Solidarity

Roger Berkowitz

When Li Wenliang saw the danger posed by the Corona Virus and tried to sound the alarm, he was forced to remain silent by the Chinese police. Dr. Li died from Covid 19, alongside thousands of others in Wuhan. During this time as the world learned of the ravages of the virus first in China and then in Italy, the United States refused to act to protect its citizens. With no national plan, no national testing strategy, no effort to acquire supplies, and no leadership, the United States squandered two precious months. Once the crisis was upon us, doctors volunteered to work in over burdened hospitals, families at home sewed masks, and students sought to redesign ventilators. But as a nation, the United States responded with the incoherence of a failed state. What is more, President Donald Trump saw the virus not as a health crisis but as a political crisis. 

Viewing the United States' failed response and President Trump’s partisan mobilization of the crisis, George Packer argues that despite “countless examples of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure” made visible in the country’s response goes to the very heart of our existence as a nation. We must ask the question: “Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?” Packer’s answer does not inspire confidence:

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.