We need a holiday to honor frontline workers

When we get through this — as much as we get through all this — we’re going to need a parade, or a national holiday.

The idea is not original with me. It comes from Dr. Robert D. Keder, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. One morning recently, Keder began thinking about what life might look like when we’re on the other side of this.

You’ll have to excuse Keder. He was educated by Jesuits. He’s prone to reflection.

During the pandemic,

Keder has been providing support for people on the front line of our strained health care system. He thinks about colleagues who have self-isolated at home to avoid infecting family members. He’s also thought about how some medical professionals are sometimes treated as pariahs – potential carriers of a virus they risk themselves battling.

As heroic as these professionals are, the impact goes beyond the medicine. There isn’t a corner of the culture that hasn’t been affected by the virus and the country’s subsequent shutdown. Gov. Ned Lamont announced recently that Connecticut schools won’t meet again for the rest of the semester, and parents statewide took a deep breath and prepared to dig in.

Colleges and universities are scrambling to make graduation and end-of-theyear awards ceremonies meaningful in the sterile, Brady-Bunch-squares Zoom meetings. Come fall, when (we hope) classes gather again, educators and parents will see just where their students are on the scale of preparedness for the next grade. Bless the teachers – professional ones and those at home.

Restaurants that could stay open whittled staff to provide takeout to loyal customers. Children planned playdates from across the park, or the street. Yet flowers bloomed and trees budded.

In his spare time, Keder is a swing dancer, but that’s been off the table while we’ve all kept our distance. He found himself looking for online videos from friends — swing dancers in Manhattan — who’ve regularly posted the cheering that goes on for front-line workers in New York every night at 7 p.m. The ritual started in Wuhan, China, where the virus also started, and it spread across the globe. In New York, the cheers, horns, and cowbells are often accompanied by someone blasting Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York.” You cannot watch those videos without tearing up.

Meanwhile, as Connecticut begins the slow process of easing the pandemic restrictions, we have no such ritual, and that’s a shame.

So Keder has been thinking that what we need is a national holiday. It could be a Health Care Worker day of appreciation, but as he says, it should be more than that. It is, as well, a day to appreciate janitors, FedEx delivery people, the grocery checkout clerk behind the plastic shield, the postal carrier and the volunteer who masked, gloved up and showed up anyway. It’s a day to thank the essential workers who didn’t have the luxury of being bored with Netflix, and a day to mourn the people we lost.

In the medical field, “it’s the service staff,” said Keder. “People don’t think about it, but the people who are cleaning at the bedsides, they are just as much on the front line. These are individual who show up to work every day, and they do it with same commitment and fear that anybody would. All professions carry equal value. It’s amazing to see it’s been so much all-hands-ondeck.

“We’re still in this, and I’m proud of our state and how people have really been following orders. Everybody is really working together. We are small but mighty. Go, Connecticut.”

A holiday would acknowledge that we’ve come through a difficult epoch where we lost people before we or they were ready to go, where we had the difficult challenge of telling children to be cautious, but brave, where we learned difficult truths about ourselves and our culture.

“It’s all of us coming out of our homes and coming together again,” Keder said.

Let there be a Together Again Day, or better, Together Day, an annual marking of the time when some of us went indoors until – as the Facebook meme said – our land was rid of the pestilence, and some of us stepped out into it, because we had to. On Together Day, we put aside our protests and partisanship and we give each other a hug, or a handshake – no more distancing, even if we’re still wearing masks.

There should be lights. And music. And, because Keder is a swing dancer, let there be dancing — lots of it — beneath twinkly lights and a crisp moon.