MARCH 13, 2021 – Yesterday marked an anniversary—the last time I rode a bus; my last day at my downtown office; the day I sat for 20 minutes across a table from a voluble guy, who experienced severe symptoms the following day, winding up on a hospital ventilator and nearly succumbing to The Plague.
I celebrated the anniversary by going to a local Walmart—my second time ever—for my second vaccination.
My journal entries from the days and weeks that followed March 12 make for interesting reading. No one could know, of course, the depth or duration of the global crisis that was beginning to unfold.
As any sweeping crisis does, this one revealed much about us humans—our resilience, our myopia, our nobility, our selfishness, our mighty achievements, our abject failures, our . . . everything that makes us human.
For me, the heroes above all are healthcare workers, the front-line who put themselves at risk and worked beyond the point of despair and exhaustion to bring succor to the fallen.
The villains are the conspiracy theorists, the science-is-a-hoax people, and members of the “Don’t Tread on Me!” Party. If anything could compel a nation immersed in discord and wrapped in disparity to face the same direction, you’d think it’d be a non-partisan, enemy microbe. As the enemy revealed, however, in the Age of Big Tech, microbes are partisan.
The wholesale skewering of facts doesn’t bode well for the next crisis to overwhelm us. Nor does the ferocity of our independence and the extremism of our myopia. As troubled waters rise on the foundations of our Republic—and the coastlines of the continent it inhabits—we need to move to higher ground. This imperative, however, stumbles on the paradox inherent in our culture: one individual’s rugged individualism can be fatally rugged on the next person’s individualism. Social Darwinism in America is as far-reaching as our Interstate Highway System. Over time guardrails of a sort have been installed, but the shoulders of laissez-faire capitalism are wider here than elsewhere in the world. Until we alter the rules of the road—until we bend the course of our culture, we will have to endure more pileups on the freeway.
Change isn’t as simple as the extremes would have it. The rightwing would remove all guardrails on the right side of the highway and erect along the left side, right up against the pavement, an immense concrete wall topped with razor wire. The leftwing, meanwhile, would immediately prohibit from the throughway all motor vehicles that aren’t solar powered.
Revolutions never go as planned. Where we need to travel is down the middle of the road, mindful, however, that with 7.7 billion people on earth consuming resources at an unsustainable rate, the road itself narrows a short distance ahead. Before we run ourselves off the road altogether, we need to brake and downshift and take full stock of the lessons learned over the past 12 months.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
