#480: What Stands Before Us

     “We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.”

--Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb, 1-20-21

Amid the optimistic pomp of Joe Biden’s inauguration lurked an undercurrent of realism--as when Biden himself referred to the “cascading crises” that we face. 

This new year brings us (1) the worst public health crisis since the 1918 “Spanish flu,” (2) the worst economic crisis since the 1930s great depression, and (3) the worst civil unrest since 1968.  This triple catastrophe is without precedent in our history.

Trying to process this reality, my mind reaches back to my own childhood to retrieve two keys to understanding what this moment means and why it matters.

Key #1: Peaceful transfer?

It is a 1959, and my sixth grade teacher Mr. Peirce conducts a current events quiz each morning.  It’s the height of the Cold War and Mr. Peirce indoctrinates us daily on the superiority of America over Russia.  Nikita Khrushchev has only recently emerged as the Russian leader, and we’re told that when Joseph Stalin died a few years earlier a vicious power struggle ensued to determine his successor.

But the U.S. is different, Mr. Peirce tells us.  In America we have elections, and no matter who wins, his rival concedes and power passes to the winner.  The process is routine, predictable, and free of struggle or conflict.  So Truman gave way to Ike (who would, in turn, give way to JFK). 

This, at age 10, is my first civics lesson: America is great because it has maintained the peaceful transfer of power since its founding.  In our way of life, no one is indispensable, we’re a government of laws not men, and no one may rise above that law.

The election of 2020 has changed all that.

On September 11 2001, the terrorists attempting to attack the U.S. Capitol failed, as heroic passengers crashed the plane into a Pennsylvania field.  But on January 6 2021, homegrown terrorists succeeded where foreign terrorists had failed, halting the certification of an election by invading the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.  It took police and National Guard action to restore order. 

So the transfer of power to Joe Biden has not been peaceful--it required the suppression of an armed insurrection. Yes, “democracy prevailed”–but the unbroken string of peaceful transfers has been permanently broken.  Our system is more fragile than we believed. My boyhood civics lesson is now obsolete

Key #2: Fantasyland

It is 1953.  I sit watching our 10-inch black and white TV screen as Walt Disney introduces the very first broadcast of “Wonderful World of Disney.” Each week’s episode, he tells us, will visit a different world: “Frontierland,” “Adventureland,” “Tomorrowland,” and “Fantasyland.”

I love Fantasyland.  It’s a land where elephants fly, where broomsticks fetch water in buckets, where the gods still reign on Olympus, and where skeletons ride horses up from their graves.  It’s a land of dreams (and nightmares!) where anything can happen.  It’s a place where magic rules, untethered by facts.

I love it, but even at age five I know it is not real.  I don’t expect our cat to talk, or a magic wand to appear, or a genie or fairy to grant me my fondest wish.  However much I love the TV fantasies, I remain grounded in reality.  I love playing make-believe with my friends, I die hundreds of pretend deaths on make-believe battlefields.  But I know that real soldiers, shot dead, do not walk away.

But now, I fear, Fantasyland has taken hold of millions of Americans.  They seem possessed by magical thinking. They seem to be watching a movie in their own minds, a movie where a make-believe  world obeys their desires. 

In that magical land, Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. He won a landslide victory.

In that fantasyland, the Covid virus is not a terrible pandemic causing 400,000 American lives. It is no worse than the flu. It is not to be feared.

In that make-believe land, climate change is not real.

In that pretend realm, there is no systemic racism, no white privilege, no white supremacy movement.

In that alternate reality, Russians never interfered with the U.S. elections.

In that imaginary existence, vaccines do not protect us--they make us sick—or worse, they wire us for surveillance.

Such widespread magical thinking constitutes nothing short of a wholesale denial of facts.

It strikes me that these two phenomena - - the breakdown of peaceful transfer and the prevalence of Fantasyland thinking--are the two barriers we face in overcoming our cascading crises.  One threatens our constitutional order, while the other threatens our public discourse.  Both threaten our national unity.

