The Good News

Photo: Ben Hassett

The other good news is that we’re learning—in small towns, in countries, in continents—the lessons we desperately need if we are going to survive… not only this crisis, but the far greater looming crisis of global climate disruption.

So what are these lessons?

I see friends and strangers practicing them every day.

We have found ways to overcome the essential “social distancing.” I’m glad that the dogs don’t do it. They are an example of joyful playfulness. But we humans bridge the six feet between us with ready smiles, greetings—an affability I’ve never seen before on the streets. Fewer people walk plugged into their devices, and therefore unavailable. Fewer people seem so preoccupied they might as well be on the moon. We have woken up to a fact we’ve ignored for decades: we need each other.

Not just our families, but all of us.

We can’t travel, at least by plane. How many of us who have the leisure and the money have constructed our lives in retirement as incessant airplaning? I know I’ve taken too many of those flights, for no very well defined purpose. And sometimes, as the monster I’m riding in takes off, I have a sharp pang of doubt: what is the release of these jet fumes doing to the sky?

Nobody knows.

Because no one has been authorized and financed, as far as I know, to do the studies. The airplane industry has surely done everything it can to prevent it.

Here in Santa Fe, I see more people walking and riding bikes than ever before. Surely we’ve learned how many car trips are really unnecessary when many of us live within a mile or so of the post office, grocery store, drug store. Our mountain trails are now jammed with hikers. Many with children. Will we remember how important this respite in the wilderness was, and make a concerted effort to save it?

We’ve also learned how to connect using various online devices, and they are so effective we may decide to use them even when things return to “normal”—if there is, or was, a normal. Online teaching may remove some of the inequalities in our schools—judgments based on clothes, or skin color, or diction; as we have failed to equally fund all schools, online may now be the solution. And as we have failed to figure out how to prevent chaos in many classrooms, online teaching, again, may be the only way to ensure uninterrupted learning.

What about washing our hands? I was astonished to notice what my hands and fingernails look like when they are really clean. I probably washed my hands two or three times a day “before,” and I thought they were clean. They were not! Now, with a dozen washings a day, the beauty of my clean hands and nails is revealed.

How many others have had this unsettling experience?

Now, about waste: hoarding may teach us the lesson that even too much is never enough. The appetite for security we all share can’t be satisfied with a mountain of toilet paper or anything else. In this deeply secular society, surely we are noticing how many are sending poems online. Poetry is a search for the spirit, in many forms. And what we desperately need is not toilet paper but an access to the spirit, in whatever form it can be found. And there are many forms—in doctrines, in music, in many books. But only necessity will drive us to the spirit when the consumerism we have preached as gospel for decades loses its power.

The skies are clearer. The air is purer. The birds’ springing is easier to hear when the roar of traffic on the street is quieted. It seems to me that our only hope of saving the natural world depends on this quieting: less travel, less buying, less insistence on convenience as more important than its cost, less reliance on entertainment and luxuries to distract us from what is happening around us.

So that’s the good news: stop incessant, unnecessary travel. Business meetings can be achieved on Zoom. That trip to the beach is maybe not, after all, essential to anyone’s health and happiness. Another pair of jeans won’t bring us joy, another meal in an overpriced restaurant where most of the food goes to waste won’t restore us. And yes—we are even learning to cook again!

So that’s the good news. This is not to ignore the suffering of many people out of work, with no medical insurance and no unemployment coverage because they are hourly workers who never did benefit from what social safety net still exists, in tatters. But again, we are learning the lesson: this over-indulged capitalist society can’t survive without fair treatment for all.

And as for us at the top of the social pyramid: what did we do, what are we doing to justify our power and money?

In New Mexico Santa Fe Hiking