There’s Something Very Unifying About A Global Crisis

There’s something very unifying about a global crisis — a great inescapable event that affects us all at the same time.  Such crises seem rare but in modern times, they happen often.  We have world economic crises, a global climate crisis, and a crisis of faith in our leaders that’s led to widespread social uprisings around the world.  These sorts of crises affect everyone to some extent, but the effects are hard to gauge.  Some people are affected disproportionately, others not at all.

But in the case of coronavirus, it’s different.  Coronavirus is affecting everyone — rich and poor, young and old, all races and creeds — at the same time.  And while some of us say to ourselves, “It’s just the flu” or “I’m young, it won’t kill me,” our lives are still being majorly impacted by it.  For starters, there are social restrictions and they’re getting tighter by the hour.  Moreover, the world economy is shutting down, which means that along with toilet paper, money is going to be in short supply..

This kind of reaction is unprecedented for a virus.  What is it about this virus that has the powers that be so terrified that they’re willing to lockdown whole countries to stop it?  Whatever that may be, here we all are, in our homes for the most part, individually and in small groups, “staying safe” and waiting it out, whatever “it” is.  Is it a wave?  Will it sweep over us and some of us will be swept away, as Trump says, “forever” — never to return.  Oh no, too scary, right?

So let’s assume we’re not going to die, just for the sake of argument.  We’re going to follow guidelines and not do anything stupid, and we’re going to survive coronavirus.  But what will we do in the meantime while we wait for the all clear?

This is where the Internet and media can actually help us.  We are alone.  We are lonely. We are going stir crazy with our families. We’re bored.  We’re depressed.  We’re scared.  We’re anxious.  But we have each other and, for once in human history, we’re all in the same situation.   We also have widespread access to communications with phones and tablets and the Internet and social media and streaming media and news and too much news and altogether too much news.  Most of us need not be alone.  We can keep our peeps around us online and on the phone and chat as much as we want, maybe more.

Which brings us back to where we started — there’s nothing like a national disaster to bring people together in a bond of shared experience.  We all know what each other is going through, in broad strokes at least.  Food, hygiene, children, parents, jobs, businesses, money, doubt, uncertainty; to some extent, we’re all there.  

So the obvious next question, for me anyway, is ” What does this mean for the future of humanity?”

Based on the proposals of newly socialist Republicans and even some Democrats, it might be more socially conscious.  Witness the radical calls of politicians to “make everyone whole” (Biden), give $1000 to every adult in the land (Romney), give $4000 to every adult in the land and a sliding scale for younger dependents (Kennedy). Add to this free coronavirus-related healthcare, relaxed guidelines for unemployment insurance, deferred tax and student loan payments…who knows, maybe they’ll even give us all a pony.  

I don’t mean to make light of these better-late-than-never proposals, because we’re going to need all of them and more to keep ourselves going while we wait for the economy to restart. This will be especially true if the epidemic lasts more than a month or two, which they now say it will, with predictions of August and even September for any hope of a return to normalcy.

When that happens, it will be interesting to see which of the various stimuli stick around after the threat of coronavirus abates.  Healthcare, student loan forgiveness, even universal basic income, were all aired on the debate stage earlier in the Democratic Primaries.  What seemed “radical” and “polarizing” a couple weeks ago, now seems almost vitally necessary even to Republicans, bizarre as that sounds.  There’s almost a rush to bail out the little people, especially after the government threw trillions into the stock market debacle to little discernible effect. 

One of the ironies of the coronavirus epidemic is that we needed Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren with their crazy, unelectable ideas; trouble is, didn’t know it yet.  But just as it seemed as though Centrist Democrats had won the day and halted Sanders for good, Nature stepped in and supplied a means by which his ideas and those of other progressives were not just appealing but necessary — the implacable reality of Covid-19.  Some might call it karma.

Meanwhile, here we are, all in the same big boat, in our own little staterooms as it were, sailing uncharted seas much like those hapless cruise ship passengers we’ve been hearing about lately.  Having no choice, we will float around together until the big wave finally washes over us and recedes. And on that fine day, we’ll disembark and see what we can make of the new world we find there.  But one thing’s for sure — although the immediate crisis will end, our world will never be the same.  And maybe that will turn out to be a good thing.

Photograph by P. Alejandro Díaz (12 August 2005)