“Eventually, this will pass.”

“We’re gonna get through it.”

I’ve heard those phrases a lot in the last couple weeks and there is a little voice in my head that keeps saying “not for everyone.”

I understand the impulse to say these things and I appreciate the power of optimism, but I can’t stop thinking about how lonely it must make people feel who are dealing with fear and grief that will not ever go away. As of this writing, nearly 50,000 people in the United States have died because of Covid-19. Twenty-six million people (so far) have filed for unemployment. Domestic violence hotline calls are down significantly, which is a bad sign: it means that individuals, mostly women and children, are stuck in situations where no one sees their suffering. When I hear the chin-up rallying cries, I flinch.

There’s been a lot of reporting on the fact that this pandemic is not creating disparities in our society, so much as bringing them into sharper view and amplifying them. Technology access makes it harder for low-income children to continue their schooling. Black and brown people are being hit especially hard by the virus, partly due to the disproportionate number that work low-wage but essential service jobs and partly due to the prevalence of health conditions brought about by long histories of discrimination and marginalization. Because of health care, housing and college costs, American workers across the income spectrum lack savings to cover expenses for more than a few weeks. Inequality has always existed and we are in a moment where it is hard not to see it’s repercussions.

I am a person with enormous privilege and I am riding this out in relative comfort and safety. Neither my husband nor I have to leave home for work, we are financially secure, and we are not primary caregivers for anyone but ourselves. We are not trying to home-school children while working our own jobs or make sure an elderly relative is okay. There are people in our lives about whom we worry, and the broader anxiety of this upside-down world still gets to us, but we are not immersed in constant acute stress. Situated as we are, I feel both grateful and helpless.

The reporting I described above has led to cries for making sure that we learn from this experience, that we figure out how to address the inequities better than we have been.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-fc3ejAlvd/

I love that quote and couldn’t agree more, but feel overwhelmed and flummoxed when I try to figure out how to make it so. There’s a lot that depends on our political representatives putting the right safety nets in place, ensuring people don’t lose their homes and that more equitable health care and educational systems are developed. I can call my reps and cast my votes and do my best to support system changes like those, but that is big, slow work – a lot of which is beyond my control. How do I make sure that moving forward, I don’t just forget all these things when life (eventually) resumes it’s former pace? It’s easy to understand why we want to just be free of the stress and the worry and the chaos that we are feeling right now. And that’s making me fear that all this talk of shared humanity will be shed like used face masks once there is a vaccine.

Which brings me back to those phrases that are bugging me and leads me to this conclusion: we need different mantras. One thing we can do right now to help build our muscles for long-term fights is to shift the words we use, which shifts the way we think. I’m not sure what the right replacements are, but here are some thoughts:

“We will mourn together.”

“We will bear witness to each others struggles and share the journey forward.”

“We will become better than we’ve been.”

“We will not look away.”

We’re having a lot of different experiences right now. No one is completely spared the stress of this time. For some of us it’s a shock, like getting a bucket of cold water dumped over our heads. Others have been standing in cold water for a long time and it is simply rising faster. We need to bail that water, starting with the way we rally.