Making it Right

History occasionally catches us in moments of great vulnerability, times when we wonder what has happened and what is our role in it all.

Recently, as society begins to somewhat open up in this next phase of COVID-19, I’ve talked to some who wonder if we are perhaps culpable in some of the troubles that now assail us.  We might even be labelled as the “what have I done?” generation.

To a degree, it became more obvious with the election of Donald Trump.  Many believed America would never elect such an erratic individual and we’ve all spent the last three years watching the fallout of citizens who voted as though it didn’t really matter – or didn’t vote at all.  We have had 40 months to watch how it has all played out and we marvel at how democracy could be as thin as veneer.

Now it has spread everywhere, as we observe the world as we have known it fall prey to the challenges that were largely of our own making.  All ages have contributed to our precarious state, but with this pandemic we also realize that we can’t keep blaming political or financial elites for our vulnerabilities at the moment.  Climate change, growing poverty, homelessness, underfunded health systems, private borrowing through the roof, the erosion of our human hegemony – these all happened under our watch.  It was easier when we could blame the Boomers, or the Millennials, or whomever, but it is growing increasingly clear during COVID-19 that we have all had a hand in our collective vulnerability.

It has left us all to wonder what citizenship really is.  By continuing to view it as a political category, we have reduced it to voting every few years and occasionally publicly demonstrating.  But overall, instead of refining it, we have used it to live out our freedoms without being careful over our excesses.  Money has come to mean so much to us – how to spend it, how to get more of it, how to use it go gain influence.  If we were honest, we would admit that most of our collective and individual lives were driven by materialism than our responsibilities to the state or to our collective awareness.

And, so, here we are, feeling like victims when we should have been expanding our responsibilities to one another, to the planet, to the next generation.  Citizenship, it turns out, was just another way of our carrying on without really looking at our overall condition or how to get it to live in harmony with our world and ourselves.

It took this pandemic to not only reveal our oversights but also to finally stop long enough to see ourselves in the mirror.  We are vulnerable in ways we never imagined and our lack of guardianship over the private state left us with little power in the public state.

But that pause gives us the opportunity to make it right.  We have permitted public dialogue to become a frontier of shame, blame and a game of one-upmanship.  Yet the longer the pandemic endures, we do see signs of a recapturing of our civic spirit.  Civility, respect, understanding and sensitivity – these are the virtues of citizenship required if we are to rebuild a public life out of all these opinions.  In such situations, character matters more than proving ourselves to be right.  There are now so many voices of individual persuasion sure of their correctness that the noise of their bickering drowns out the calls for reconciliation and collective action.

The time has arisen once again, as in previous decades, to become good citizens as opposed to engaging in the voices of blame.  COVID-19 has taught us that this endless division of cells in the public space has only unleashed a cancer of distemper and inability to come back together again in ways that are empathetic and progressive. Good citizens must nurture the dialogue of hope and understanding, regardless of the desire to lash out or bail out.  Should we continue dividing ourselves in crisis moments, we will become too diffuse and distracted to come together once again to tackle our greatest challenges.  COVID-19 is teaching us that very lesson.