Covid Letters, No. 5

Today’s guest blog, written by Marilyn Guggenheim, is not for the faint at heart! In response to the prompt, “What is the one thing you’d like to see become a permanent change about this pandemic?” she tells it, boy.  My favorite line: “I want this pandemic to rouse us into some kind of rock-bottom, come-to-Jesus redo.”

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DANGER: RANT AHEAD! LoL but you did ask us to “say what you mean…” so I’m forging ahead.

Typhoid Mary was caught by authorities more than seven times, and imprisoned in isolation for the last fifteen years of her life, because she refused to believe that germs living in her gallbladder sickened and killed people whose food she cooked. A hundred or so years later I walk through Bozeman’s Main Street on a Wednesday afternoon in late March, reading handwritten signs in 90% of shop windows: “We are temporarily CLOSED to protect public health and reduce the spread of COVID-19.”

Plenty of people out there at this moment are in Typhoid Mary / John denial, or think themselves too special to stay home and keep their germs to themselves for the sake of public health. But for the first time, all businesses huge and small, cities, counties, school districts, and individuals keeping a distance from family, friends and strangers, believe in science and are fighting, together, against the threat of this virus. Can this fight against an invisible, abstract enemy extend to the fight against global warming? Both threats reach into our daily lives, but a pandemic brings it into our homes where even drought, firestorms, hurricanes and floods have failed to change our pursuit of happiness through consumerism. I want this pandemic to make us see that we need each other enough to make profound changes in our lifestyles.

Picture the recent photos of earth from space with vast areas of neon yellow or red indicating polluted air over North America or China, that now show clean, clear air while everyone stays put. Each American riding a plane, driving a car, stuffing their closets with “fast fashion” and their bellies with meat and dairy, vents an average 16 tons of carbon emissions in one year. To stave off more pandemics /fire / drought / food and water shortages in the next ten years, every global citizen must limit themselves to the Paris Climate Accord’s 2 tons of carbon per year–equivalent to about one round trip on an airplane. We have an opportunity to change our ways with this crisis. The pandemic has upended our systems of “imagined order” (to use Yuval Noah Harari’s term): humanity’s miraculous accomplishments in mass cooperation that also promote corrupt stock markets, tax codes that screw wage earners, byzantine pricing in air travel and health care, and advertising that infiltrates our every thought through social media and mainstream media. All these are more delude us about what real happiness is. I want us to see while we are stuck inside with things we once thought would make us happy, that we can’t buy happiness from a store shelf, or with multiple plane trips to paradise. We only need money for food, shelter, clothing, medicine, and connection, not multiple motorized toys, giant houses, and dust-collecting bric-a-brac that Marie Kondo and other TV shows teach us how to throw away.

I want this pandemic to rouse us into some kind of rock-bottom, come-to-Jesus redo. Our minds are capable of improving our society’s “imagined orders” in the same way they are capable of believing in the destructive power of invisible viruses. I want us to evolve beyond the ignorance and selfishness of Typhoid Mary. I want businesses to stop valuing stock price and spreadsheets more than their flesh and blood employees. I want us to remember that happiness is the scent of your friend as you press your cheek to theirs in a hug. Happiness is the warmth radiating from the person next to you or across from you, the flash of understanding in their eyes when you speak, the way they turn toward you to acknowledge your being, share their story while they listen to yours. I want us to imagine the other human beings we protect while protecting ourselves and the air we must breathe together.