Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.
New York City was in a state of shock back in March of 2020. In many parts of the city, residents heard sirens all night due to people being rushed to area hospitals. Since most people were home, and few were in the streets, things seemed grim.
New Yorkers tried all kinds of ways to deal with the unfolding tragedy. One of the ways people tried to cope was a collective daily cheer session for essential workers.
Every night at 7 PM, many New York City neighborhoods came to life with the calculated whimsy of a cuckoo clock. It started with a single neighbor clapping; then others would join in. Some opened their front doors or hung from their windows to say, “woohoo.” There were banging of pots and pans with spoon s, dogs barking, delivery people blaring their horns, or blowing whistles as they rode through the city. It was all over within five minutes each night.
The clapping spread through New York City on a Friday night in late March, and in countries like Italy, India, and Spain, similar actions followed. In New York, the idea was seeded by a strategic marketing firm and spread over social media outlets. The idea was to thank people who were on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 7 PM noise-making event was supposed to be a one-time event. After that, residents were to repeat it once a week.
It felt useful to many who participated. New Yorkers felt like they were coming together to cheer on doctors, nurses, E.M.T.s, U.P.S. workers, and Instacart delivery employees. Many saw it as a way to honor New Yorkers who were putting themselves at risk to protect the city.
It was lovely-until it wasn’t.
I knew early on what I was seeing wasn’t going to last long. Cheering for those with demanding jobs that were tougher because of a crisis was nice, but how long could people be cheerleaders without wondering what was to be accomplished?
I knew all of the support would fade away when reality set in. Not only were we dealing with people falling ill and dying, we soon had a city with zero culture, a million or more people out of work, increased crime, but vandals also spray painting the town as if it were 1988. After May 25th, we had rioting and looting in many parts of the city. We had significant issues to deal with.
Social media was abuzz due to governors all across the nation giving daily briefings. These talk show style segments soothed many residents and lulled them into a state of sleep. Citizens were comforted by the fact someone was trying to do something about the pandemic in their state.
I was alarmed. I knew instantly that something wasn’t right. I saw abuses of power, legislatures abdicating their responsibilities and a citizenry lulled into a state of complacency. It’s one of the reasons why I started this newsletter. The messages I saw on social media were troubling, and so many fell for the lines they were being fed. “We’re all in this together,” “ wear a mask to protect others, not yourself,” and other feel-good phrases were being pushed out of statehouses all across the nation.
I was skeptical of everything that was going on around me. I started asking tough questions back in mid-April. When I did, I was excoriated. People thought I should simply follow the rules, “listen to the science,” and stop being such a Trump supporter. Little did they know, I’m not too fond of The Donald.
Almost everyone in my professional and personal circle was okay with whatever our mayor, governor, and the president told us. Nothing that was said to me made sense then, and it certainly makes no sense today. Was I the only one who saw the emperor had no clothes?
All of this reminded me of a story I heard about through a friend. It was part of a book I need to read. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described a surreal scene in his book, The Gulag Archipelago:
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly — but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter… Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”
You might be wondering why in the world anyone would be afraid to stop clapping for any leader. To understand this, you need to know Joseph Stalin.
Stalin was a ruthless dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952. Although no one knows the precise number of political prisoners he executed, estimates usually reach well over a million.
Historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev estimated that Stalin had about 1 million political prisoners executed during the Great Terror of 1937–38 alone. That doesn’t even count the 6 or 7 million who died in the famine that Stalin created through his policies or the millions who had to do long, stiff sentences in the Gulag labor camps.
So when people were afraid to stop clapping for Stalin, they had good reason.
There is an inconvenient truth about the past seven months. Lockdowns have failed. Economically, socially and medically. Like many other countries, especially America, people put too much faith in experts and political leaders. They all failed us. These so-called leaders who were “listening to the science” are instituting reopening pipelines that are nonsensical, arbitrary, and replete with an illusion of metrics and goals.
Those in charge of reopening and recusing are part of a system that is an echo chamber that functions in measuring its success while disregarding its effect on the people who live in the economy ruined by their terrible decisions. Daily infection rate reports are eerily similar to Soviet harvest reports. They sound impressive but are meaningless. Plus, they aren’t verifiable. Who sees the details of who is sick or dying? What are the demographics of the people who are in these reports? Have you checked recently?
The politicians listen to the government agencies, who then tell us to trust “the science.” We are then supposed to listen to the politicians who have spent all of these months moving their goalposts and shifting their lockdown rationales while simultaneously destroying the economy. The next thing they do is blame other politicians.
It takes courage to be the person who questions authority, especially during times where everyone seems to be blindly following orders. A certain amount of bravery to stand up, ask tough questions, and be the one willing to stop applauding, even when everyone else keeps going.
There is often a price to pay for this kind of courage, but there’s also a reward beyond measure. We live in a society where much of the power has been ceded from elected officials to “expert” bureaucrats. By their nature, bureaucracies specialize in one area of government and cannot balance multiple vital interests. As such, it is dangerous to allow bureaucrats to dictate intrusive and extensive edicts on the population without debate or input from competing interests. In the long run, a politician who governs illegally and by fiat is potentially more dangerous.
If we were “all in this together,” why were certain businesses and livelihoods deemed essential? We haven’t had government treat its citizens this arbitrarily and capriciously since the American Revolution in 1776. Before then, we had a king. Isn’t that why there was a revolution?
Share Think Things Through Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University’s School of Business and is a 28 year veteran of the fast-paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in several hit broadway and off-broadway musicals, including “Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. Also, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.
Originally published at https://claytoncraddock.substack.com.
