A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by spending a night in a hotel room overlooking Brooklyn Bridge Park. The view was spectacular and we spent most of the night watching barges and ferries going up and down the East River and people walking their dogs. It was indescribably beautiful and mesmerizing, and the main thought that emerged for me was, “I want to walk here at night,” immediately followed by “but that’s impossible,” and then “but is it really, though?.”
Because what makes it feel impossible for me to walk in a semi-deserted park at night is not a physical barrier but rather a socially constructed one: I would not feel safe. Whether this is objectively true is not relevant. The point is that I intuitively articulated a key part of the world I want to live in - one where I am safe - and that it felt impossible to achieve.
This, at a much larger scale, is what is happening with our reactions to the deep structural inequalities the COVID pandemic has surfaced.
In the United States, Black and latino individuals are up to twice as likely to die from a coronavirus infection as white people. This observable fact is linked to inequitable access to health care, as well as to stress-induced morbidity at least partially caused by underlying violence and hostility. Even when Black people do reach hospitals for care, they are sometimes distrusted and their subjective experience of their own bodies is ignored.
You don’t have to be a public health official or a policy expert to know what a better world would look like: one where access to health care is freely available, where everyone's experience can be heard, and which is prioritizing those who need it most. And yet, when we plan around even just one single health intervention - access to the COVID-vaccine - the people prioritized are those with money or in predominantly white neighborhoods.
Another topic the pandemic has underlined is our collective misuse of natural resources, in particular in countries with high levels of personal car ownership and use. This is nothing new, of course, but the evidence highlighted by the near total worldwide stand-still of air and automobile traffic in March and April 2020 showed just how much we actually can control. Emissions picked up immediately as lockdowns lifted. Again, it is easy to imagine a more balanced world: one where we organize ourselves around collective modes of transportation and where local products - those that do not have to be flown in from abroad - are not only accessible but promoted and their exchange incentivized. And yet, one of the first things France’s President Macron did when the initial lockdown was lifted was to authorize massive governmental support for individual car-ownership in France, rather than investing that very same amount on an equally job-producing overhaul of the country’s infrastructure.
My point is that we already know what we need: a community where we are all safe, seen as our full selves, and in harmony with nature and the physical world we inhabit. But as we begin to envisage that world, we immediately revert to our current set-up. Sure, it is harmful and not sustainable, but the road to the alternative feels scary and unknown and therefore we dismiss it as impossible when really it is not.
I am not (excessively) naive. I know that there are people in power whose short term interests fuel the all-but-calcified status quo. I know that our regulatory systems often are set up to protect the interests of the powerful - observe the recent chaos and panic caused by individual speculators playing the stock market in a way that led to massive losses of established companies, when no panic ensued where the opposite was true.
And yet, we have the tools to circumvent many of these structures: crypto-currency, collective community action, locally-grounded economies, and - yes - love. Because love is what is at the heart of the world we all know we want to live in. And the only thing standing between us and that world is the myth of impossibility.