Our Future is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Living in Canada has been a blessing in the COVID-19 era.  Positive cases are trending downward in most regions as governments follow the lead of public health advice and citizens, for the moment at least, also show a willingness to comply.  

But our world isn’t just played out within our national borders.  The world itself, depending on where you live, is in flux, chaos, authoritarianism, economic decline, measured security, and boiling tensions.  The pandemic has brought out the best and worst in humanity, the latter best seen in countries like Hungary, China, the Philippines, Uganda, Brazil and El Salvador close down their democratic affinities and turn to nationalism, authoritarianism and, in some cases, a renewed fascism.

A globalization that stressed the free movement of goods, people, money and opportunity inevitably transported COVID-19 along the same channels, with a global consequences.

The result has been a worldwide shutdown, as nations remain hard-pressed to control a pandemic that most were hardly prepared for.  At the same time, a new incentive has emerged within displaced and refugee populations around the world to migrate to wealthier nations in search of things we take for granted – hospitals, medicines, safe food and water, doctors and, yes, vaccines.  The desire for nations to close their doors to protect themselves is occurring in the same moment millions around the world are seeking to move to safer confines in order to protect their families will create an historical moment.  This will result in an unpredictable brew of tensions, racism, dystopia, and the ongoing threat of violence.

Democracy is taking a hit in those places where it was most vulnerable.  It is the very absence of responsible government, election accountability, the viable voice of citizenship and a truly free press that is opening the door once again for the power seekers to take their shot at the brass ring.

Tensions between West and East, especially between the U.S. and China, will change everything from climate change to commerce, from humanitarianism to hatred.  The United Nations will either get more effective or fall into further irrelevancy because of the COVID-19 era.

Yet the same pandemic that threatens to spin the world out of control is also teaching us some valuable lessons, some of which we are already taking effect.  Institutions we already knew to be in a weakened state prior to the pandemic – politics, government services, hospitals, public health deliverers, corporatism, finance, media monopolization – have shown signs of recalibration, even reform, due to the present challenges.  Perhaps the primacy of public health is the most important, as the capacity of our healthy systems has been under such great stress.  The nations doing better in this pandemic have largely been those who have thrown their weight once again behind the necessity and professionalism of their public health institutions and evidence-based policy.

The experience of this health crisis south of border has up-ended the normal fixation of Americans on politics above all else.  The lack of effective democratic leadership has now pit politics and physical safety – a choice that should never have to be made – and amateur politics has been the loser.  There is no winning for a politics that, in its hunger for power, tolerates the deaths of tens of thousands of citizens on its watch.

But elsewhere, like in Canada, the strengths of governmental response and resources are gaining new respect – a regard that crosses political stripes and rewards political collaboration.  Will it last post-COVID?  Likely not, but during this moment in time that understanding of just how pivotal governments are to our very survival has created a historical moment of sanity and shift.  Should we hold on to such regard, the solutions for racism, financial profligacy, poverty, climate change, gender equality and citizen weakness and potential will be next in line for reform and attention.  If only we can hold on, stay together, during this remarkable era, and take that new respect for our public institutions into the future.  This will be a marathon of accountability, not a sprint of rampant individualism.