I don’t know why I feel compelling to write about covid. It’s not pleasant. Mainly I feel sort of incensed, outraged, sad and concerned about the path we’re on. My mind races through these kinds of thoughts at night. And the outlets I have for it are imperfect. All I can say in my defense, is I come by it honestly.
Anyway there was a really good article in The Atlantic yesterday about my favorite topic right now (open schools). And it was from a woman who lives in Texas, writing about how her district made the commitment to keep schools open, and have them operate normally. One thing she said, sort of struck me:
“My unmasked kids get on a public-school bus each day. My husband and I both go to work in the office. We attend piano recitals and school plays. Last month, my fifth grader capped off her fall semester with a classroom holiday party where we parents passed out slices of pizza, Capri Suns, and grocery-store sugar cookies. The whole affair, like the whole semester, was everything she’d hoped it would be: decidedly pre-pandemic and reassuringly normal.”
That line about the piano recital struck me. It’s such a normal thing. A small, everyday happy thing. That is the kind of thing we live for. Especially those of us that live somewhere in the middle class range.
You can picture these families in this gymnasium in Texas feeling proud and excited of the work their child put into developing this skill. The fanciest outfit worn. The smiling photos. The crowd laughing and some sort of cute or nervous error, potentially. The kind of things we all used to take for granted.
I think over the course of the pandemic, especially on the left, there has been sort of an impulse to minimize this sort of thing. “A kids recital? How could you care about a kid’s recital when people are DYING IN HOSPITALS EVERY DAY, you monster, etc.” But it is important to people. And in addition to death and illness — which obviously are terrible — it’s important to empathize with those little loses and weigh them fairly agains the evolving climate of risk.
Every cancelled recital, or party, or first date is a little kind of death. It doesn’t mean those things are never worth sacrificing. But when we weigh those sacrifices, we will never arrive at the proper balance, the compassionate one, by minimizing their importance. These moments are sacred in their own everyday way. They are the kinds of things we will look back on. Those little happy moments with friends or family. We only have so many years after all and all of us are going to die.
My goal with this is truly not to stir the pot and drive out all the trolls to take aim at my own character, etc. I’m just trying to appeal to people’s better instincts. The pandemic somehow became this '“team sport” that we want to “win,” I think. And I think it’s dampened our humanity and compassion in sad and frustrating ways.
However we decide to address the ongoing pandemic, we can never do it fairly and compassionately without acknowledging the importance of these little everyday moments of joy and happiness, which have always involved a degree of risk.