#WhenThisIsOver: Catherine Lankes
Dear Europa,
This is written by an incurable romantic about you.
When this is all over, I wish that we, your people, will wake up to a new sense of identity. Of support. Of loyalty — across those borders we so urgently closed for one another.
Because, oh Europa, don’t you see? That all your doctors are struggling to keep us from suffocating? That all of us are worrying about how to keep life alive while time is suspended? That all of us are fighting the same evil?
Don’t you see that this is your chance? Albeit in desperate times, Europa, for once, we all truly want the same thing. This means your motto could finally be true: We could indeed be United in Diversity.
This is your moment, Europa! Grasp it — and raise your flag, sing your anthem and make your way into our hearts.
But do move a little faster than usual … because quarantine won’t last forever. And when quarantine is over, your window of opportunity will have closed. You will have given nationalism a pass to encroach on even more of our houses. Nationstates will be even less likely to give up some of their own spaces. Even more of your people will have stopped believing in you.
Yet … now that anything goes within your countries, maybe everything is possible outside of them as well?
Catherine Lankes is a student in the M.S. program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is sheltering in place in Austria.