Our Constitutional Order

The long stability of our constitutional system is no longer assured.  It took multiple recounts, 50 court cases, the Supreme Court, the suppression of a coup, and an impeachment to get us from President Trump to President Biden.  This was the very definition of a power struggle, not a peaceful transfer.

We might hope that this struggle was a one-off recurrence, and never to be repeated.  But the signs are ominous.  Since 2000, Americans have been increasingly ready to question the legitimacy of presidential elections.  In 2000, people questioned the Florida recount, which determined the overall outcome.  In 2008, Trump and others questioned Obama’s very birthright to the presidency.  In 2016, 33% of Democrats and 50% of young Democrats considered Trump’s victory “illegitimate.” In 2020, similar numbers of Republicans disputed the election results.

I submit that, unless we find a way to conduct elections acceptable to all, we’re in for trouble.  There already has been too much unrest--Biden called it our “uncivil war.”  Too many norms had been broken, making me wonder if norms are enough to maintain our fragile fractured system.  Disrespect for our institutions is now dangerously widespread.  And it appears that America’s celebrated “individualism” has metastasized to the point where any sense of “common good” maybe too weak to motivate Americans to set aside private interest for a unified future.

The last year has finally exposed how fragile our civil stability has become, and the trends of the last 20 years point to further breakdown. The growing, infectious willingness of millions of Americans to reject outcomes they do not like is the mark of a failed state.  That infection must be stopped.  But that depends on repairing public discourse.

 Public Discourse

An open society requires dialogue among people of differing views. But differing opinions are only constructive if they respond to the same facts.  Facts are the currency of public discourse: we must agree on facts before further discussion can proceed.  Thus the cliché: the “you have a right to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.”

If facts are devalued or even dismissed, dialogue breaks down. People begin to fabricate their own “alternative facts,” and they enter that fantasyland where the real and the imaginary merge and blend

“Conspiricism” poses a special threat. While conspiracy theorists merely concoct a scheme that explains to them the true meaning of a PARTICULAR event (say, the assassination of JFK or 9/11), people infected with conspricism believe that such schemes lurk behind ALL events. For them, ANY reportage of news is merely the smokescreen behind which reality lurks. The smokescreen is part of the conspiracy and the reality behind it is evil. Thus all of life’s events, all the facts presented, are mere distractions luring us into a hidden evil. Our lives come to depend on dismissing facts and replacing them with our own imagined schemes.

In such a fact-free country, public discourse withers. Different people form different opinions based on different sets of facts, some of which exist only in their minds.  They end up with nothing to say to each other beyond epithets, name-calling, insults, and threats.  Instead of helping to reduce our civil unrest, this reign of fantasy fuels discord, conflict.  In the end, people decide discourse is futile, and then, as we saw on January 6, “initiative becomes the privilege of violence.”

Our Task

The year 1968 also brought a parade of horrors: the Tet offensive, the student riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the riots burning up whole sections of our cities, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the police riot in  Chicago, the Soviet tanks invading Prague, the election of Richard Nixon, the bombing of North Vietnam.  In the wake of that awful year, I quit my political science studies and my political career ambitions because I had lost faith in our political system’s ability to solve the nation’s real problems.  

It is possible that 2020 was as bad as, or worse than, 1968.  If so, my conviction is confirmed: more than 50 years later, we have still not resolved the issues that plagued us then. 

Martin Luther King named three great evils that threaten America’s greatness and threaten us still: racism, materialism, and militarism.  He knew civil rights alone could not solve these problems, so he called for a “revolution of values,” that would transform America’s culture.  He was calling, not for political reform, but for spiritual transformation.

We get the government we deserve, and since 1968 we have not deserved the best.  Our civic stability is fractured, our people too often choose fantasy over reality, and so we have brought the “cascading crises” of Disease, Depression, and Disorder upon ourselves.  “What Stands Before Us” now is the same vast task King named then: a revolution of values.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2021

#480: Is this, finally, our nation’s Great Awakening?

