The broken world awaits

After the long weeks of baking sourdough bread and cleaning out closets and giving over our lives to zoom are history, will we be changed? Will we have been have genuinely, permanently shaken out of our everydayness?

How much of what we are learning about our country, our leaders, our communities—and most of all, about ourselves—will endure after this crisis has passed?

Will we be ready to re-think, to reach out, to take action?

I hope so. I tell myself this is possible. I tell myself…

–that the pandemic has shown us what real leadership looks like, that we do not have it in Washington, D.C. And we have an opportunity to change this in just a few months.

–that the pandemic has shown us how crucial fully vetted, authenticated, factual information is to making informed decisions. And that we owe it to the failing health of our democracy to support trusted information sources.

–that the pandemic has reminded us—in case we forgot–that the deep economic and racial inequities in our country play out in life and death. And that we can do something about this by making health care a right not a privilege.

–that the pandemic has shown a bright light on the dangerous, overcrowded, toxic warehouses we operate as prisons and jails. And that we can do something about this with intelligent, rational, fact-based, humane prison reform.

–that the pandemic has shamed us about our attitudes toward and treatment of the elderly and fragile in our midst. And that we can rethink and reform the “industry” that has been built around the warehousing of our elderly.

–that the pandemic has shown us that climate change is not an insolvable problem. The earth is resilient in a way we did not appreciate. Now we know. And we can create environmental policies with great optimism.

–that the pandemic has shown us that an emotionally and psychologically healthier way to live is to embrace internal rather than external motivation for our behavior and actions. External motivation are acts done to receive external reward (money, power, fame, the acknowledgement of others). Internal motivation is behavior done for its own sake, personally rewarding (from sourdough bread baking to sewing masks for health care workers). This inspiration, which comes from within, is more forceful. Its results more fulfilling. We’ve learned that these past two months, haven’t we?

Onward, my friends, onward.