Coronavirus has been ugly enough already. Here in New York, we have 15,000 dead – we all know someone whose relative has died even if none of our own direct contacts has perished – yet. That story is being replicated around the globe.
Yet to me somehow this time has so far revealed the positive side of humanity more than the negative. True, we have the idiot in chief to make our blood boil daily, calculating when we think he deranged and deranged when we think he is calculating. True, there have been scammers, and reckless cowboys, and penny-pinching partisans and racist bigots. One lady interviewed for TV clearly thought her hair care was a human right, while other people’s health care was not.
The positive side of humanity has come through far more strongly. We have seen inspired leaders, generous philanthropists, ingenious scientists, assiduous journalists, courageous health care workers, endlessly adaptable parents, stoic shop workers and cleaners, brave patients, thoughtful neighbours and uplifting communities. Humanity delivers miracles every day, and we don’t need sightings of the Virgin Mary to prove it, we just have to keep our senses open.
My problem is that I fear for what is coming next. I predict that the balance will switch to the negative side of humanity. The positive will still be there: our hearts will be warmed by stories of miraculous recoveries and eventually by global scientific collaboration and brilliance, and a vaccine will eventually tame the beast some time in 2021.
But 2021 will feel a long time coming, and our frustrations will spill over long before then. Sitting on the couch for two months deprived of many pleasures is a manageable hardship for three months or so, especially when we remind ourselves how much tougher things are for some others. But once three months becomes six, during the stifling humidity of high summer when the city is almost unbearable in normal times, then nine, then twelve, our nerves will fray. We will stop enduring and start blaming.
Actually, I think the bigger issue will not be the continuing restrictions, but their relaxation. For it is one thing for us to be told that we are permitted to venture out, but quite another for us to be ready to do so, no matter how claustrophobic we feel at home.
Over the last few weeks, we have been led to believe that the world outside our front doors is a death trap. That has been necessary. In order to make everybody comply with the necessary precautions, we had to be cajoled into complying with many other marginally useful ones. We all took a week or more to fully embrace the restrictions, and it would have taken longer if the message had been more nuanced. Many people took far longer than a week and are still rather cavalier.
Some time soon, the message will change. People will be allowed to return to offices a few times per week under various conditions. We will be allowed back to restaurants and bars, as long as we sit far enough apart. Gyms and salons will open up, and after that other non-essential stores and businesses. We can’t stay as we are until the vaccine arrives, the balancing act between saving lives and saving livelihoods has to shift.
But will you be visiting the gym on the first day it opens? Why is something deemed reckless on one day suddenly safe the next day? The virus is not tamed. We might still die, without doing anything dumb. If we become infected, it is highly likely that most of the people we live with will be as well, including dad with his lung condition. The best that can be said is that the odds of catching the virus might be slightly less. Even that is doubtful. What might be more true is that, if we catch it, the odds of us passing it to lots of people who we don’t share a house with will be less, because of the testing and tracing. But that seems scant comfort, even if we believe it. And why should we believe it, when the president said that anybody who needed one could get a test at a time when nobody who wasn’t an NBA star could get one?
China has started opening up, and what has happened feels to me to be a good predictor of what will happen elsewhere. The restaurants are open but few are dining. The malls have reopened to silent corridors. It makes sense. It took us a week to learn how to behave to save our life. Surely it will take far longer to unlearn that?
If everybody was to take this journey in the same way at the same pace, it would be OK, the recovery would be slow but it would arrive in the end. But in reality we will all be making different trade offs, and that will create tensions between us. We will display more and more of the ugly side of humanity.
Imagine a company trying to reopen in New York, one with some small manufacturing, sales, distribution and administration. The company might or might not have received some government help, but it will still be cash poor and operationally compromised. It might have been able hurriedly to devise some safer processes and put up some screens, but it will essentially be making it up as it goes along. It will ask its staff to be part of that effort?
Many people will respond with ingenuity and humanity, but there will be conflicts as well. Some people will be in a hurry to get back to work, needing the money, while others will refuse, fearing illness. Who then gets paid? Who gets to decide? When does welfare get switched off? Can management insist, and fire those that refuse? What happens when it becomes obvious that management have designated safer conditions for themselves than their workers?
Everybody will be a part of this experiment, and everybody will have their own perspective and priorities, which will create conflicts everywhere. Already, I see vast differences when I go shopping and ride home with the heavy bags on the bus. The posher folk keep ludricrous distances from others and are wearing space suits, while the poorer people, probably still working themselves, make compromises to get on with their lives. On the affluent Q23, people won’t get on if there are more than two passengers already, but on the blue collar Q60 they fill most seats, because they have to get to work, and because at work the risks are far greater than anything on the Q60.
This will pit parent against child, husband against wife, manager against worker, worker against worker, white collar against blue collar, old against young, fit against fragile, rich against poor, business against government, government against government. The stakes are high, the rules are absent, the dimensions are vast, and the timescales are instant.
Here in the US, in the midst of all this we will have an election. Oh bliss! We all need to prepare for some ugliness in the months ahead. Hopefully we can still have our hearts warmed by the everyday stories of humanity’s kindness and ingenuity and all those other miracles. We will need them more and more as this continues. Let us pray for that vaccine, and avoid eating bleach in the meantime.
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