In this moment of national crisis, the popular uprising triggered by George Floyd’s killing raises the question: Is America finally ready to acknowledge and repair the systemic racism embedded in our culture? 

William Bratton is the former police commissioner in Boston, New York city, and Los Angeles.  When interviewed recently about George Floyd’s killing, he referred to slavery and racism as “America’s original sin--the scar that never heals.” My own awakening to that scar’s depth took many years, but I was fortunate to have many opportunities.

In December 1969, during my senior year at Holy Cross, all the Black students packed their bags and left campus, vowing never to return unless a group of expelled Black students received amnesty.  During a recent student sit-down protesting a campus visit by GE recruiters considered “scabs” (since GE was on strike), a disproportionate number of the protestors punished were Black.  A college administrator offered the excuse that, in a big mostly white crowd, those students were easier to spot!

In response, we white students went on strike in solidarity with the Black students.  Eventually amnesty was granted, and all the Black students returned to a campus newly awakened to their plight.

I spent the summer of 1971 as a research assistant for a doctoral thesis on “Racial Stratification in the US in the 20^th century.” My job was collecting data for the chapter on lynching.  I constructed tallies of the lynchings in each state for each year since 1900.  Such tallies were rarely published in mainstream (white) periodicals, so I spent two months digging through obscure, often defunct Black journals that printed monthly totals of lynchings.

One day a Black reference librarian confronted me.  Why, she asked, was a white boy like me searching through these Black journals?  Why wasn’t this job given to a Black student?  What was I trying to prove?

Our encounter, perhaps 20 minutes long, ended with me (1) getting access to the archives I sought and (2) realizing that the burden of proof was on me to both acknowledge my privileged state and to persuade her of my bona fides.

My research left me appalled. I learned that thousands of Blacks were lynched not only without trials but also often without being charged, and even without any crime at all being committed.  Blacks were often lynched to cover the crimes—or simply the embarrassing behavior—of whites (as when a white girl flirted with a Black who was then lynched for rape after she was, in fact, beaten by her white boyfriend).  Blacks were lynched singly and in groups.  Blacks were not just lynched by hanging: Blacks were shot, drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, buried alive, burnt at the stake, blowtorched, skinned alive. Pregnant Black girls were lynched after their babies were ripped from their wombs.

And blacks were lynched in frighteningly large numbers throughout the 20^th century, well into the 1950s— right into my own lifetime.

It became clear to me that lynching was a cultural institution aimed not at justice, nor at crime, not even at individual conflicts. Lynching was often disguised as vigilanteeism, but in reality it aimed at terror--terror to frighten the Black population into continued submission.  In short, lynching replaced slavery to keep Blacks in their place during the Jim Crow era. And I saw that, as lynching finally faded away, the states with the most lynching became the states that executed the most Blacks.

My work that summer made me aware that terror against Black people had “evolved” from one institution to another: from slavery to lynching to the death penalty to mass incarceration to police brutality.  These different forms of terror all aimed to keep Blacks in “their place.”  Whites thus aimed to maintain supreme control.

In 1972 I moved to Washington, DC for work, and barely three miles away whole city blocks still lay in ruins from the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination four years before.  My job was in a comfortably white suburb, but there was nothing comfortable about those burnt-out Black neighborhoods.

In April 1973 I flew to Chicago to scout the University of Chicago for my doctoral studies.  Riding the elevated train south from the Loop would bring me west of the campus, so I planned to catch a bus east to the school.  I soon realized I was the only white person on the train, and every station stop simply added more Black passengers.  Finally an older Black woman got up and approach.

“Do you know where you’re going, young man?” she asked.

I told her my plan to reach the campus.

“Well, it’s best if you get off this train as soon as possible.  This is not a safe train for you.”

I thanked her, thinking that I was still not fully aware just how deeply divided our culture was--and had been for generations.

That fall my wife and I move to Hyde Park, the university enclave on Chicago’s South Side. We soon learned that none of our neighbors dared to venture into the “ghetto” neighborhoods to our north, west, and south.

