Five Not-So-Easy Lessons
What I've learned from our three-year dance with COVID
Three years. That’s how long it’s been since the pandemic shut us down. From the good to the bad and back to the good again, here are some lessons I’ve learned (and some I wish I hadn’t) from our collective pandemic experience.
1. Our remarkable ability to adapt. Perhaps the most obvious lesson (maybe better characterized as a reminder) is the ability of our spirit of innovation to adapt to new challenges. In the span of a few days, most of our experiences were transformed from live to virtual. Those of us who could, stayed in our homes. We connected to work, school, family, and friends through the wonder of new technologies we had not even heard about until we needed them. We met over Zoom and Teams and for the first time became aware of our lighting and backgrounds as we sat before the peering eyes of our computers. We closed our doors to contain our household sounds, and learned to turn our mics on and off to avoid the errant burst.
And it worked. Except for the real heroes among us -- the nurses, doctors, and hospital staffs, the first responders, and so many other types of workers who ensured the best possible flow of food and medicines and energy and masks and other life necessities, in many cases at grave risk to their health and survival -- we were able to shelter-in-place and go on for what we thought would be a few days, then weeks, then months, then years, with our work, studies, and other commitments. And while the COVID virus took a dreadful toll and still lurks among us today (yes, it really does!), most of us are emerging with our physical health intact.
2. Our stubborn divisions. In contrast to the hopeful message of that first lesson, I’ve also learned that a worldwide pandemic does not improve human nature or eliminate human conflict. After 9/11, it seemed for a brief time that most Americans had become kinder. Political divisions softened, because the external threat to which we all felt vulnerable knew no partisan bounds. The experiences of some of our Muslim citizens were not so benign, as they often were unfairly painted with the same brush as the terrorists who crashed the planes into our buildings and, in Pennsylvania, into the ground. But there were other Americans, including the then-President, who came to their defense, and overall, we seemed united in purpose and patriotic to a fault.
Something feels different this time. With the exception of that brief, relatively harmonious interlude in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, America’s political divisions that had amped up in the Clinton/Gingrich ‘90s continued to gain momentum during the Obama/McConnell era. They accelerated in 2015 when, in a New York high-rise, what little bipartisanship remained began a steep, deliberate descent down a celebrity couple’s televised escalator ride to never-before-seen depths. Our political enmities did not subside in response to the pandemic but, if anything, grew stronger. Hate found a champion, and that champion, it turned out, had many followers. Americans are as divided ideologically and spiritually today as they’ve been since the Civil War, and the pandemic has done nothing to change that. Indeed, the pandemic only revealed new pathways for channeling the partisan rage that now characterizes our national identity.
3. Our irrational fear of, and resistance to, beneficial change. A third lesson (again, more of a reminder than a lesson) is that our tolerance for inconvenience, even in the name of public health, as well as our trust in science and our ability to make rational, evidence-based decisions, are as limited as our collective memory is short. Despite being blessed with scientific advances and resources that provided, at lightning speed, the vaccines that could have ended or at least significantly mitigated our public health crisis within a year or so of its start, large segments of our population chose to go unvaccinated, thereby making it impossible for us to reach the herd immunity that had been expected to save thousands of lives.
The raised-voice rift between the vaxxers and the anti-vaxxers followed partisan lines, providing conclusive proof that the rage and distrust that divide us run deep. How else can one explain the far right’s vilification of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom most Americans and the rest of the world consider a hero? And although there have been some silver linings in our response to the pandemic, like the rapid emergence of new and important medical and communications technologies that can keep us alive and keep the engines of commerce turning next time a global virus hits, can we realistically expect political extremists to behave more rationally? I have my doubts.
4. Our fragile mental health. A fourth lesson is that, no matter how well medical science reacts to emergent threats to our physical health, our emotional fragility is high. As a member both of a college board of trustees and of a demanding profession, I have been hearing and reading about the mental health crises afflicting students and lawyers. The crises were already becoming apparent before COVID shut us down, but they likely were exacerbated by the isolation, anxiety, and depression the pandemic caused. Colleges and universities have had to employ or at least locate larger-than-usual numbers of mental health providers to support their students. Bar associations have also studied and begun to address the mental health of their constituents, especially the newest members of the profession.
As one example, a report issued on February 1, 2023 by NORC at the University of Chicago found that “[a] majority of Massachusetts lawyers (77%) reported burnout from their work,” and that “[a]lmost half considered leaving or have left their legal employer or the legal profession due to burnout or stress in the last three years.” The study was conducted in 2022, and while it found that well-being measures (e.g., self-reporting of burnout, and hazardous or unhealthy alcohol use) trended higher than they had before the pandemic, the report did not have comparison data pre-dating March 2020 from which the researchers might have been able to isolate the pandemic’s effects on lawyers’ mental health. (Later this month, on my “Higher Callings” podcast, I’ll be interviewing two of the leaders of Massachusetts’ lawyer-well-being initiatives about the work that they and others have been doing to study and respond to the well-being crisis.)
There are plenty of reasons for people, and especially younger people, to worry about the future. There also are reasons for hope. Now that we have begun to recover from the worst ravages of the pandemic, and most of us have emerged from the damaging isolation it has wrought, perhaps some of the mental health challenges we’ve witnessed these past three years will soon show signs of receding.
5. Our indomitable spirit of caring. Let me end as I began, on a hopeful note. One more take-away from the past three years, it seems to me, is that for every person in need, there are many more ready, willing, and able to help. Yes, we are a nation divided, but we mustn’t overlook the tremendous efforts and sacrifices of those who have been quietly working to protect and support those most affected by what we just went through. Those helpers – the medical professionals, the researchers, the first responders, the mental health workers, and even the government workers and lawyers, just to name a few – are not often in the headlines and are showcased much less on cable news, but they are there, people of goodwill of all races, professions, economic circumstances, faiths, and political persuasions – meeting the physical, emotional, and economic needs of their neighbors.
The help takes many forms. It’s not always directed at an infectious disease. Sometimes its simpler than that – providing food to the hungry, sheltering people whose homes have been damaged or destroyed by severe weather events, or assisting asylum seekers who have nowhere else to turn. The more I learn about the many organizations and their volunteer members that collaborate to address people’s existential crises wherever and whatever they may be, the more hopeful I become that people overall are more good than bad, more loving than hateful, more kind than unkind. The pandemic brought out the worst in some of us, but it brought out the best in many more. And while we could have done better, on the whole we did all right. Maybe, just maybe, we came out of these last three years a little stronger, more determined, and better prepared for the future challenges we will face.