Two decades ago I walked into the Monitor newsroom just as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Life, many of the journalists gathered around the TV agreed, would never be the same. For a while it wasn’t. And then, for most of us, save for enhanced security at airports and federal buildings, it was.
Not so of course, for those touched by the two endless wars launched in the aftermath of the attacks, or the increased discrimination felt by those who appeared foreign in looks or behavior. But it didn’t take long for the spirit of unity and goodwill spawned by the tragedy to fade into the humdrum of everyday life. Is that what will happen once the coronavirus pandemic has run its course, whenever that might be?
The answer probably depends on the duration of shelter in place orders, the number of zeros in the death toll, and the depth of the damage to the economy. A generation burdened by college debt could enter the workforce, once it’s working again, during a recession or worse. Their futures could be altered permanently through no fault of their own.
There are virus-fueled changes that we hope will happen. One is an end to the attacks on government as the enemy. Government, in the form of subsistence checks issued to virtually every American, is about to come to the rescue. That government is us.
The pandemic should also, in one form or another, result in universal access to health care as a right. It’s for the good of all, since a sick person who can’t afford care makes it more likely that a well person who can will fall ill.
The nation’s high court, which recently agreed to rule yet again on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, faces, as the pandemic rages, a decision that’s more moral than legal. Take away health care for millions and many more people will die.
Grave as it is, the coronavirus pandemic does not threaten civil order or civilization itself. Climate change does. The current disruption to life as we know it should jar people and nations out of their complacency. It’s Greta Thunberg not Donald Trump who is right about what will happen if the world’s nations don’t act quickly and drastically to curb carbon emissions. It is time to listen to experts, not the rumblings in the guts of hucksters and braggarts.
This pandemic should lead the nation to reclaim its supply chain, to willingly pay a bit more to preserve and recapture critical industries, be they producers of steel, N95 masks, life-saving drugs or food. Just-in-time ordering doesn’t work when everyone orders at once.
Recent years have seen a population shift from rural areas and suburbs to cities. Will this pandemic change that? Cities can’t exist without mass transportation, but as the world’s population increases and warming allows tropical diseases to spread, can public transport be kept safe? We don’t know.
Combatting a pandemic or climate change requires that everyone work in concert and do their part. That’s not easy to achieve in a gig economy, where no one is a teammate and everyone is a competitor, when employer-employee loyalty is a quaint artifact of a more innocent age.
Unions and social organizations like the Oddfellows Club were created to ensure that workers had each others’ backs. Will this pandemic lead to their resurgence? We hope so. To say that we are all in this together may seem a sappy platitude but it’s true, and never more so than in times of great suffering and trouble.