 The following summer my parents visited and I offered to drive them to see the house they had lived in when my father was in the navy in the 1940s.  Thirty years later, it was an all-Black neighborhood, and when we parked across the street the Black gentleman rocking on the porch was clearly frightened by this car full of white people staring at his house--and we were too frightened even to explain our presence.  We simply drove off. To this day I regret I did not talk to the man.

In 1977 we moved to Dorchester, a rapidly changing inner-city Boston neighborhood with its historic Irish and Italian population fleeing as Black families moved in.  We found our apartment by word of mouth: it  had been off the market for two years for fear of Black tenants. Our suburban relatives were often reluctant to visit our “tenement” home, but we stayed.

Our children eventually enrolled in the Raphael Hernandez Bilingual School, where they acquired a unique education as members of a white minority in a multiethnic student body.  This was, of course, fresh in the wake of Boston’s busing crisis over segregated schools, and as we persisted we witnessed most of our white neighbors moving away rather than subject their kids to Boston’s public schools.  Citywide, schools became increasingly Black as white families abandoned a school system they could no longer dominate.

We still live in Dorchester, and our once lily-white neighborhood now includes a stable mix of Black families, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Haitians, gay couples, and a remnant of the Irish and Italians.  But as late as the late 1990s, my daughter’s Holy Cross classmates were often not allowed by their parents to spend weekends at our “inner city” home.

By now our own family includes people of color on both sides: my brother’s wife is Chinese-American, and our nephew’s wife is African-American. Their wonderful bi-racial kids are now our beloved kin.

Through all this time I’ve met my share of overtly racist people, but for every person who spouted racist sentiments there have been many more who were simply blind to, or even in denial of, racism’s pervasive grip on American Life.  Perhaps they have not benefited from experiences like my own, which awakened me to the reality depicted by the evocative imagery of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

For me, the basic truth is that slavery’s impact has never been eradicated.  And this brings me back to the notion of slavery as our Original Sin.

Most people’s worldview is shaped by their view of human nature. People who think human nature is simply good expect a world of happy human relations, and seek to blame any distress or injustice on external forces. People who see human nature as basically evil expect the worst of others, and seek to shield themselves from all threats.  But Christians have a more complex view.  For us, human nature is essentially good but factually flawed and wounded. We therefore hope for the best but expect that humans, unaided by divine grace, will typically fall into evil ways, not because of external forces alone, but because there is a moral misery within us.

This idea is usually applied to the whole human race.  But what if we apply it to a nation?  Is it possible that our national character is so rooted in our original enslavement of others that we as a people are fatally wounded and permanently incapable of goodness?

My own experience since 1969 until now has made me think so.  Yes, we have witnessed great gains since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Since the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther king, we have seen Blacks take leading roles in movies, television, sports, business, and politics at all levels--including the presidency itself.  Mixed-race couples and families and now more widely accepted, and there are broad legal protections for Blacks in housing, folding, employment, voting, and education. 

But the Covid-19 crisis has exposed how superficial some of these gains have been.  Black Americans are harder hit by the pandemic because Black Americans still lacked the privileges white Americans enjoy in housing, health care, wealth, and education. It was Dr. King himself who believed that America’s wounded nature would require more change than mere civil rights:

The Black revolution is much more than a struggle for civil rights of the Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws--racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.

The moral ills King decried in 1968 remain deep flaws in American Life.  One might even think that their persistence, despite all the activism and progress of the past 50 years, proves that no treatment will ever heal our national scar, so deep is the wound.  We might fear that slavery and racism comprise not only our Original Sin but even our permanent moral defect.

But now the perfect storm of pandemic and police killing has unleashed fresh healing forces.  People pent up from confinement take to the streets, unmindful of the health risks, to decry the death toll that both police and pandemic have taken on Black America.  We now see both the spread of virus and the blight of brutality as symptoms of our deeper moral malady.

And now come polls suggesting that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans are finally awakening to the historic reality of systemic racism.

