‘ An opportunity to change trajectory’
According to Nathaniel Raymond, a lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, “This is the defining event of our generation of humanitarians.”
Further, Raymond said, COVID- 19 is “a pivot point in the history of humanitarian response.”
Raymond served as an aid worker with Oxfam America and has conducted research in conjunction with United Nations agencies, according to his online profile
Whatever the current generation of humanitarians build, will be built in the context of the pandemic’s challenges, he said.
“We were doing a very complex puzzle … on a card table and someone took that card table and slammed it up and down,” he said of COVID- 19’ s impact on international humanitarianism. “The puzzle has fundamentally changed.”
Now, international aid workers face two daunting tasks: they must create a global supply chain to deliver personal protective equipment, and they must come up with a plan to inoculate an entire planet, which will be necessary once scientists develop a vaccine, Raymond said.
This will all unfold as international agencies face likely budgetary restraints, he said.
“I think there’s going to be a contraction and a dieoff of mid- level NGOs,” Raymond said.
Whatever the international aid community looks like post- pandemic will also depend on how the world changes geo- politically, he noted, adding that COVID- 19 could set back responses to other health crises.
At home, a possible change in trajectory
“The Chinese character for crisis is two characters – it’s danger and opportunity,”
Raymond said as he concluded his conversation with a reporter.
Sean Duffy, a professor of political science at Quinnipiac University, sees in the pandemic both an opportunity for American culture to alter its course and the risk it will revert back to normal.
“Particularly for the last 30, 40 years we’ve become more and more a society committed to the idea of the individual,” said Duffy, who also directs the Albert Schweitzer Institute, which does humanitarian work. “What this [ the pandemic] has allowed us to do, particularly as we’re isolated in our own homes, is to realize the limits of what individuals can be without community.”
The many instances of folks pulling together — supplying masks and food to
first responders, for example — show a renewed recognition of the importance of community, one partly due to the pause the pandemic affords people from the “rat race,” he said.
“The United States was … early on, observed to be a society that really cultivated and thrived on this kind of community,” he said. “We might have thought we lost it in recent years, but it’s still there – I think it’s still fundamentally there in our culture to help each other out and to look after each other.”
But the question remains: down the road, will Americans try to rush back into the pre- pandemic “normal,” or will they refocus their values on community?
Duffy guessed Americans would jump back into the rat race.
But, he said, as the country readjusts to post- pandemic life, Americans have an opportunity to change trajectory.