Living through history, but not its victim
We are all historical actors and as such owe it to ourselves to try and bend the arc of history.
On May 21, 2020, I wrote an op-ed in these pages that pointed out that our nation was approaching 90,000 deaths from COVID-19, which seemed unimaginable at the time. On the East Coast, we had just emerged from a horrific March and April and witnessed panic and fear intimately. By May, in our rush to reopen, I worried that we had failed to process or understand the moment and its brutal losses. I feared we had not learned anything and feared we would step away from our humanity. I was naively hopeful then, believing we had a choice that we were at a proverbial fork in the road, “a democratic moment.” I asked “are we going to mourn them or just forget them?”
Well, today we see over 360,000 dead from this scourge. We are witnessing 2,000 to 3,000 deaths per day. ICUs in some states are at 600 percent capacity and Los Angeles County’s hospitals are running short of oxygen. We now have the new UK variant that spreads faster and caused the UK to go back into its third lockdown to worry about.
By the end of February, we could see 500,000 dead in the U.S. To put that into perspective, that number equals all the U.S. dead from WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam combined. Sit with that for a minute; let it sink in. There will be more U.S. deaths in one year within our borders than three of global wars. More than the combined populations of Stamford, Hartford and Bridgeport. This is just the official number, as we know that many more COVID deaths were not correctly classified. And some estimates suggest that by the fall we could see over 1 million dead.
As we don’t see a definitive endpo int, a pessimist might see this as a new dark age, a moment of a Malthusian culling, that calls for a dog-eat-dog response. Our current tribal political culture seems to reinforce this view, as it is ripe with political violence, f act avo idance, systematic racial inequalities and widening economic gaps. The leap away from democratic norms at this moment of crisis has shaken America’s f amous view of progress. It’s the belief (naive maybe) that we can continually grow, improve, lean into an ever-present optimism that says we can solve all problems.
What does it say about us as a society then that we remain silent, motionless and passive at such devastation? Maybe we are numb, simply too exhausted? Maybe we can’t see it because we are still in it? Or maybe we do no see a path out of this?
In May, when I wrote how we were at a moral crossroads, I naively believed we could simply pause, mourn and recognize the pain and suffering around us, reflect on our next steps and think beyond ourselves. That we could find strength in our collective sacrifices and come more fully into our humanity. I did not see the extraordinary moment of history we find ourselves in. And, while these are drastic times, drastic times have always existed and people found ways to live through them.
So today, I ask rather than remain passive and giving up our ability to effect change, we grab our chance to push back against circumstance. We need to realize we are standing fully in the stream of history, a moment in time that our children, grandchildren and future generations will read about and study. It is easy to see our limits, the darkness of our times, and just give up our chance to make history. Instead, I ask that we own our agency.
Writing over 40 years ago, the historian Herbert Gutman, channeling Sartre, said history showed that we are involved in an existential struggle, constantly acting and being acted upon. It is this tension that makes history. Gutman demanded what was central to moments in history was not “what ‘one’ has done to [wo]man, but what [wo]man does with what ‘one’ has done to him[/her].” Or more boldly, as another older thinker argued, people make their own history, though often not under conditions of their choosing.
We have not chosen these circumstances. But we are not completely powerless, either. We are all historical actors and as such owe it to ourselves to try and bend the arc of history. It will not be easy; nothing important is. But it seems necessary. We know what we need to do. We need to mask up, socially distance, trust science, demand justice and hold the line until the vaccines roll out enough to provide herd immunity. We can slow the spread, protect our neighbors and smartly engage the world. To step away from this historic moment would be to turn our back on our neighbors, to give up our chance to effect change and simply to resign ourselves to becoming victims of history