So against all odds, amid all the sickness and chaos, all the failed national leadership and the heroism of frontline workers, all the patience of those staying home and the persistence of protesters marching and kneeling and even lying in our streets--amid all this rises the hope that now, at long last, we might be ready to shed our past, to rip off that ancient scar and find true healing of our deep national wound and, with God’s grace, get to our nation’s promised land where we can, finally all together, breathe freedom’s fresh air. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020

#479: After Covid19, “normal” is not good enough

This moment tries our patience, our courage, and our hope. But that does not mean we should yearn to return to what we had. Instead, we should imagine something better and safer.

When Jesus called Lazarus from his grave, it was just a temporary return to his normal life. Lazarus would still die a natural death, only some time later. But for Christians observing the Easter season, the resurrection of Christ is something different.  The resurrection is proof that love can conquer death itself. The resurrection brings, not just an extension of life, but an altogether new life beyond death--what Benedict XVI called “an evolutionary leap.”

Like the doubting Thomas of last week’s gospel, we naturally seek certainty—and right now, there is very little certainty about what life beyond Covid19 will be like. But just last week Pope Francis proposed Un plan para resucitar (“A plan for rising up again”) and suggested that,  even if the shape of things to come is uncertain, we should imagine the aftermath of this crisis as a creative leap:

That aftermath has already begun to be revealed as tragic and painful, which is why we must be thinking about it now. I’m living this as a time of great uncertainty. It’s a time for inventing, for creativity. The creativity of the Christian needs to show forth in opening up new horizons, opening windows, opening transcendence toward God and toward people…save yourself for better times, for in those times remembering what has happened will help us.

If we are smart, life after pandemic will not be the same, but will bring a “New Normal.” Indeed, Francis argues that our response so far proves we can shape our future life:

If the health authorities order that we remain confined in our home, it is the people who make this possible, aware of their co-responsibility in stopping the pandemic.”

We’ve seen this in so many small acts of solidarity: people delivering food, making masks, sharing stories, beautiful images, gallows humor, and “meeting” online, inventing things to do together at home, honoring front line workers, and donating to those needing help.

Thus in the very act of cooperating to “flatten the curve,” Francis says, “We have recognized the importance of joining the entire human family in the search for a sustainable and integral development.” And we have also understood that “for better or worse all our actions affect others because everything is connected in our common home. An emergency like Covid-19 is overcome in the first place by the antibodies of solidarity.”

I believe Francis is right: to protect the future health of our people and our planet, to rise again, the best “antibody” is solidarity itself. But that means we must learn and implement at least four main lessons.

Lesson #1: We must dismiss the denials and doubletalk.  For the last month I’ve been debating online with folks in denial. They asserted that Covid19 is no worse than the flu, that shut down orders are the overreaching, “draconian” measures of an authoritarian state, that people’s rights and even free will are being violated.

My wife and others advise me against debating deniers as a waste of time.  But in this crisis the deniers are dangerous people, exposing others and risking the overburdened healthcare workers.  I figured it was worth a try. 

And some people actually looked at facts and listened to reason. When one Facebook commenter suggested that those protesting shutdowns were merely exercising free will, I said:

Yes, but free will should take account of the common good....it's why no rights are absolute. If I test positive, does my free will allow me to infect as many others as possible? True public safety (eg traffic lights) and public health (eg rules against dumping toxic materials) will always cause limits to individual free will. These limits are the dues we pay to live in civilization.

Happily, my comment got a favorable response, and we found common ground. But most of my debating has been futile.  Some people have fixed opinions that no facts dent.  Others kept arguing around the facts, acting so desperate for “normalcy” they simply resorted to magical thinking. 

In the future, we must sideline such deniers quickly; they contribute nothing to shaping our new future.  We must challenge their “alternative” reality, and then distance them if they persist.  If they are office holders, we must dismiss them from office. We cannot trust our lives to those who cannot face reality, to leaders who pass the buck or waste our time playing blame games.  We cannot follow those whose fragile egos resort to settling scores.  If 10% of Americans reject social distancing and refuse to stay at home, we must shun them. The virus is more powerful than politics, and deaths don’t lie.  We have no vaccine for incurable stupidity; we can only quarantine it.

