It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it?
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what I’m talking about. The world as we know it has changed drastically in the past several days. It’s on all our minds and hearts.
I confess, until last week I was not overly concerned about Covid-19. Yes, I was paying closer attention to hand washing, I had stocked up on extra provisions (including toilet paper thank goodness!) Most of my concern was for my husband, who is at increased risk due to underlying health conditions. So I was focused on keeping myself healthy most especially for his benefit. But generally I was going about business as usual.
Last Wednesday morning all that changed. I read my daily email from Heather Cox Richardson, whose work I particularly appreciate because of the way she puts current events into a historical framework and perspective. On that morning I learned about the historical responses to the 1918 flu epidemic that killed thousands of Americans. Richardson contrasted the responses of two cities - St. Louis and Philadelphia - once which curtailed large public gatherings early on in the spread of disease, the other that waited until several weeks into it. The death toll was dramatically and frighteningly higher in the city that did not cancel public events and curtail activities. On Wednesday I also heard the term “flatten the curve” for the first time, and began to realize that keeping myself healthy was about a lot more than just my tiny little family’s well-being.
That morning I moved out of my insular mindset and into the mindset that people throughout history have had to embrace during periods of war, famine, natural disaster, and disease. I realized that we must work together as a society, that we must make drastic changes in our daily lives that would involve great sacrifice and uncertainty, and that we must do it all for the greater good.
It seemed the rest of the country began making that same shift that day, because as the day wore on cancellations began pouring onto the news feeds, and have continued with an amazing range and scope.
I read a lot of history, and I’ve always been particularly interested in the period of World War II. During my reading over the years, I’ve often found myself marveling at the sacrifices that war entailed. My mother was a teenager then, and she talked often about food and gas rationing that went on for years. Also, in typical teenage fashion, she complained about the personal inconvenience of being able to get nylon hosiery or use the car whenever you wanted. “But we were all in the same boat,” she said, “so we tried to help each other out the best way we could.”
We aren’t always terribly good at doing that these days, that helping each other out. It feels to me that our modern world has become very insular, that we are self-contained to a fault sometimes. As Meghan O’Rourke writes in this insightful piece for the Atlantic, “we live in a country stubbornly hung up on a damaging idea of self-reliance, a nation pathologically invested in the idea that we should all “just do it”—an attitude that challenges us to muscle through it—whatever it might be.”
I'm including myself in that category. I (proudly) think of myself as being fiercely independent. I never want to ask for help, I want to take care of myself and my little family circle all on my own. So I have also often wondered how I would respond to a crisis that called for the kind of sacrifices necessary to keep the world safe from the kind of overwhelming disaster that can threaten an entire society. Well here it is, our 21st century worldwide disaster. It’s the time we each have to set aside our individual desires, comforts, and in some cases livelihoods, and do very hard things for the good of humanity.
I don’t want to sound fatalistic, but I believe events like this global pandemic will always occur - they have ever since the dawn of recorded time, and they always will. I think there is a natural cycle of life and world events that involves change, growth, and occasional course corrections to give us an opportunity to look at ourselves, our relationships to the world and to others, and the way we’re living our lives, and maybe see and do things differently in the future.
Of course I can say this right now from a place of luxury and privilege. My husband and I are retired, we aren’t being asked to forgo income or housing or food. We’re not even being disappointed by a trip we couldn’t take or a long anticipated event being cancelled. We’re content to hang out at home with our dog for the next few weeks, to check in (from a socially safe distance) with our friends and neighbors. (I did have a moment of panic yesterday when I heard the library was closing for the duration, but then I looked at my bookshelves loaded with hundreds of books I’m perfectly happy to re-read and calmed right down.)
I’m not a deeply religious person, I do firmly believe in the precept most every organized religion adopts in some version or other. In the Christian tradition, it’s called the Golden Rule - “Do unto others as you would have done to you.” If there is ever a time to practice that rule assiduously, it is in a situation like the one we’re in at the moment. That goes for everything from buying toilet paper and coughing into your sleeve to staying out of crowds and staying home from everything you possibly can. It means helping those who are threatened with loss of income - the small businesses in your neighborhood, the musicians and artists whose gigs have been cancelled. It means donating to food banks and homeless shelters more than ever. One thing I’ve enjoyed seeing on social media are some very innovative ways people in every walk of life and all over the world have been stepping up to help one another through this. Just one example: In a nearby community local bus drivers have volunteered to take food deliveries to their routes in the morning for those children who were on school meal programs.
This pandemic has much to teach all of us about human relationships, especially in these times of global polarization and division. And as we go through these days of enforced quiet, perhaps many people will also discover that life can be enriched by spending quiet time with friends and family instead of constantly being busy with one activity or another.
Our mission is now to pull together and effectively contain the spread of this disease. It’s also to help those who are afflicted by the effects of the illness survive the process, and cope with the implications of societal changes that will incur as a result of it. It means finding our “mettle,” as Winston Churchill said, the ability to do something that needs doing that you don’t quite believe you have the courage to do. If we can accomplish those things, we will - both individually and collectively - be healthier in body, mind, and soul.
Let’s all be in it together, shall we?
Some additional reading…
24 Techniques to Manage Stress and Anxiety During the COVID-19 Crisis, by Debra Smouse