10 hopes from the apocalypse

Back in early March, when the epicenter of the pandemic seemed to be moving to Spain, I saw images of a ghostly Madrid. Places like the Prado Museum, so crowded when we visited, were closed, the streets outside empty except for police. 

We are used to apocalypse meaning the end times, but as in the title of the last book of the New Testament, Apocalypse really means Revelation. This pandemic is revealing some of the best and most heroic aspects of our human nature. Also some things that don’t work and what we should find astonishing.

There are few silver linings amidst all the death and destruction, but surely one of them is the opportunity, in this enforced pause, to think about what we appreciate (or miss) and how we could make the future better. Resist the temptation to return to “normal”—including reverting to our well-worn personal biases. Learn from this time when everybody is on the same side.

This is a work in progress because I'm still learning. But here are 
10 things I hope we learn:

1.       We have to take care of other species, if only for the sake of our own. Zoonoses—infections, like the novel coronavirus, that hop from animals to humans—are becoming more common, and this one has proven an unprecedented disaster. If we want to protect the livelihoods and indeed lives of millions of people, markets in wildlife like those in China, for example, have to remain closed. Changing the way we farm and treat other animals can no longer be treated as nice-to-haves, or some inherent conflict with the important business of looking after human beings. Our lives are connected with theirs.

2.       Taking care of the environment is not a luxury either, and it has quickly become apparent just how possible it is. Businesses that for years have resisted letting employees work from home have suddenly found, when told they have to do so, that it is possible. Air travel has ground to a halt yet technology still allows us to meet with others around the world. Since any future travel will be more than we are allowed now, surely there are ways to continue living with less pollution.
We have seen, within weeks, extraordinary reductions in levels of pollution, in cities like New York and Los Angeles. We have seen clear skies in Beijing and fish swimming in the Venice canals. No one could bear carrying on with the terrific human costs of this pandemic, but when the crisis has passed, we have an opportunity to gain something with regard to an even greater crisis for all generations—the climate emergency. All air travel cannot be canceled (at least, not for those of us who live oceans apart), but surely we will have learned to live without some of it. Having managed so many business meetings online, do we really need to resume flying people around the world for work?

As Richard Nelson Bolles pointed out years ago in What Color is Your Parachute?, until the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century almost everyone worked at home. They had a farm, or a blacksmith shop, or a bakery. With so many reluctant employers having found, when push came to shove, that it's perfectly possible for their workers to be productive at home, do we really need them all to resume coming back into the office? Sometimes, perhaps, but surely not commuting every day. We have an opportunity here to reduce stress as well as greenhouse gas emissions.
If we learn only one lesson from the sacrifices people are currently making, I hope it is that as younger workers stayed home to protect older generations, we can grab this chance to save the planet for future generations.

3.       The flip side of this, of course, is those who must and have continued going to work. While I, for example, work at home anyway, I couldn’t if I had to go into an emergency room to work, or drive a bus. Have we noticed who is truly keeping life going during this extraordinary period? Health care workers, first responders, transport personnel, delivery drivers, grocery store workers, postal workers, trash collectors. And in many cases, these most essential workers, including carers who are overwhelmingly women and disproportionately people of color, are not compensated fairly in the first place. And they have risked their lives. Almost every health care worker in the U.K. who has died of COVID-19 has been black or a member of an ethnic minority. Non-white people make up a share of health care workers in this country that is far beyond their proportion in the population. 

Will we remember key workers, like the brave veterans of the war that this is, and value them properly in the future?

4.       Human rights are not just individual rights. We, especially Americans, are used to thinking of the Bill of Rights, such as our right to assemble; we notice that this is curtailed, and that is a very serious matter. But why is health care not a basic right? Why, at a time of catastrophic mass unemployment, is it tied to people’s jobs? We should be asking this question even if we have different ideas about how to address it. If our neighbors get sick but are afraid to go to the doctor, because they can’t pay or don’t have the right immigration documents, that’s not just too bad for them. It has a cascading impact on other people, who do have insurance and citizenship. The interest of the entire community is served by some kind of basic health care coverage. I hope we can find a solution to this instead of just falling back on tired partisan tropes.

Since this all probably sounds pretty left-of-center so far, here’s a different example. Some people in Britain, particularly critics of the Conservatives, have been quick to criticize the prime minister’s reluctance to restrict civil liberties. Boris Johnson seemed incredulous when first asked if the police could have a role. But I’d rather him hesitate than, like Viktor Orban in Hungary, take advantage of the pandemic to make the country more authoritarian. Hungary’s parliament has expanded Orban’s powers with no time limit. Here is a country right in Europe, not long free from communism, and at the first hurdle, checks and balances have failed. 

So although I’m not a Johnson fan, I would rather have a government whose instinct is to preserve civil liberties, rather than take the first opportunity to limit them. How much better for the government to step in once the public in general was clamoring for these drastic measures, than to impose them earlier and just have them flouted.

