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Posted Mar 19, 2020, 2:41 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Vancouver
Posts: 9,915
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Here's a refreshingly positive & hopeful take on this. It's about the US, but could just as well apply to anywhere else - if not the whole world. Aside from a bit of ugliness - people fighting over toilet paper, racism against Chinese people, price gouging, etc - I have to say I've mostly been feeling a great sense of kinship & inspiration from my fellow humans with how we're handling this.
Quote:
What Americans Are Doing Now Is Beautiful
The public’s response to the coronavirus will stand as a remarkable moment of national mobilization.
6:15 AM ET
Garrett M. Graff
The worry and unease about COVID-19 feels so inescapable that Americans can easily miss the sheer beauty of what is unfolding across the country right now. Yes, we are approaching errands that were routine just a week ago—to the hardware store or the grocery store—with the same wariness that we might bring to an Arctic exploration. Yet if we take a step back from the panic-buying of toilet paper, the response to COVID-19 should stand as one of the most beautiful moments in our country’s long history—a moment of shared, galvanizing national spirit that has existed in perhaps only in a handful of epochal years before, like 1776, 1861, 1933, and 1941, and, in modern times, after 9/11.
We are witnessing people everywhere, acting mostly independently but all together, shutting our country down—a move that ensures millions will face a massive, incalculable economic hit—to give the weakest among us a better chance against the novel coronavirus. We are each sacrificing our daily routines—our gyms and coffee shops and offices—to keep health-care professionals from becoming overwhelmed..
“Flattening the curve,” a phrase few of us had heard of a month ago, has arrived as an urgent national mantra akin to Rosie the Riveter’s “We can do it.” This call to arms reminds us how those on the front lines—the vulnerable (and equally scared) doctors, nurses, EMTs, paramedics, and other health-care professionals—benefit when all of us do our own little bit, and, in turn, how helping those first responders gives the inevitable patients, whoever they may end up being, the best chance of survival.
It is a collective act of almost unprecedented community spirit, a fundamental statement of how we stand together as a species. The many act to protect the few—an almost tribal, communitarian instinct that is all too rare in modern life.
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As the journalist Matthew Zeitlin wrote on Twitter, “One way to think about social distancing is that to contribute to a great national cause in World War II you had to, like, die face down in the muck on some tiny pacific island, now you can literally stay at home, watch the sopranos or that Netflix dating show and be a hero.”
For many people, forgoing familiar rituals—the calm of faith services or the reinforcement of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting—comes at a significant emotional cost. Moreover, the anxiety of the moment is real, both for ourselves and for our families, friends, and loved ones. Precisely because a sense of dread is entirely warranted, celebrating taking these drastic steps we are taking as a society becomes all the more important.
Even before federal and state leaders began ordering closures and cancellations in recent days, any number of small-business owners, restaurateurs, local mayors and officials, artists, and individuals provided leadership by prioritizing the collective health above their own profit motives or desperate need for income. We must recognize that truth, the collective-ness of this moment, and the mutual regard we all hold together for our communities and the most vulnerable among us in order to understand that the effect of turning off daily life with the suddenness of a light switch is actually as inspirational as it is a short-term hardship.
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The path ahead—surely weeks and likely months—will be hard. The usual negativity of our politics will be very much on display as Congress debates potential aid packages for the industries and individuals harmed by the pandemic, and as President Donald Trump’s critics and defenders Monday-morning-quarterback the government fumbles that worsened the economic and human pain of the epidemic on America’s shores. That makes it all the more important, for this one moment—at the quickening point of the crisis—to pause and reflect on the sheer wonder of what we’re all doing, together.
The most isolating thing most of us has ever done is, ironically, almost surely the most collective experience we’ve ever had in our lifetimes.
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Full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...t-2020/608308/
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