A Saturday morning coffee thought as the kids sleep in:
Everyone wants to pull up the drawbridge in a pandemic. I can see my neighbors starting to agitate about shutting down the one-lane bridge into our little community. No one wants Covid-19 to land on their street...
Everyone wants to pull up the drawbridge in a pandemic. I can see my neighbors starting to agitate about shutting down the one-lane bridge into our little community. No one wants Covid-19 to land on their street...
That’s obviously what is happening on a bigger scale with borders around the world. And yet we are quickly learning that pulling up the drawbridge is a false choice...
The idea that every community (or nation) can somehow be this self-dependent enterprise has always been a false one. Exceptionalism never holds for very long.
My family is healthy and sheltering in place. But we are only able to do so because the drawbridge into our community is still down. We are reliant on people from other places for food. We will be reliant on people from other places for medical care if it comes to that...
We are relying on talented people in other places - and, yes, other nations - to find a cure so that we can go back to living the lives we were used to.
To be frank, I don’t care if the ventilator I end up on some day is from Switzerland or China. Or, put another way, if the ventilator my mother in Australia ends up on is made by GM in Kokomo, Indiana.
So I’d much rather leave the drawbridge down and have communities/nations/leaders work together to find solutions to a problem that isn’t a local one, or a national one.
I know, I know... I can hear the nationalist screams from my neighbors: “You are so naive!”
But I’m hopeful there’s a quiet majority out there who get that having our doctor neighbors head courageously out each morning to fight this thing in other communities will pay off in the long run. Those hospitals they are going to battle in are beyond our one-lane bridge.
They’re also hospitals filled with doctors, nurses, medicines and ventilators from other places. That’s encouraging to me. The moment they become isolated outposts of medical autarky we are screwed...
So I’m cool with sheltering in place and doing my part to flatten the curve. That’s essential. But for the sake of my children, who are slowly getting up now, I sure hope the neighbors starting to think about pulling up the drawbridge (locally and nationally) don’t win the day.
This was prompted by conversations I had for work this week with people who thought this was someone else’s problem.
There’s no doubt we should limit travel etc. But feels like blockading bridges to “other” people is coming soon. That’s different.
There’s no doubt we should limit travel etc. But feels like blockading bridges to “other” people is coming soon. That’s different.
