From ‘I’ to ‘We’
“This is the beginning — from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I’, and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’.
— Chapter 14, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
As you wake, look around the dark room, undisturbed by the messages you’ll read, the articles you will see, from the safety of your bed, the house plant providing oxygen, as jobs collapse into “essential,” as EDD leaves its electronic voice, as the crows squawk as if they’ve had their ears to the ground or have seen overhead, the squirm of humanity, the silence of human beings, the new dance of intermittent people on sidewalks, along the streets, small clusters of families, or couples, or single people, how animals are braving the emptiness they sense is changing, braving the sidewalks, coyotes attacking 5-year-old girls, people finally donning masks against the “wisdom” of their government, stories popping up of people we know with the virus, a friend’s dad just died. I don’t know why; a friend from high school, whom I used to go to church with, hesitates to tell but does, and who appears to be a survivor but felt like “road kill.” I don’t know where she is in terms of the steps of the illness.
What’s happening? Your job has disappeared, and the industry it represents is now a figment of itself. A person who works in a catastrophe o rebuild, catastrophe is at risk. I see it as a building being demolished as you watch. It crumbles into itself. The dust leaps and wafts in the breeze, and then the cloud comes and passes. Where something that used to have shape and utility is now emptiness, an afterthought, a figure of speech, the ground upon which we stand has only the idea of something.
I honestly think this is over. It’s over for now. Those lucky to get jobs will have income, but also significant risk unless they can afford to stay home or manage not to get sick, or go through it relatively unscathed, and not contaminate and kill their loved ones. If they can dodge that bullet, on the one where all the money runs out and its everyone for themselves, people in breadlines, people willing to sacrifice themselves, people accepting that they have to do something, tend the fields because the farmer workers have left, and gone home, because they were never treated well, never granted citizenship, who spit on our food as a final “F#ck-you” for all the kindnesses we bestowed. No, we are on our own. Did I mention the poor from “bad neighborhoods,” which will start to branch out to feed themselves, and how the military will take to the streets to restore order, blocking major thoroughfares? How police got sick weeks ago, and the ranks thinned. Who is enforcing the law anyway?
Who investigated my stolen vehicle years ago as I presented the evidence in a plastic bag, and the officer came out of a door on the side of a secure wall? She listened with sympathy, probably laughed as I left, and threw it in the garbage.
Even years ago, the ranks were thin. Money comes from the taxes of these neighborhoods, where the green velvet curtain was thick enough not to reveal the red-headed man with the microphone. Our armies were not meant to fight urban battles, to protect from invisible enemies. Homelessness was never cured. Do we drive battleships to the coastlines and fire munitions into the boroughs to extract one man trying to feed his family but who is rampaging in his apartment building, scavenging to find food for his daughter, son, wife, mother, father, uncle, aunt, mother-in-law, father-in-law, grandmother, and grandfather…? Everyone is shut-in because of the virus, and few will have jobs. We’ve become the migrants we kept in cages, the train loads we stopped at the border. We have become what Mother Nature wants us to become so we can see what it is like to be equal, equally tied to a reconstruction of what matters.
And what is most essential? Health, money, and love. If you don’t have your health, as Bejan Moghaddam used to say, you have nothing and would point to Steve Jobs and cancer and how his money couldn’t save him.
Moghaddam would also say: “Your savings is your freedom.” And love is the only thing that gives us reason not to kill ourselves or take from neighbors and to be able to empathize.
How do we plan for our escape? Should we leave and head for the hills? Shall we start to grow crops? Work the fields as in the Days of Heaven or The Grapes of Wrath? Shall we respect each other, work together, and love one another, now that we are the same?
To those in their bunkers, I know what it’s like to have more, to live in isolation; it’s not human. The lesson here is love; the address is sacrifice. Because that’s what makes us who we want to be.