5.       Collective action is a real thing. Like most people, I was slow to think of this disease in terms of collective risk. I understood (or thought I understood) my personal risk of catching the disease, and what I could do to minimize my spreading it to others, even if I was asymptomatic. But the strange thing about flattening the curve is that it isn’t so much about the risk of any one person spreading it to any other individual nearby. By staying home and out of each other’s way, we aren’t so much protecting individuals, or even their families and others they must interact with. It only works on a total, numerical level—to bring down the average rate of infection, and slow the spread. That is a remarkably hard concept to understand.

Here’s a simpler, practical example: The “beg” button at pedestrian crosswalks. We shouldn’t be touching those now anyway, but they are entirely for the convenience of drivers; the assumption is that road traffic should flow uninterrupted unless a pedestrian demands otherwise. For years, many North American cities have resisted nudging things in pedestrians’ and cyclists’ direction instead, saying it would be impossible. Now we are told not to make nonessential journeys and to walk or cycle for exercise, and suddenly, it’s possible. Cities should continue this nudge, because it would help tackle the deadly obesity problem and all its attendant health concerns, not just because it helps clear the air.

6.       Government, and whether we can trust public institutions, really matter. Do our elected officials have, and importantly listen to, expert advisors? Or is everyone just choosing his or her own conspiracy theory off the Internet? Suddenly, that’s a matter of life and death.

7.       Thrift, an almost archaic word, is actually a real virtue. As are old-fashioned things, like a postcard put through a neighbor’s letter box, offering help. Not everyone, as Trish has pointed out, can use a phone. Certainly not everyone has the wherewithal to use more recent technology.

The other day on BBC Radio 4, someone was urging us, when we find a chicken, to roast it, cut the rest up and make a stir fry, then boil the carcass for soup. A couple of generations ago this was normal; Trish and I were already doing it. Will we, in the future First World, continue buying too much food and just wasting it? Or will we remain more aware of the value of what we have, and the work that goes into getting it to us?

8.       “Social distancing” really means physical distancing. Not long before things got weird here, Trish and I went to a pub where someone she knew was performing with his band. I had feared we’d been to our last concert together, and so we were delighted to find that Trish could get something out of live music that she can’t from recordings. We were looking forward to doing it again, though now we don’t know when “again” will be.

But while we maintain physical distance from friends and relatives, we have also been brought closer together. For the first time outside Toronto, I’m able to join in services with the Church of the Holy Trinity, as are people living in other provinces and countries. One week the music was led by someone in New Brunswick; another friend dropped into coffee hour from her current home in Saskatoon.

My cousin used to call my dad her “Fake Father” because of her special relationship with our family. Well, we have “pretend nieces” in Illinois, the only people in the world who call me “Auntie.” We rarely get to see them, but now they’re on Skype to me all the time.

9.       If you live in the northern hemisphere, have you noticed birdsong recently? The swallows, cuckoos, and other birds are on their return migration to this part of the world. A cuckoo (yet another thing I’ve learned from the radio) weighs less than “a packet of crisps,” but flies all the way from Africa to the village where it was hatched. The birds are singing everywhere, and more people are aware of them, because they are home, and going outside for once-daily exercise.

Trish now starts her essential job, at the grocery store, at 5:00 AM so that she can get the shelves stocked before customers come in. It’s a good idea from a distancing point of view. When I can’t go back to sleep, I listen to Radio 4, which at that hour is still the BBC World Service. This is followed by such rarefied listening as the Shipping Forecast and Farming Today. Then, just before the Today programme kicks off at 6:00, there’s the “Tweet of the Day.” Nothing to do with Twitter or its most execrable practitioners—it’s literally a tweet, the song of a bird, and two minutes of information about that species.

10.   Most of all, will we recognize that our lives are, quite truly, in each other’s (washed) hands? Depending on each other is not just a quaint ideal of community, and trying to shop—or shoot—our way out of this crisis will only make it worse. In a society that glorifies freedom and individual choice, we need each other, need other people to do the right thing. We must recognize, as the Christian says to God, “I cannot do it on my own.”

A few weeks ago now, our next-door neighbor texted me that the international space station was about to pass overhead and her family was all going out in the garden. I stepped outside for a chat (from our usual safe distance over the fence) and couldn’t believe how clear the sky was, how many stars. Certainly where we live, in the flight path of Heathrow airport, I’d never seen such stars in London. Perhaps it was the absence of most flights, or just less pollution in general. 

I picked out Orion’s belt, and Tracey told me the bright planet I could see in another part of the sky was Venus. I don’t remember ever knowingly seeing Venus before. Then a small lit object appeared, moving steadily in a straight line from Venus past the moon, until it winked out like a sunset. 

That was the space station. Human-made and human-occupied, but in time with the music of the natural spheres. Maybe it’s still possible to coexist. And we didn’t even have to leave the backyard.

Happy Earth Day.

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