Will we head the COVID-19 warning

April 4, 2020

An acquaintance wrote to me this week: “I think people think they are invincible until phased with a sickness or in this case a pandemic, then we realize just how vulnerable we really are.” The search for a response inspired some thinking.

These days I often ask myself the simple question as to what humanity is to learn from this global pandemic. In seeking an answer, I cannot help but draw correspondence to a famous novel by Albert Camus, “The Plague,” published in 1947. If you haven’t read the book, I encourage you to do so. The novel is about an Algerian coastal town overcome by a mysterious plague. But fundamentally, it proposes the question if humanity is able to conceive of suffering not as an individual burden but as a shared experience from which it is able to propel itself forward to a new, more collective state of consciousness.

We have somehow evolved into an affair with individualism, which has taken precedence over the moral obligation to take responsibility for one another. Certainly you recall a news episode where teenagers on Miami beach were gravely upset about the fact that their “long-earned vacations were being disrupted by a virus and how unfair it was,” not for a moment pausing to understand the danger they represented to others who were perhaps more vulnerable. Or government officials who debate about providing much needed assistance to cruise ship passengers trapped at sea in disappear, forgetting that around the world millions regardless of their race, nationality, culture or social standing are taken in and taken care of. Or politicians that step up to a platform arguing who should or should not have access to a stockpile of urgently needed supplies because it belongs to “us,” being somehow so caught up with themselves that they are simply unable to understand the meaning and extent of the word “us."

The COVID-19 pandemic brings about one of those extraordinary events that unleashes unprecedented suffering. But the suffering is anything but extraordinary. Every day, somewhere in the world, thousands of people are impacted by terrible circumstances. This one, just caught the entire planet at once. And however unfortunate, it will likely not be the last time. What we do during these difficult times or when the next scourge comes is what defines us. All of us.

We will come to realize, hopefully, that it is the ethos of self-interest that undermines the greatest lesson to be learned – the understanding that life is more than our individual self. After all, COVID-19 is impartial to who you are, where you come from, your beliefs, race, or social standing. Yet, all is not lost – everyday first responders, nurses, doctors, caregivers place their lives at stake, because of the shared belief that it is their duty and responsibility to care for others, often placing their own families at risk. In the novel “The Plague,” the scoundrels are those who simply cannot see beyond themselves. Yet those who find a way to reduce the suffering of others become the most fulfilled. For Dr. Rieux in the “The Plague,” it is the devotion to resisting the plague and achieving solidarity with its victims that defines him.

Our planet has been placed on “pause." However inconvenient this reality might be – there is nothing we can do about it other than caring and protecting each other until a vaccine becomes widely available and yes we are all in the same boat. But will we learn from it? Will it make us recognize the true poverty of individualism and will it help propel our specifies forward? Will it help the world recognize that “selfies,” are baseless and that our true purpose is to collectively move forward? After all, it is our collective responsibility to “slowing down,” and ultimately halting this pandemic which will make the difference.

At the end of the book “The Plague,” Camus, delivers the following passage:

“And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

Considering the harm we are intent on inflicting on our only home for now, planet earth, this pandemic, won’t be the last. But it does highlight our mutual interdependence and social conscience in a way that only tragedy can.

But, will we heed the warning.

- Anthony DeLima