#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