31: Your problem is my problem

by

It’s been hard to force both catastrophic threats to live inside my skull at the same time

Vanitas Still Life, Pieter Claesz, 1625

Not very long ago, like pretty much everyone, I was living in a world in which Covid-19 was not my problem, and then all of a sudden I was living in a world in which it very much was.

There was a window there when it just wasn’t something I was engaging with much, the way I might think, I’ll admit, about a violent conflict overseas. On January 16, I flew from Cambodia home to Boston, about a week after the first reported death from something called novel coronavirus, and I recall brief flashes of lit signs in the Seoul airport about travel restrictions from Wuhan.

On March 2, two days after the first reported death in Washington State and the US, we flew out to a dear friend’s funeral in Minneapolis, an event I look back on warmly now, fearlessly greeting so many old friends with bear hugs, tears and snot on our unmasked faces and crumpled Kleenexes in our hands and pockets, as we made small talk about a virus that still seemed more distant than it was.

It was closing in by the time we got back that week, but still didn’t seem like much was happening in Boston yet. I remember making some comments about it I now regret. I remember reading an early article about how we should buy a two-week supply of food and not leave the house, and thinking at the time that seemed so extreme.

Then on March 7, I was texting with a good friend who lives in Seattle, where the number of cases had exploded in just one week, and the reality became very clear. He and his family were homebound, store shelves there were wiped out, schools were closed. He said if we all can quarantine now it could save millions of lives (I’ll respect his privacy but I have really smart friends). And that was it. We bought a couple of weeks worth of dry goods and other groceries that night, and have been riding it out mostly and increasingly at home since.

Just like that, a problem I thought was someone else’s became my problem too, and very soon after it would become my biggest problem, and then everyone’s biggest problem.

I think a lot about that moment when it flipped for me, how it was more than two weeks before the governor issued a stay-at-home advisory here. Later I would talk to other friends and family about what it was like in Boston, and I suspect that helped flip it for them too, like a fun little present of fear and home arrest that I could pass along. It’s that pivotal moment when you realize that even though you might look outside your window to your own street and everything seems totally fine, it is actually not fine, and you have to do something right now.

That can be a difficult shift, and it’s one that climate scientists and activists have been trying to get people to make for decades now, with not great results. It’s hard to avoid certain comparisons to climate change, even though you don’t want to be the person who spends all day saying hey you know what this is just like…climate change. (OK fine I basically am that person.) The comparisons only go so far, they fit but they don’t fit, some solutions align but others conflict, and that’s one reason I haven’t written that much about the issues in tandem yet, like it’s been hard for me to force both catastrophic threats to live inside my skull at the same time.

But I also know it’s important that we start drawing new maps with both things on them. And there are really important, clear parallels, as Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Climate Interactive, pointed out to Yale Environment 360:

“The public is coming to understand that in that kind of situation you have to act in a way that looks disproportionate to what the current reality is.” … If you wait until you can see the impact, it is too late to stop it.

That means something has to nudge people into action. One big difference is that coronavirus is way, way faster than climate change, so we’re watching the fatal consequences of people not taking action until it actually is too late. To some extent, it’s understandable why it happens. As with climate change, it’s complex, there’s all this disinformation coming from people looking to protect their own interests, incompetence on the national stage, genuinely confusing data points.

And then there’s just some percentage of the population that’s extremely hesitant to heed warnings or are by nature resistant to viewing themselves as part of a collective. There are always those people who figure things are going mostly OK for them, they figure the status quo is actually quite fine, so let’s not make any big changes. They call themselves pragmatists, rationalists, they warn against a cure that is worse than the disease. They caution against alarmism.

So how do you get those people to shift? Well, in a global pandemic, I guess it eventually reaches a point where they don’t have much choice. But what about in other scenarios where there’s a communal threat—poverty, systemic racism, inequality, environmental collapse—where collective action is needed to stop it?

It’s true that action by governments and institutions and putting policies into place are important and ultimately necessary, after all, some percentage of 7 billion people will just never do the thing unless forced. But we know top-down action has limits without broad support, and besides that it can take forever. So more and more I think, as in my case, it takes personal connection to create sufficient change—like a jolt of empathy ricocheting across our networks. The importance of relationships doesn’t stop with acknowledging the problem either, because as we’ve seen with restricted travel and a hobbled federal government, the strength of our response is often reliant on these hyperlocal connections, whether it’s through mutual aid, networks of volunteers, or moral support sent from afar.

In Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan’s book Why Civil Resistance Works, they outline how, while there are many factors involved, key tipping points in successful mass movements usually involve some kind of defection of loyalists. Often military or police forces who once propped up corrupt regimes will flip, and either refuse to act against the movement or actively begin supporting it. In other cases it’s the business community or professional classes who came on board.

That’s an idea that I want to get into more another time, and non-violent regime change is obviously a very different scenario than fighting a pandemic or climate change. But I think there’s a lesson there that to bring about a sufficient response to a collective problem, we have to connect with people who were once resistant and get them to flip, and then maintain strong relationships with them. We have to weaponize those moments of recognition that someone else’s problem is my problem too.

Links. So many links.

Watching

I rewatched Melancholia recently just seemed like an appropriate thing to do. It’s a lot but it’s such a beautiful movie. There’s this one part that stuck out this time where spoiler the world is just about to end and Kirsten Dunst’s character says to her sister, “You want us to gather on your terrace to sing a song, have a glass of wine, the three of us? You know what I think of your plan? I think it’s a piece of shit” which I thought was a little harsh but point taken I guess.

Reading

I recently finished Abuses of the Erotic by Josh Cerretti, and I am biased because Josh is a dear friend and by law he is my brother, but that aside it is an excellent book. It focuses mainly on the period after the Cold War and before September 11, so roughly the 1990s, and the different ways sexuality and heteronormative “family values” were used to militarize American society. He has a great disclaimer up front that promptly casts aside the view from nowhere: “I openly concede my bias in favor of democratic civilian control of politics, the pursuit of peace instead of war, and social justice at large.” I also found it especially effective the way he uses newspaper reports and snippets from popular culture to chart out the societal values from that time (including some sick burns on relics like GI Jane and Sublime).

Listening

Anyhoo there we have it another dispatch from the compound. One thing I’ve enjoyed in this time is the way various friends have been channeling anxiety and frustration and maybe boredom into various culinary adventures. I, for example, made a giant tuna casserole this week, something I have not done in years, and ate the whole thing. I’m seeing a lot of weekday pictures of steaks on the grill. One friend said he and his family roasted a turkey and had a full Thanksgiving dinner last night. Another said one day he had nachos for breakfast and pie for lunch.

I don’t know what it is maybe running out of ideas, or just lacking the willpower to not eat like a bunch of five year olds. Or maybe it’s a kind of nostalgia, flipping through our memories of eating in better times and trying to experience them again. Regardless, I’m there for it.

Email me back with some of the strangest things you’ve been eating under quarantine and maybe I’ll share highlights. Hang on tight you can ride this out.

Tate