For those of us who had a pretty heartbreaking day four years ago, yesterday was a moment of needed release. On Wednesday it became clear that Biden was going to win Pennsylvania and the hand wringing over Georgia, Nevada and Arizona wasn’t going to matter. But cable news networks had people in a panic that lasted for two more days. I had my camera bag packed that entire time just waiting for the moment we could celebrate in the street.

As soon as I left my apartment I saw people celebrating. My elderly Dominican neighbor who I have become friends with even though her English is even worse than my Spanish started pumping her first at me. My neighbors were standing on the street and yelling out their windows. It was pretty great. I decided to head to Washington Square Park but I got on the J train instead of the M because I wasn’t paying attention and instead of switching trains I decided to just get off in the Lower East Side and walk up a couple of miles to the park while photographing people in the street. Weirdly enough when I got into the city people were celebrating a bit but nothing really worth photographing. I got up to Houston Street and I saw some people across from me dancing so I walked over to them and realized one of them was my friend Ronen. He had already called an Uber and was headed to the park so I jumped in with him.

We got there before noon and there were a lot of people there but it wasn’t quite as crazy as I imagined, fortunately more and more people started showing up and it became the exact kinda party I was looking for. People were popping champagne everywhere, dancing to music and swimming in the fountain. Who would have thought the global climate crisis would come in handy and give us warm day in November. 

I have posted some of these photos already to social media and my followers on the right keep going off about “super spreader events” so let’s address the Covid concerns right away. There has been very little outdoor transmission. If you look at the science, the combination of being outdoors while wearing masks makes it incredibly difficult to transmit covid. There were also a lot of people there but it wasn’t exactly packed in and most people were wearing masks. Obviously there were some exceptions but as someone who is very paranoid about Covid I felt much more concerned on the fairly crowded subway ride home than I did at the event. 

Anyway, yesterday was so much fun, but today we gotta start working again. I did a lot of text banking for Biden but he is certainly not my choice of candidate. I wanted someone much more progressive, but even if a candidate that I liked won it wouldn’t have mattered with all of the down ballot races we lost. We had no pick ups of state legislatures and because of that Republicans will be able to continue to gerrymander the fuck out of their states and that can’t be changed for another decade. Any court reforms will have to wait because we only picked up one senate seat and even if we manage to somehow win both Georgia runoffs nothing will get done without Joe Manchin’s approval which means the most watered down policy imaginable. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and win those races.

I bet a friend $200 Biden would win and I immediately donated half of my winnings to Fair Fight Action, Stacey Abrams Georgia based voting rights organization. She lost her Georgia governor’s race in 2018 because of voter suppression and she has spent the last two years registering voters and trying to turn out the vote and there is no doubt Biden would have lost Georgia without her. You can donate to Fair Fight here. If you want to donate directly to the campaigns you can split your donation between Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock here. This is going to be the most expensive senate fight in history and I am just glad I don’t live in Georgia because they are gonna get so many damn texts and calls and TV ads that it’s going to consume their life for the next two months. 

Okay, enough of me ranting about politics. Let’s just look at some fun photos of people finally getting to enjoy themselves after a very painful year or four. 

Click here to see photos from the Biden victory celebration yesterday in Washington Square Park. 

 

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