What Has the Country--USA--Learned from This?

Charles Blow, an NYT columnist whose brother died during pandemic times though not of Covid I don't think, has another smart read in today's paper -- "The Pandemic Exposed Our Empathy Deficit", worth a few minutes of your time:

We have been well taught by this virus, humbled by it...

 An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll of American adults released last month found, “Fewer than half are always or often avoiding nonessential travel, staying away from large groups, and wearing a face mask outside of their homes” for the first time since at least February 2021. “And just a third are avoiding others as much as possible.”

People have absorbed their personal risk calculations and simply decided that they will return more to a so-called normal life, even as the virus continues to claim lives. We seem, as a society, to have become resigned to the virus, accepting a certain level of sickness and death as the new normal...

Take, for instance, a report released last week by the Pew Research Center, which found that economic hardships in the first nine months of the pandemic fell hardest on lower- and middle-income families. “From 2019 to 2020, the median income of lower-income households decreased by 3.0 percent and the median income of middle-income households fell by 2.1 percent,” the researchers wrote. “In contrast, the median income of upper-income households in 2020 was about the same as it was in 2019.”

While the well-off shopped online and dreamed of delayed vacations, whole swaths of America were falling into an even more desperate state. The pandemic wasn’t an inconvenience but instead a life-altering experience, a complete reordering of things, a gateway to more suffering, not just from illness but also from society’s ills.

Hunger, trauma, violence. The pandemic exacerbated all three, and more. But we don’t center therapeutic remedies in our discussions of what’s next. We center crackdowns and handouts. We center moving on over getting back up. We center a “return to normal” over the plights of those for whom normal was never enough.

An America now plagued by endemic disease faces a real challenge: Will we behave differently and do better, will we care for people rather than cuff them, or will we resort to the response we too often have — of not allowing ourselves to truly register need so that we don’t have to truly contend with it?

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It's a rhetorical question, of course.  Anyone living reality in this country knows the answer.

"Look away, look away, look away..."  An eighth-grader allegedly beat, killed and raped a 10-year-old.  Child killings (even unintentional!) in city shootings are through the roof, and yet we move on. Because we want to eat out, go to the shows, travel at will.  Our American birthright, it seems.

That's insane.

I'm glad I can't live like that. Dispassionately, not knowing Christ, true freedom, and love. I've never been able to live like that...

Counting my chips, while others suffer.  For heaven's sakes, we're in another world war! (please don't tell me America is not in this one.  No one believes that, we didn't even try to hide our actions... and we believe too much our own propaganda over reality staring us hostilely in the face. We're the good guys who fix it so we always win; by birthright, not faith and grace, natch. /s)

I was wrong about Charles Blow.  Thought he was just another NYT identity-candidate promotion (the gay food critic Frank Bruni got a column when they needed "representation";  the black graphics designer got a column when Bob Herbert left them.  Frank, of course, has long since moved on for allegedly greener, younger pastures "teaching" college kids, mentor-like helping 'em learn the biz).

But Blow has managed to retain his roots in reality, even with his wealth and social status in New York.  Maybe he was older, didn't come from a soft upper-middle-class background like most of them opining, and had established himself well before he was chosen...

Either way, the column is worth your time, a few minutes reading, and perhaps some extended thinking as/if you observe the world around you in the coming days?

Nothing at all wrong with wishing we could go back to "normal", but the observant are humbled a bit at least. Not taking babies on airplanes, then complaining when they home sick or receive... poor service. (so many complaints, so little time...) Not wondering why some people seem affected, or ill even, when encountering life's little challenges.  The virus changed us, for better -- if you own stocks and now have the conveniences of "working" from home and are increasingly sheltered from other in society -- for worse, if you didn't and don't.

Who is withdrawing from community life really?  And at what cost to the country?  The humbled don't insist you answer, but they're not so afraid to honestly ask the question.  Carry on, then. 

We've got wars to win.