Lesson #2: We must fix what’s broken:

The virus has exposed many fissures in American Life. 

·   We have no universal health system to collect nationwide data or track infections.

·     We have no federal structure to mobilize a pandemic plan or response. 

·     Millions of Americans lost health benefits when they lost their jobs, exposing our mistake of tying health care to employment.

·      Many other Americans have no health coverage at all.

·     The virus hit minorities and poor people, who are less able to social distance and stay at home or work or study remotely, and because they’re less able to lose income and still pay their bills.

·     Millions of homeless are marooned without safe haven, and millions of elders have suffered as senior care facilities became super spreaders.

·     We find US federalism too creaky to respond as fast as the virus spread, with federal officials claiming either too little responsibility or too much authority, while state officials pushed a patchwork of policies that reflected local politics more than public health.

Our new normal will need to be better than what came before.  We will need to tackle the dire legacy of our 50-year growing wealth gap.  We’ll need yet again to ask what holds back the people of color, and what to do about it.  We’ll need to find the homeless homes, and guarantee health coverage to all, and make nursing homes truly safe.  We’ll need a national agency to coordinate public health policies at all levels.

Even without a new pandemic on the horizon, we have a lot of work ahead do. But there will be a new pandemic on the horizon.

Lesson #3: We won’t get fooled again.  Anyone who says we could not see this coming is DEAD WRONG.  After Sars in 2003 many scientists predicted the inevitability of more deadly epidemics, and Bill Gates’ 2015 Ted talk described our own coming pandemic in graphic terms that now seem all too familiar: (https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready)

Yet no major leader called to rebuild our public health structures or to establish a national pandemic response plan. And Covid19 caught us unprepared.

Consider, by contrast, the best practices of countries that have suffered less, like South Korea, Germany, Iceland, and especially Taiwan. With 30 million people just off China’s coast, Taiwan (the world’s 9th densest country) figured to be Covid19’s second global hot spot. But Taiwan prepared for pandemic after widespread Sars deaths in 2003, and its universal health system kicked their epidemic plan into full gear. On December 31 they began screening passengers on board arriving airplanes, isolating anyone testing positive or revealing sick contacts, and tracking their previous contacts. Every new case of respiratory disease showed up in their national health systems database.  Quick isolation and contact tracing stopped the virus before it spread, and made “stay at home” orders unnecessary. Everything stayed open, yet Taiwan has only 6 confirmed deaths--the equivalent of 72 U.S. deaths, while the U.S. itself at this writing has more than 55,000 deaths and still counting.

Next time--and there will be a next time--we must be prepared.  Our old standards are not good enough.  The 1918 “Spanish Flu” spread because infected WWI soldiers returned on troop ships to their native lands.  Those trips took days or even weeks, but today continents are only hours apart.  Our modern global village leaves no time to prepare for an infection that spreads this fast.  We must be prepared with all the systems and equipment already in place, or when the next “early warning” comes, it will already be too late.

We were fooled this time. We paid a gruesome price.  We simply cannot get fooled again.  This is true not just for the next pandemic, but for other threats we can see coming.  And the biggest threat, by far, is climate change.

Lesson #4: We must avoid the fate of the frog.  We know the fable of the frog in the lily pond who boils to death because the pond is heated one-degree-per-day, too gradual for him to notice until it’s too late.  Our terrestrial lily pond is also heating, but too many people refuse to notice.

As with pandemic, we have ample warning about climate change.  Both are natural disasters we’ve failed to  prepare for. But there are two differences.  First, the threat of climate change--making large regions of the earth uninhabitable for billions of people--is much worse.  Second, the impact of climate takes not weeks but years. Whereas nations mobilized once Covid19 suddenly started killing people, the deaths from climate change seem slow enough to ignore.  Until we begin to boil.

