The Anesthesia of Uplifting Stories
A few weeks into the Coronavirus lock-down here in Michigan, I felt a compulsion to search out good news, happy stories about humans helping humans, examples that supported the seemingly reasonable thesis that we were all in this together. Like Mr. Rogers advised, I looked for the helpers. Excitedly, I made plans to write series of articles predicated on the belief that love is all around us, even during a pandemic.
I was an idiot.
What I’ve come to realize in these last weeks of stay-at-home protests, self-proclaimed patriots storming state capitols with guns, entitled people refusing to wear masks in stores and mocking and threatening people who do, is that heartwarming stories can lull us into believing everything will be okay. Is believing everything will be okay a bad thing” Take a closer look at the phrasing: “everything will be okay.” Passive voice, making no demands on us to actually DO anything to cause everything to be okay. It’s ‘thoughts and prayers’ 2.0, an excuse.
The truth is this: Everything will be okay if we continue to follow social distancing rules, if our governors stop prioritizing money over people, if our president stops pushing untested drugs and cleaning products as cures, if Mike Pence and Jared Kushner make sure every state has all the resources they need, if the president doesn’t publicly question the number of ventilators the epicenter state requires, if we don’t re-open too soon, if our actions continue to say to our fellow Americans: the health of your loved one is more important than my need to go to Applebee’s.
The grammar is off there. Because now, with over 72,000 loved ones lost (more American fatalities than from Vietnam, 9/11, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined), it’s a little too late for everything to be okay. Now the best we can do is: Everything will get better (if we…).
I don’t want to say that positive stories that reveal our humanity in the midst of horror don’t have their place. I don’t want to say that our healthcare professionals and other essential workers are not doing amazing things. I don’t want to say that virtual birthday surprises from celebrities are not heartwarming. Rather, I mean to say, as a collective, we have not yet earned these stories. Collectively, we have not yet earned the right to feel good about ourselves. We order up triumph, hope and glory, but hold the struggle.
I live in a suburb right next to Detroit. I’m in a warm-spot of Michigan’s hot-spot. In the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, downtown parking lots were deserted, random skateboarding teens (mask-less) could use 8 Mile as their turf. And a week after that people finally started wearing masks and gloves. This determination seems to have caved after 8 weeks. Parking lots are filling up, 8 Mile traffic is close to usual, and from what I see, less than 1 in 10 people wear masks/gloves in stores.
In another hot-spot, the real epicenter, Manhattanites who probably clapped out their windows in a show of appreciation for their healthcare workers every night at 7 pm, recently spent a sunny day knotted close together in a West Village park sans masks, sans gloves. Those formally-heartwarming viral videos documenting their nightly applause seems a mere mockery of their ‘heroes’ now.
We need to stop acting like we’re in an ’80s movie and the money needed to save our community center can be raised in the span of an over-synthed pop song. This is just a dream the president is trying to sell you. He’ll say time and again that we’ve done a great job, that we should go to the beaches, that we’re ready to re-open America and our economy is just going to skyrocket. See these claims for what they are: A corrupt charlatan’s last-ditch attempts to get re-elected after overseeing the most criminally-catastrophic pandemic response in modern history.
Numbers don’t lie, we have miles and miles before we can justify our sleep. With nearly a million active cases and having only conducted roughly 23.200 tests per every 1 million, relaxing our commitment to social distancing now (as some some state governors have already done officially) has and will continue to have deadly consequences. And we must demand testing so accessible, anyone can get a free one with quick, accurate results at their neighborhood CVS. When we refuse to capitulate to the re-opening our states, refuse to relax our commitment to each other’s lives until this is n place, we are officially doing the hard parts.
We need to work hard; we will suffer and we will struggle. But if all of us refuse to skip over the hard parts, the loved ones here with us now, will still be with us when the pandemic ends.
Enjoy the confection of a viral feel-good story now and then, but don’t get addicted; don’t let them fool you that everything will be okay. Cookies are for closers and this horrible ordeal is far from closed.