A beautiful piece by Matt Thompson on why just "surviving" the pandemic isn't enough:
My partner’s been making a verbal note every time he comes across a sign of hope. He calls these signs “seedlings.” A friend’s listless nonprofit finds a new purpose delivering boxed meals to isolated elders in an immigrant community. Seedling. A man runs bare-chested along a road beside the ocean, waving aloft a blue flag with a picture of the Earth. Seedling. We meet a group of our neighbors, who gather at a safe remove in the long yard we share, for what has come to be called “BYOB social-distancing happy hour.” Seedling.
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Why is it, one might ask, that services such as hospitals and news organizations are closing when the public seems to need and want them most? The answer isn’t that we have bad nurses or bad reporters, or that people have turned away from medical authorities and the press has grown too liberal to gather a mass audience. The answer is that our economy had come to rest, over the years, on the cheap, endless consumption of things whose true costs were carefully hidden from us, a sleight of hand we called financialization. Amortize the cost of your phone over the course of a year, and it would almost seem affordable. Amortize the cost of your health into an insurance plan, and it would give you comfort until you needed it most. Amortize the cost of your career over the duration of a student loan, and only as you age would the price begin to grow. Amortize the cost of your house over a lifetime, and at least you would have something to pass on to your children. In this way, we became a nation of debtors, the prices for our lives set by the true owners of our phones, our houses, our health care, our education. The things we get without paying their full costs come from subsidies. The costs are all hidden. As long as people’s incomes are stable, the system works for almost enough people to keep it going.
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And now we’ve been asked to be alone as much as we can bear, and decide what part of any experience we most value. There’s no choice here between “human lives” and “the economy.” Only a possibly endless series of choices about how we will live with others, and then how we will live with ourselves.
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Perhaps it’s a stroke of grace that this war is against a dumb enemy—a virus that knows not even itself, that has neither the agency to be called life nor the strength for the death it brings to be total. Perhaps it’s to prepare us for a war against a smarter enemy, one that thinks it knows what living is, and decides it has no value. Perhaps that war is being fought inside us.
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Last month, the show Radiolab played part of an interview with the musician Esperanza Spalding, a person somehow daring enough to face the world with hope blazing in her very name. It asked her to think of a sentence that she might want to pass on to the next generation, that could pack the most insight into the fewest words. Before she said the sentence, she told a beautiful story that might help her contemporaries understand the sentence’s meaning.
Spalding’s story was about what happened when conservation biologists reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone National Park. First, the uncontrolled populations of elk and deer, feeling the threat of a new predator, stopped overgrazing the low grasslands and started foraging higher in the hills. This let trees and other more robust plant life start to grow, strengthening river banks to the point that beavers started building dams. Larger animals and songbirds started returning to the park as these new ecosystems flourished. “So basically,” Spalding said, “this one species that had become dominant and very comfortable and at the top of their food chain—just the presence of them having to confront regularly and respond creatively to a little fear completely changed the health and the landscape and the sustainability of the ecosystem."
"So maybe it’s just that," Spalding said, offering at last her sentence: “the willingness to respond creatively to fear, without trying to eradicate the source of the fear.”
My partner’s been making a verbal note every time he comes across a sign of hope. He calls these signs “seedlings.” A friend’s listless nonprofit finds a new purpose delivering boxed meals to isolated elders in an immigrant community. Seedling. A man runs bare-chested along a road beside the ocean, waving aloft a blue flag with a picture of the Earth. Seedling. We meet a group of our neighbors, who gather at a safe remove in the long yard we share, for what has come to be called “BYOB social-distancing happy hour.” Seedling.
[---]
Why is it, one might ask, that services such as hospitals and news organizations are closing when the public seems to need and want them most? The answer isn’t that we have bad nurses or bad reporters, or that people have turned away from medical authorities and the press has grown too liberal to gather a mass audience. The answer is that our economy had come to rest, over the years, on the cheap, endless consumption of things whose true costs were carefully hidden from us, a sleight of hand we called financialization. Amortize the cost of your phone over the course of a year, and it would almost seem affordable. Amortize the cost of your health into an insurance plan, and it would give you comfort until you needed it most. Amortize the cost of your career over the duration of a student loan, and only as you age would the price begin to grow. Amortize the cost of your house over a lifetime, and at least you would have something to pass on to your children. In this way, we became a nation of debtors, the prices for our lives set by the true owners of our phones, our houses, our health care, our education. The things we get without paying their full costs come from subsidies. The costs are all hidden. As long as people’s incomes are stable, the system works for almost enough people to keep it going.
[---]
And now we’ve been asked to be alone as much as we can bear, and decide what part of any experience we most value. There’s no choice here between “human lives” and “the economy.” Only a possibly endless series of choices about how we will live with others, and then how we will live with ourselves.
[---]
Perhaps it’s a stroke of grace that this war is against a dumb enemy—a virus that knows not even itself, that has neither the agency to be called life nor the strength for the death it brings to be total. Perhaps it’s to prepare us for a war against a smarter enemy, one that thinks it knows what living is, and decides it has no value. Perhaps that war is being fought inside us.
[---]
Last month, the show Radiolab played part of an interview with the musician Esperanza Spalding, a person somehow daring enough to face the world with hope blazing in her very name. It asked her to think of a sentence that she might want to pass on to the next generation, that could pack the most insight into the fewest words. Before she said the sentence, she told a beautiful story that might help her contemporaries understand the sentence’s meaning.
Spalding’s story was about what happened when conservation biologists reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone National Park. First, the uncontrolled populations of elk and deer, feeling the threat of a new predator, stopped overgrazing the low grasslands and started foraging higher in the hills. This let trees and other more robust plant life start to grow, strengthening river banks to the point that beavers started building dams. Larger animals and songbirds started returning to the park as these new ecosystems flourished. “So basically,” Spalding said, “this one species that had become dominant and very comfortable and at the top of their food chain—just the presence of them having to confront regularly and respond creatively to a little fear completely changed the health and the landscape and the sustainability of the ecosystem."
"So maybe it’s just that," Spalding said, offering at last her sentence: “the willingness to respond creatively to fear, without trying to eradicate the source of the fear.”
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