Both my son Chris and Pope Francis have described Covid19 as mother nature’s wake up call, warning us to take better care of what Francis calls “our common home,” the planet. I suspect they are right: we may survive our failures over Covid19, but we will not survive climate change unless we learn our lesson.  

Our delay responding to Civid19 cost many lives and trillions of dollars. We cannot delay the challenge of reversing our collision course with climate disaster. Don’t we all wish the response to pandemic warnings had been quicker, more aggressive?  Don’t we want that quicker, more aggressive response on climate? So we need to shape our aftermath with changes that show we have learned our lessons.

Pope Francis has long decried the “globalization of indifference” that accepts business as usual, but pandemic has imposed the “timeout” we might need, an opportunity we might heed, to act on climate. And the “antibodies of solidarity” we’ve witnessed during this crisis proves we can do it as long as we do it together.

We still have time to overpower climate change. This is our moment to say: going back to normal is no longer good enough!

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020

#478: Our Mission: Stay Home—But Stick Together

This moment feels perilous because it is. We feel helpless to control events, and moreover we are told to remain alone. Our only power lies in staying physically distant from each other, hoping isolation protects us. But are we really alone? And are we really so isolated?

The Spanish flu hit the year my father was born, and he has been gone nearly 8 years. In our lifetime we’ve never seen anything like this moment in its global scale, sudden spread, and long duration.

Most of us now are sheltering in place. When the orders went out to self-quarantine, I was surprised by the irony. “Quarantine” comes from “quarantino,” the 14th century Venetian policy of banning ships from landing at port for 40 days (“quaranta giorni” in Italian) during the Black Plague. The number 40 may not have been arbitrary, but was probably based on the 40 days Jesus fasted in the desert—and the 40 days of Lent. The irony: we are now under quarantine during Lent 2020, so most of its ceremonies—including the Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday services—have been cancelled.

Traditionally, many Christians have practiced “giving something up” for Lent. But this year we have no choice, as the First Baptist Church’s sign tells us:

When Pope Francis preached to an eerily empty Saint Peter’s Square last week, he first described our situation in terms of spiritual distress:

For weeks now it has been evening. Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void, that stops everything as it passes by; we feel it in the air, we notice in people’s gestures, their glances give them away. We find ourselves afraid and lost. 

And then he also named the spiritual challenge that accompanies a crisis like this:

We are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

Francis is right. Now, as my own self-quarantine has taken hold and focused my thinking, I've realized that many moments in my own past echo the present crisis —— and those echoes seem to all teach the same lesson: whenever a crisis triggers physical isolation, it challenges our commitment to human solidarity more than ever.

None of those past moments were as grave or massive as this one—but they all posed a similar challenge: We must all row together.

 When I was born, in December 1948, my mother left the hospital knowing she could not take me home. My older sisters had contracted scarlet fever, and the family home was quarantined — — the front of the house even bore a poster warning people to stay away. 

So instead my mother and I spent the next few weeks staying with my mother's best high school friend, who just happened to be my father's only sister. My father could visit, then return to my sisters. I'm sure my mother and my sisters still suffered terribly being isolated from each other. 

And I’m sure this upset the usual happiness of having a new baby. But the support from my wider family—my aunt, uncle, and cousins--meant that we all got through that crisis.

In May 1955 the surgery to remove my tonsils was cancelled for fear of the Polio epidemic that was spreading among children even in hospitals, and especially during the warmer months. My tonsils never came out. That summer, the same fear of Polio infection kept many children, including my sisters, from seeing the Red Sox at Fenway park. It fell to parents to guard their kids against dangerous settings, which often meant keeping them at home.

One dark afternoon in November 1965, walking home from school, I saw all the street lights and house lights suddenly go off. Reaching home, I could see the power was out everywhere. But what did “everywhere” mean? We had no other means of communication at home, so we had no clue what was happening until a neighbor visited with a transistor radio, informing us that the entire eastern seaboard was blacked out, with no word on when power might return. 

