many disparate voices together so quickly to come to the aid of others, even if just by hugging a colleague, opening a door, or letting someone’s car in on a freeway considerably slowed down to accommodate others in the days and weeks following a national tragedy.

Where you find opportunity for lies and bluster, surrounded by sycophants, others have always done the hard work of caring for the dying and rebuilding that which comes later.

Americans find their own heroes, in real life, and sometimes in the movies they love ... from Captain Sully, landing an airplane on the Hudson River, to George Bailey who saves the “Building and Loan.” Now, as always we look to our first responders who run into burning buildings, deliver babies in the back seats of cars, and every day risk their own lives in our hospitals, in our schools and in our transport systems, all to save others during a seemingly relentless plague that you can’t begin to understand. You are too lazy to learn, too arrogant to speak truth, too vengeful to be loved.

You perch at your podium pretending to be “a war president,” plagiarizing words from Franklin Roosevelt. You speak of an “invisible enemy,” even as you plot your revenge against governors of character who engage the fight. You reveal yourself, delivering calculated lies to mollify your seemingly baseless base, every single day. And the media provide an assist in what is tragically called a “coronavirus daily briefing.”

History will remind you that you are a coward and a disgrace.

So will New York.

And, you will never be one of us.