Hard times bring out the best in us: Let us learn from that!

This epidemic, or pandemic, is new to most of us in the western world.  We had to answer exam questions about such things, perhaps, in history class.  But it was abstract.  It happened to other people, less advanced than us, elsewhere, maybe of some other color than our majority, way back when.  Well, now we are they!

Can we manage through this with minimal damage, but then remember–remember the good that such trials achieve, and keep them as part of the COVID legacy?  Of mutual care and concern. That would, in some tragic sense, be a good, maybe the only good, that can come from it.

Our daughter and her husband and their infant daughter live in Ground Zero of the epidemic, in  northern Italy.  They are in a small town, but the number of deaths even in their town is mounting.  Friends and neighbors have died.  At the same time, many there have rallied to help each other through this, including a local doctor, a friend of theirs, who is running herself ragged, in a burdensome protective space-like suit, caring for the many stricken.

The toll will be substantial. Jobs will lost (our daughter and her husband are musicians who live in part on the classical music gig economy), but economic loss won’t be all.  There will be a psychological toll as well.

But the local mutual aid, strength of extended families and neighbors, will be gains, if their lessons are remembered when the dust has settled and the dead are underground, no longer visible reminders of what happened.

Can those of us for whom this is just a minor annoyance (where will we get some toilet paper or do we have to use newspaper?) remember it, too?  If not, what will be the cost of our neglect next time something like this comes around?