→ See more of our coronavirus coverage, including community resources and personal stories.
My Scottish-Canadian relatives used to tell a gallows humor joke about the dark early days of World War II, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s nightly aerial bombings. An optimist and a pessimist meet at a pub. The optimist says, ‘things can’t get any worse.” The pessimist counters–”oh yes they can.”
As we battle this peril, hope has become elusive. Americans are dying, the economy is a wreck and families are stretched to the limit. Still, believers find light in the ancient rituals of Passover and Easter, with their messages of overcoming oppression. It’s a reminder that human society has endured plagues, wars and depressions.
Sometimes a crisis is an opportunity for changing our ways. Social security and federal support for labor unions came out of the Great Depression. The 1960s Civil Rights movement led to the beatings and murders of protestors, but resulted in civil rights and voting rights laws.
What our current mess reveals is the stark fault lines in our nation between haves, have mores and have nots. These divides have been simmering for decades, but now they deepen in the gloomy daily roster of deaths, hospital admissions and lines at food pantries.
The obvious one is the disproportionate manner in which communities of color have been affected. The CDC reports that one third of patients hospitalized in the first 30 days of the virus were African-Americans, who make up 13 percent of the population. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh released data that show 40 percent of those infected are black in a city where they compose about 25 percent of the population. Rhode Island is still working on details of which groups are most affected, but community statistics show that proportionally more people from urban communities where most of the state’s minority groups live are sick.
Yet it isn’t just a matter of race. The United States has long lived under the myth of an egalitarian society. Political figures who emphasize how unfair life is for the poor and working people are too often accused of demonizing the successful or being socialists. But now it has become almost laughable to deny that these fissures don’t exist.
It isn’t just about who gets sick and can get treatment. Rhode Island and particularly Massachusetts are both national leaders in access to health care, with very few citizens uninsured.
What the virus has exposed in the crash of economic and social life is the horrible fragility of our society. Consider our greatest armor against the virus–social distancing. For the better-off and better-educated, this is more inconvenience than life-or-death issue. White collar workers click away on laptops and conduct business through Zoom. The blue and pink collars –the folks who stack the shelves, clean the hospitals and deliver packages — put themselves at risk every day.
These worker bees are also the first to have their hours slashed or be laid off.
Looking ahead, we need to extract our heads from the sand. What good does it do for our nation to be the world’s military Leviathan if we can’t prevent a large swath of our citizens from infection?
A decent minimum wage, family leave measures and social safety nets all deserve attention. Even conservatives are supporting government support for free testing and medical care for the infected. It’s not a big leap from that to some measure of guaranteed health care for the poor.
When things get back to something resembling normal, it would also be nice if we could tamp down the culture wars. This happened a bit after the 911 attacks, but soon evaporated.
We’re all jittery and anxious. Yet we need to understand that in the long annals of history, things have been worse.
Let’s adopt the spirit of a sign I saw last week on the lawn of Rockwell School in Bristol. It read, “We’re all in this together.”
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard at 6:45 and 8:45 every Monday Morning and at 5:44 in the afternoon.
