This morning, when I opened my bedroom door to the hallway, I felt a noticeable wave of warmth, a big temperature difference between the two spaces. We have been trying to figure out our new tech-enabled thermostats, the ones that “learn” your patterns. Why will it not cool the upstairs evenly so that my daughter can get to sleep without continually asking about why it’s so hot in her room? It is registering a temperature and other rooms don’t reflect that.
I don’t know how these mechanical things work, but it brings to mind the fractured nature of suffering in the United States and the world due to the coronavirus. Some communities are experiencing untold loss, and yet it seems to allow the whole to carry on as usual. If I were to somehow have a severed hand, painful and needing immediate attention, I can’t image the rest of me carrying on with my day like I’ve written off the loss. I’d think it would disrupt everything, send me to the emergency room in agony, and alter the course of my life.
This Memorial Day weekend, as our losses in this country approach 100,000, why do we not share in the shock and grief that such a staggering number should elicit?
One
hundred
thousand
lives
extinguished.
Should we not collectively be shocked, outraged, burdened by this loss? Why are some “rooms” feeling it and others are not? Why is it not a “whole house” problem?
I think I got used to seeing the news reports each day of 2,000 more deaths. In that mindset, it would take a much larger number to cause me to register shock. I think that ability to become conditioned to such horror is unfortunate. Maybe it’s a coping tactic because I know that I cannot personally allow myself to feel such a catastrophic loss and stay mentally sound.
The human body universally activates it’s immune response to the virus in order to attack it and survive. I am far from a scientist, but I can’t imagine that it would allow one organ to fail and then carry on protecting the rest. It’s a closed system. We must do the same as a nation.
What is happening right now is an unraveling. One state differs from another in temperament, response, and behavior. One city’s numbers are the inverse of a neighboring town. One neighborhood is tragically affected while the next refuse to take precautionary measures. There is a definite sense of cutting oneself off from the whole and letting conditions deteriorate for “other” people.
When one individual or one community experiences an unusual physical event, it makes the news. A rare condition, a sudden devastation. It is “novel” and their life story receives our attention. Why wouldn’t that be magnified untold times right now?
How do we as a society assign a value to a human life? Is one life more valuable than another depending on geography, occupation, or financial status? In Judaism, one human life is equivalent to an entire world and saving one life is the highest of all our commandments. No person should be able to say that his life is more valuable than his neighbor’s. We must recognize that we cannot fathom what one person’s descendants might accomplish in the future.
Globally, there are 335,000 deaths from this virus. If we don’t feel that these losses belong to us, if we don’t allow such a staggering statistic to register in our minds, then we will not appropriately grieve together, heal together, or move forward together. What amount of loss, what number, would bring about a unified response? What kind of spike in cases and deaths would awaken a collective sense of shock and dismay?
We have always been connected; one body. For better or worse, we are all in this together. As much as my family is isolating in our beautiful home with a full refrigerator, we are simultaneously in an adobe hut in India with unclean water. We are suffering alone in an ICU. We are exhausted in a cemetery burying the dead. We are all hurting, overwhelmed, and scared.
Just as a river flows seamlessly into a larger ocean; just as one body part connects to all the others; just as air molecules (ideally) move freely between spaces, so too will our individual pockets eventually join together. It is inevitable that we will all experience loss.
The numbers are terrifying, but what is even more concerning is our (at least public) cavalier acceptance of it. “What a shame… I really liked that hand. It’s going to be much harder to play golf now.”
In order to derive meaning from our collective losses and experiences, we need a way to unitedly acknowledge our losses and share in our uncertainty of the future. Together. It is only in accepting a loss that we can move forward. We need a leader who can compassionately guide us through that process.
This is not a game or a popularity contest. This is human life. This is us.
Beautifully written and so on point.
I think people have a hard time understanding big numbers, but in this case they are rejecting the tragic reality because they can’t fit it into their beliefs about the world. If someone is suffering, people imagine it must be their fault, because it is more comfortable to lie to yourself than accept the world as it is.
Every evening at 7 pm EST, New Yorkers bang on pots, clap and yell in appreciation for the front line workers saving lives.
And every day around the same time, my husband and I go outside and sit in silence for a few minutes, for those thousands who have perished from Covid 19. For those in our zip code, for those in our county, for those in Texas, the US and the world. A moment of silence for the mourners of those who have died. I imagine somewhere on earth, someone is playing taps. I also mourn our former way of life and pray we change to better human beings in the future that is left for us.