A Timeline of 2020 Through Brian Lehrer Show Callers

After five years of working at The Brian Lehrer Show, I’ve become acutely aware of the power of the call-in segment. The wisdom goes: If Brian asks it, someone will call in with an answer. We’ve heard from leap year babies, people who are cheating on their spouses, people who’ve accidentally killed someone, veterans, bus drivers, climbers of Mount Everest, LARPers, and Dreamers.  

But in March of 2020, our call-in model was briefly turned on its head. It didn’t matter what we asked, callers had questions for us: What’s going on? Where can I get tested? What do these symptoms mean?

Before we got set up to work from home, I remember sitting in the office with my headset on at 9:59 a.m., closing my eyes, and bracing myself for the explosion of calls that would start in one minute and not stop for two hours. Behind every blinking line was another anxious question, and an answer I didn’t have.

As public health officials began to get the word out about how the virus spread and “social distancing” became common parlance, we were presented with a new startling truth: underneath those questions that everybody had about infection and spread were vastly different realities. No one was experiencing the pandemic the same way -- inequalities were exacerbated, health care workers were exhausted, kids were missing out on prom and graduation. We had to figure out how to represent those stories on the air, who to give voice to and when. We turned back to our specific call-in questions, and listeners like we knew they would, showed up.

Over the past year we’ve heard from so many of you, and you’ve given us so much insight into your world, and how you’ve experienced 2020. A lot of you called to talk about loss: of income, jobs, weddings, school trips, and your faith in public officials and the police. Most painfully we’ve heard about your family members, and your friends lost to COVID. But we’ve also heard joy and gratitude this year. Joy about the projects you’ve started, at one point joy of finding toilet paper at your local bodega, and gratitude for your friends and community.

So here, I’ve made a caller montage, a timeline to try to capture some of the confusion, pain, and strangeness of this year. I wanted to make it for our listeners, but also for myself because hearing your stories is something I am grateful for. Hearing from you has made me feel less alone this year, and that’s something I want to remember. So thank you, to all of you for calling in, answering our questions and teaching us about humanity—the big stuff and the small stuff—everyday.