I am suddenly and terrifyingly and depressingly under the influence of this whole Covid-19 thing. I’m not sure how it happened exactly, but just two days ago I was mainly feeling, if not OK, then somewhat comfortable. Feeling, that is, that I’m basically in a safe place, with plenty of food, company via my son and his family with whom I’m recovering, my computer and smartphone to keep me up to date on the latest outrage from our Dear Leader, an outlet via these blogs when I get too overwhelmed by the stupidity out there, and online books to read and keep me occupied. I can also talk to friends and relatives when I choose. So I go for my daily walks, I read and write when I need to, I exercise a bit to recover what I’ve lost during my recent stroke, and consider myself, despite being in the highest-risk group for contracting and dying of this nasty virus, fortunate, or reasonably so. As to the pandemic, I have reassured myself with that old nostrum: “this too shall pass.”
Suddenly, though, and it probably stems in part from talking to a wider range of people recently, and also from some segments on the Newshour—an interview with Bill Gates, a piece on the plight of EMTs or emergency medical technicians, a sobering piece on the awful percentage of deaths among people of color—I am feeling as if the apocalypse is imminent. As if the whole world and its culture are about to collapse; and all of us with it. This is not altogether paranoia or alarmism on my part either. The fear expressed by EMTs—those people who are dealing with emergency calls about coronavirus cases daily, hourly, and seeing for themselves how many of those people die—is truly terrifying. One would have to have a heart of stone not to feel empathy for these poorly-paid techs, afraid especially of either contracting the virus themselves, or bringing it home to their families and friends. One would also have to have a stone heart not to bleed for the terrible plight of minority communities, who not only have jobs that force them to keep working in perilous situations (they make up a majority of the hospital and healthcare workforce), but whose longtime-impoverished living conditions as a result of historic racism have guaranteed that their lack of affordable health choices makes them the most vulnerable of our people to the ravages of the virus, which the horrendous statistics (up to 70% of the deaths in places like Chicago) testify to. Finally, Bill Gates, with a frontline seat at the remediation methods frantically going on worldwide, assured us of one hard fact: until the world has a proven vaccine—which will take a year and a half to test and get into the population and assure “herd immunity”—none of us can really feel safe. Oh, we’ll be back to work and shopping and eating and hanging out with our friends, but another outbreak is not only possible but probable until that vaccine and mass immunity are in place. Worldwide.
Think about that. It will be another year and a half, at least, before we can safely co-mingle again. Touch again. Embrace friends again. And even then. In other words, we humans, the social animal par excellence, have had to alter the very attribute which makes us most unique, most human. Our sociability. Our cooperation. Our brilliant ability to cooperate to hunt, to garden, to make war on our enemies, to love those with whom we grow and speak and learn in ever larger associative groups. All of that has been suspended in order to combat this virus. It is almost as if some evil comic-book villain, envious of our accomplishments, can be heard saying something like: ‘So, smartass humans, you think you can rule the world, take that!’ And zap, we’re all scrambling to get away from each other to save our precious, imperiled lives.
That’s really what has happened. When I’m on my walk, people coming the opposite way go out into the street to avoid even minimal contact. At home, all of us keep some distance. No hugs. No sharing of food from one plate to another. No sitting together at meals. And with Easter coming this week, I’m wondering how we will manage that usually festive dinner. I suppose we’ll have to maintain our distance, and know that back home, there will be not even a modest gathering of the clan this year. It will all have to be virtual—a Zoom call to include everybody flung far and wide. Which has always been tolerable on holidays; but now, even the small groups that are lucky enough to actually be together must keep their distance. It’s incredible, when you think about it. Which I think most people try not to do. But think it or not, everyone, without exception, feels it in their bones.