1965: Manhattan in Blackout

In Boston itself, elevators in the new Prudential Tower (The tallest building in the world outside Manhattan at that time) stopped between floors, trapping dozens of passengers in the dark with no exit and no way of knowing what had gone wrong. After the crisis, stories told of many “foxhole friendships” created over the next 24 hours.

In March 1969 I Visited the Ann Franke house in Amsterdam during my Paris school break. I was shocked by how confined this small attic apartment felt, and the painted-over windows, concealing the life within, made the sense of isolation total. This was like the family’s prison, I thought. But then I spotted a small hole scratched in the paint of the window through which I could spy the back garden. My first thought: “At least this gave some contact with the outside world.” Then a second thought: “But that outside world was also a prison, just bigger.” Ann, of course, did not survive, but her diary did, and her father did, and even she gained two years of life in hiding--all due to the courageous willingness of another family to hide and feed them. Here again, solidarity supported those facing danger.

Boston’s “Blizzard of ‘78” was a perfect storm combining the greatest 24-hour snowfall in our history with hurricane force winds and astronomical high tides. It inundated and paralyzed an entire snowbound region for weeks.

Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis promptly imposed virtual martial law, calling out National Guard trucks and jeeps to rescue stranded folks. Military Police patrolled our neighborhoods, banning all drivers but medical and other essential personnel. 

Public transit shut down except for subway tunnels. No one could get to work, schools, family, friend, or stores except on foot.  This lockdown lasted two weeks, so neighbors banded together to share food, run errands, and organize cookouts in the snow. No internet relieved our isolation, although phones worked. For two weeks the entire population sacrificed mobility and comfort so emergency workers could rescue people from flooded homes and snowbound cars. Eventually the roads were cleared, and life return to normal amid gratitude for the common effort we all made faced with nature’s overwhelming power.

On September 11, 2001, my wife and daughter were both working in downtown Boston when the news broke that two airplanes from Boston had crashed into New York’s World Trade Center. Amid general fear of the unknown, and with an FBI anti-bomb truck raiding a hotel in Copley Square, they agreed not to risk riding Boston's transit system and returned home on foot, five miles through the anxious city streets. Since more than 400 Bostonians were killed in those planes, area communities and churches joined with New Yorkers to mourn the victims and support one another. One of my client parishes lost one parishioner in each plane—thus that community faced two funerals and two families to support.

In April 19, 2013, following the Boston Marathon bombing, Governor Deval Patrick requested all citizens to “shelter in place,” making Boston a ghost town overnight, so that the escaping terrorists could not hide among the general populace. 

April 19, 2013: "Shelter in Place"

The manhunt succeeded less than 24 hours later, and people began to emerge from their homes. The solidarity of an entire region acquired the label “Boston Strong.”

Over the years, public officials have also advised at-risk individuals to stay home during hurricanes, blizzards, and heat waves -- and urged family friends and neighbors to check on their welfare. In all such cases, people survived because isolation and solidarity became partners.

Of course, the current crisis is bigger than any of those, so the solidarity we need is greater than ever before.

Now we are seeing such solidarity everywhere. Businesses offer delivery, museums and activities offer online exhibitions and concerts, neighbors talk at a distance and offer help, friends and family share face time on the internet, people make donations to hospitals, shuttered workplaces, and institutions that are fighting the crisis.

We also see solidarity’s absence: people crowding beaches, hoarding essential goods, price gouging, demanding rents. 

As the crisis grows, so does the urgent need for solidarity: social distancing isn't tolerable without spiritual unity. As Francis said, we are all in the same boat.

Put another way: When power endangers us, we need to mobilize wisdom. One thing we know: this virus has become global, so the wisdom must be global too.

There will of course be life after isolation — — but what lessons will we take? Will we live better prepared for the next time? Will we reopen our borders to trade and movement? Will we withdraw into enclaves and shut others out? 

Next: A Timely Vision for Matching Power with Wisdom

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020