A New Year’s Wish for a Politics Grounded in Our Collective Grief
our modern plague is as unjust as it is merciless
By Jim Miller
2020 is over but we remain in the midst of a dark winter of fear, loathing, and death. As I write this, the surge on top of the surge of Covid-19 is rising, and things will continue to get grimmer and grimmer before they get better.
Hope is on the horizon, but we continue to be prisoners of Federal insanity and incompetence until the new administration takes power on the 20th, so the rocky, ridiculously slow roll-out of the vaccines will drag on as the preventable death toll mounts higher and higher.
Over the holidays, one of the elders in my family has been dying slowly of COPD in a Los Angeles hospital where no family members are allowed to visit due to Covid-19 protocols.
In normal times, we’d all be there with him, but such is not our fate in this season of mass grief and death devoid of any of the usual rituals of family witness and shared comfort. Thus, while we sit with our own mourning, we are inevitably led to ponder the enormity of the collective trauma that so much of the country has been forced to endure.
Mortality and great tragedy have always been with us, but there is something particularly cruel about the way in which the current crisis has forced so many needless, alienated deaths. By this stage in the pandemic many of us know people or are a step away from those who have had to say their last goodbye over a cellphone or not at all. And while the meaning of suffering in human existence has been pondered from Job and the Buddha on, somehow the heedless nature of a pandemic fueled by political malice and near total administrative failure on every front seems to underline the senseless, meaningless nature of this cycle of mass death.
It’s hard not to focus on images of ambulances circling overflowing emergency rooms in search of a bed for a patient struggling for breath while across town, police are breaking up a huge party of maskless revelers at a warehouse. Or worse yet, the scene of the President’s family partying at Mar-a-Lago with Vanilla Ice while we endure a 9/11 death toll a day.
It all brings to mind the words of Thomas Nash in 1593 in “A Litany in Time of Plague”:
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
God cannot buy your health;
Physic himself must fade;
All things to end are made;
This plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die—
God have mercy on us!
But, of course, we know that in this plague, the rich have less to worry about as the poor are suffering at a much greater rate, and many of the biggest scoundrels of our age can successfully insulate themselves from harm and/or pay for the best health care in the world if the virus catches up to them. Thus, our modern plague is as unjust as it is merciless. Pandemic anger rages alongside fatigue and moral exhaustion.
But it is my hope that as the light at the end of the tunnel the vaccines bring gets brighter, we learn from the suffering that surrounds us in the meantime and turn toward, rather than away from, our collective grief.
This is the harder road, but if we can come to terms with it instead of denying the mountain of loss at our feet, whether it be personal, social, or economic, we can come out stronger on the back end. Turning toward our grief means facing the fundamental uncertainty of the world, our lives, and the taken for granted nature of our social relations.
It means feeling for our neighbors instead of than turning away from them. To feel with rather than wall off from the other is the road to redemption. A cultural moment that embraces this just might lead to a politics grounded in grief that produces policies based on compassion, and yes, even love for something more than ourselves.
There will be time later for more words on what this should look like, but in this first missive of the New Year, in the midst of grief, I wish for a time of profound renewal and a rediscovery of what should be the first principles of a just, more humane society.