Pandemic Platitudes

April 14, 2020

In this pandemic, I am lucky. I have a house, money in the bank, and many layers of security, plus I already work from home. I can take long hikes, ride my bike and take solace in nature. Yet I’m also not lucky: I’m an entrepreneur whose business has virtually dried up in the past month, and whose health insurance ends August 15. My previous plan – relocate back to Spain, where there is universal healthcare – is now up in the air. Spain has been horribly hit by COVID-19. Will my business revive? When will travel be safe again? Will I be able to go there? If not, how do I find (affordable, decent) healthcare? Not to mention a means to earn a living…

Most of my acquaintances see me as comfortably well off, like they are, and while I am, they may not understand the precariousness of my comfort, especially in a country like the U.S., where there is virtually no social safety net. Most of them either have steady jobs that are unlikely to disappear any time soon or are retired and pretty much set for life. So lately I have been around many wistful, philosophical conversations on gratitude – online, outdoors at a safe distance, of course – in which my friends wax poetic about how the pandemic is bringing them closer to their families, helping them get back to what really matters, getting them back in touch with their craftier selves, building community and caring for others – albeit at a safe distance, etc. About how when all this is over things will be different, the world will be kinder, we will continue to care about each other more.

I experience a low-grade seethe when I hear these conversations, pronounced by people who are mostly getting a welcome breather (welcome in a perverse kind of way, as they acknowledge) from the usual breakneck pace of life, whose incomes are not affected, who know no one who has contracted COVID-19, much less died from it, in our remote corner of the world. I’m of two minds: on the one hand, I truly celebrate that they are experiencing the pandemic as a respite from normal life that gives them time to reflect and re-prioritize. On the other, I feel mortified at such blind privilege, such incredible luck that they can be experiencing what are such hard times for so many people as a time of philosophical reflection, personal transformation, and greater mindfulness, symptoms of an already very privileged life.

When we talk about privilege, most of us have it in some ways and lack it in others. I’m white, educated, well-travelled, had a stable upbringing and I earn a good salary (in “normal” times) – that’s my privilege. But I’m also a divorced single-mother entrepreneur in late middle age (therefore, pretty unattractive as a hiring prospect for a “real” job) putting her daughter through college whose income is drying up and health insurance is disappearing –my privilege comes to a screeching halt there. Sort of. I also live in a wealthy country which – very uncharacteristically – has promised to send me a check and has enacted a program (Paycheck Protection Program – PPP) which may just pull me through this low point… if it works, if the money hasn’t dried up already, and that’s still hard to tell. Like most people, I have a few pluses on my side, and a few minuses. Overall, I feel fortunate, but those gaps in my privilege do haunt me.

Part of my luck, too, is that I am actually able to shelter at home during this pandemic, because while my income dries up, between savings, promised relief check, and PPP, I don’t have to apply for one of the many grocery store jobs that are suddenly opening up. In fact, I’m so lucky that I can actually spend an extra $9.98 to get my groceries delivered to my house, left just outside my door with a quick knock so I don’t even have to come into contact with anyone else.

I did that for the first time last week. A car pulled into my driveway – I heard it first, and then I saw it… dents and missing headlight. Then a woman got out – hugely obese, limping, in fact leaning on her car to support herself as she slowly walked around to the trunk to open it. I actually stopped her, asked her to get back in her car, and got the groceries and brought them inside myself. This woman, whose every step clearly hurt, had just schlepped around the supermarket picking up all my groceries (even though, to be honest, my pantry is full, just in case) so I don’t have to. As I was getting the groceries out of her trunk, she rolled down the window (I was cringing and backed off), thanked me and told me her leg was hurting and she was tired… as she spoke, I realized that she clearly had some form of mental disability as well.

And so yes, despite my hardship, my privilege was staring me in the face. I can sit at home safely, comfortably, while a woman with physical and mental disabilities has to put herself in the line of danger, spend her gas, feel pain, and no doubt earn minimum wage to give me this privilege. When I discussed this with a friend, her response was: How lucky that woman is to have a job now! Oh my. Lucky! Shouldn’t luck be the same for all of us? That would not feel lucky to me; that would feel like scraping the bottom of the barrel. It would feel like being backed up against the wall, out of options.

There are plenty of memes going around Facebook about how the pandemic has shone a spotlight on how our truly necessary workers are at hospitals, gas stations, grocery stores, etc., not in boardrooms. And how the African-American community is being particularly hard-hit. And of course I hope that this is somehow acknowledged – and rectified – as we emerge from the pandemic and life goes back to “normal” (a word I can only use with quotation marks around it, because after all, what does it really mean?). But when I see this woman, and when I worry about my not-too-distant future when I lose my health insurance just as my work dries up, I hope my friends and acquaintances understand that these pensive musings on gratefulness, mindfulness, and connection, while wonderful for them in their bittersweet hiatus, are by no means the story of this pandemic for the majority of people. And not just healthcare workers on the front lines, who are (rightly) being spotlighted for their heroism.

In the midst of this tragedy and chaos, Brené Brown has said: “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” But how, my friends, do we do this? How do we stitch together a fairer society? Vote for Joe Biden? Yes, of course, but why does that not sound comforting? Why does it sound just like same old-same old, better than our current buffoon but not the harbinger of a sea-change in our society? Why do I doubt that there will be any substantial shift, any new garment? Why do I think that we will, in fact, go back to the old “normal”? Middle-aged cynicism? Life experience? Newton’s first law of physics?

Because I, too, am not quite sure what I can personally do to rectify these imbalances which are weighing so heavily on my mind, so that more people can share my slice of privilege, and so that I can live in this country with a minimal sense of security.

I hope the lessons all of us learn go beyond grateful platitudes. I hope they truly do mean that there will be a new “normal.” Please, just tell me how to get there!