Learning from the Pandemic

This past spring, communities across the United States took steps to try to contain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time of sometimes desperate innovation, as States closed businesses and schools and even churches to try to keep residents safe from infection. Many experts are now predicting that the coming months will see another rise in infections. Indeed, that is already the case in some parts of the country.

With that in mind, perhaps this summer is a particularly good time to begin to identify things that seemed to work, things that were good ideas but need some work, and things that we need to start thinking about so that we are better prepared when the next spike comes along. What did we do at the community, State, and national levels to respond to the pandemic? What lessons have we learned?  What innovations have been successful? What ideas need to be tested?  What do we need to avoid?

Here is one thought to get us started: As the pandemic closed businesses around the nation, one big concern was the huge increase in unemployment, especially among workers who may not have much savings. The federal government responded by giving each affected head of household a check for $1,200.  I suggest a somewhat different approach next time.  Instead of sending money directly to workers, give the money to employers so that they can keep employees on their payroll and, in the process, keep their health care and other benefits in place.  If businesses are not able to open for a while, employees will still have their jobs and receive some compensation and not need to start totally from scratch when the economy re-opens.

Similarly, we need to review how retail businesses adapted to continue to serve walk-in customers during this period. What practices should be mainstreamed? What physical changes to the retail environment can be adjusted to make a “new normal” work well for both customer and provider?

We’ve also seen widespread innovation in the use of online technology to keep both our K-12 schools and colleges/universities operating during the pandemic. Now, as pressures to re-open mount, is a good time to evaluate those experiences. What works best? What changes are needed to institutionalize new elements of the learning environment for the long term?  

What changes do we need to make in our health care system to ensure that we can more quickly and effectively respond to future pandemics? We are still in the midst of this crisis, but we should look at what has been done thus far, what worked and what didn’t, and prepare a new environment. Certainly, one issue is how we get medical supplies to the front line in a rapidly developing pandemic. What should be the role of the states? What should be the role of the federal government?  

There is much to be done. While the pandemic continues, we need to find some time and resources to review and to prepare for the next round and for the new normal that must follow.

Finding Community

Watching the Facebook postings these last weeks has been a struggle.  We seem to be living in a time when there are only extremes of thought.  One side, it seems, can win only if the other is utterly defeated.  Gone is the middle ground, whether it be the town square or the chambers of government where problems can be solved by people working together, finding compromise and, occasionally, even discovering new solutions that neither side can claim as their own. 

The other day, the continuing bad news surrounding Donald Trump prompted me to write on Facebook: “It is amazing how we have lost our sense of shared community over the past few years.”  Indeed, I have to wonder whether we even know how to define “community” in this new world—this global information society.

For many years now, I have looked to Wendell Berry on this issue.  Berry is a poet, novelist, and essayist who celebrates the rural, agricultural way of life that can still be found in rural Kentucky where he makes his home—a place that is not unlike rural central Pennsylvania, where I live in the cocoon of a college town surrounded by small communities.  Berry 

has made the question of localism a focus of his work for many years; in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, he described the idea of community this way: “…community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” (Berry, 1992, 1993, p. 120).  In It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lectures and Other Essays, he delved more deeply into the role of community in the lives of individuals:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.  To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it.  By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.  By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place.  By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of pre-emptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world.  As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection.  And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy (Berry, 2012 p. 14).

            Technology has tended to make less urgent the idea of localism as a defining element of “community.”  In the old days, being part of a community meant that, in one way or another, you and other members were reliant on each other.  You may shop at my store, but your daughter teaches my grandson at school.  We are not strangers on the street.  We have interconnections at many levels that make us part of each others’ lives and prompts the “pre-emptive sympathy” that Berry writes about.  

            That said, the ideal of “community” also depended in the past on the ideal of “locality.”  Today, however, we also have other kinds of community in this technological age.  Today’s professional communities may be distributed nationally or internationally.  Like local communities, they may be very important to our careers and to our sense of personal identity.  They may offer many opportunities for “pre-emptive sympathy,” but they may lack the multiple layers of inter-connection that we find in local communities.  It is all complicated.

            The complexity of “community” in our times makes it difficult to tease out a shared sense of sympathy, affection, and caring based on our awareness of connectedness and shared responsibility for a “neighborly, kind, and conserving economy,” as Berry describes it.  The result is that we are left alone with our beliefs, which, left unexplored, tend then to transform into prejudices.

            The challenge for all of us is to seek out opportunities to share experiences, our talents, our philosophies of life in ways that bring us together.  Yes, we all can look at each other and find those things that set us apart from one another.  The real challenge, though, is to find those things that can help us see how we are connected.  Finding common ground, where we can come together and build a better community, is the real challenge of politics in a democracy.

References

Berry, Wendell (1992, 1993).  Sex, economy, freedom & community.  New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books.

Berry, Wendell (2012).  It all turns on affection: the Jefferson lecture and other essays. Berkeley: Counterpoint.