And perhaps what everyone now finally also senses is this very critical fact: We humans are not only social by nature, we’re also, at a deeper level, profoundly connected. Not just with all other humans (the virus has proven that in a most dramatic way), but with all the life on this planet. And that one thought should give us pause. It should persuade more of us—some of us will not be persuaded, even as death sweeps us away—that this connectedness, this “interbeing” as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, must become a primary fact not only in our lives, but also in the new culture that is emerging even now, as the old one dies. We are connected; not separate entities that ‘make our own reality,’ but each one deeply dependent on all else. And that means that we can no longer treat all other life as our plaything, as our garbage heap. It means that we cannot continue to pour our waste into the ground, into the oceans, into the air. We cannot continue to act as if our culture and our being is some special, god-ordained open system with no responsibility for the damage we do outside ourselves—for “externalities” as the corporations like to put it. Like nature, our way of life must be transformed into a closed loop system. Everything must be able to feed into everything else. There can be no plastic that lies undigested for ages; no nuclear waste that lies poisonous and deadly for eons; no garbage dumps that poison our waters and soil for as long as there is water and soil left. No. All has to be so constructed so that it digests and turns to food for all our fellow creatures. Just as that which dies in nature is transformed into necessary food for all else. The loop is closed, as ours was for eons before our industrial system intervened. Nothing is wasted. Nothing can be wasted. (To see what some major thinkers speculate about the coming phase shift, see rebelwisdom.co.uk, whatisemerging.com, the work of Daniel Schmactenberger, and the lectures of John Vervaeke on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.)
Ah, but you say, the current situation is taking us in exactly the opposite direction. With everyone separated, with each human unit on its own and trying desperately to stay away from every other, and preserving only its own life no matter the cost, no matter who else has to die to ensure that separation, aren’t we going rather toward more selfishness, more isolation, more inclination to hand our destinies over to tyrants and corporations, if only they promise to keep us alive and isolated? Haven’t people proven as recently as the Democratic primary that they fear “revolutionary” change of even the mild kind that Bernie Sanders offered?
It’s a critical question. One which I dare say no one has the answer to. The only thing we have to count on is the simple fact that crises nearly always produce something new, some unforeseen truth or pattern that emerges out of chaos—and this is a crisis such as we’ve never seen. And there’s also this one added thing we know: not everyone will die. Some large portion of humanity is going to survive this crisis in the same way it survived all the great bubonic plagues, the Black Death, the 1918 flu, the Depression and Great War that followed, the nuclear confrontation and mutual assured destruction, the AIDS pandemic, and on and on. True, this is different in scale and severity. This is different in that by its very nature it militates against that unique coming together that humans have always relied upon. But it does not, for most of us hopefully, blot out that capacity, deep in all primates, for empathy. For cooperation. For putting aside that drive to elevate oneself above all others, that drive to compete which seems irrepressible—and which the economists tell us is foundational and primary for all humans. And which, in fact, is not.
And that, it seems to me, provides the only basis for hope. Humans have survived and thrived all these millennia not, we are now informed, because of all-out competition. Humans have survived because of our capacity to cooperate. To empathize with those in our group, and to sacrifice our personal gain for the survival of others, of, ultimately, the whole. There are thousands, millions of humans who are doing just that, right now. Not the oligarchs at the top; not those still desperate to preserve their privileges; but those at or near the bottom, like those EMTs who are risking their lives every hour to try to save others. And their co-workers in hospitals who are doing the same thing. And grocery clerks and drivers and firefighters and farmworkers and thousands of others who are doing the dangerous, unglamorous work necessary to keep us all alive. It is always so. And many many people are aware of it, and are cheering them on. And it is this awareness that we must hope provides the lift, the cultural jiu-jitsu we all need to bring about the great shift that must come. Wherein the culture that has put us in this mess will slowly or suddenly, as now, be seen to be defective, and in urgent need of removal, of replacement so that not just those at the top, but all of us, can survive. Together.
And here we might paraphrase Benjamin Franklin at the time of our founding, by saying, ‘we must indeed all survive together or we shall not survive at all.’* Amen, Ben. Therein lies the great choice that looms before us, the one that this miniscule, lowly coronavirus is forcing upon us. Will we learn and change so that we survive together? Or will we persist in our folly, and not survive at all? Something tells me we’ll soon find out.
Lawrence DiStasi
*Franklin’s actual words were, “We must indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
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