A text at 5:00 AM wakes me up.  A friend of mine, a pharmacist at a major hospital going through a bout of anxiety and exhaustion.  We talk the next morning and she tells me of he past few days, what she is going through and what she has seen.  She tells me of the suffering of COVID-19 patients, of the health disparities and of the death toll.  I hang up and take a look at the national news, and what meets my eyes are protests in Lansing.  They shouldn’t do that, I think to myself, even if they think the state has not responded strongly enough to the crisis or if they feel the lack of support to our hospitals and healthcare professional.  But then as I read, I realize its about their inability to buy gardening supplies and traveling to their second home up north.

I am not going to judge these people and they have the right to their views.  I disagree with other stipulations that the Governor or President put in place.  The angle I am taking here is what I like to call “lack of community”.  We like to talk about our community, how we support each other and all others do for each other.  And we are really good partners in our smaller communities for the most part, in our unit, our university, our neighborhood and our circle.  But when it comes to thinking about others in the wider circles, suddenly that sense of community starts to disappear.  Those trying to fix health disparities, student debts, lack of access to healthcare and other issues are not met with competing ideas that foster a healthy debate, but rather ways to divert the conversation away from actually accomplishing anything.  Big words such as civil liberties, religious freedom and individual rights are thrown into our faces, without a deep understanding of what they actually mean.  It is the same response I get from some instructors when I ask them to change their content when teaching and they respond by saying its their academic freedom.  On one hand the word means something complexly different and secondly, the conversation stops right there and no improvement is possible.  The people who protested in Lansing were not trying to protect their civil liberties, but rather the unwillingness to accept being inconvenienced.

I believe that the COVID-19 crisis revealed a lot about us.  Many good, but many bad.  What I will take out of it is that there is a serious need for a change to our healthcare system, to rely on facts and science and that there is lack of leadership at different levels.  I wonder if the issues we discussed throughout the semester, improving access to healthcare, building a better system or addressing health disparities will be fixed in our life-time.  I am more doubtful after the last month, that despite of the fact that the crisis has shed the light that these issues are real, as a nation we lack the “sense of community” that is essential to address these issues in a meaningful and productive manner. 

Stay strong and stay safe.