A Millennial Stares into the Abyss and the Abyss Sends her a Revolution of Love
I have been in my house for a month, practicing social distancing because I have been very sick. I can’t claim that what I’ve experienced is Covid-19, because when I became sick, I was told by my healthcare providers to “stay home”. There were no tests when I contracted this illness that made me lose my hearing, and voice. I didn’t eat for a week and could only sleep completely upright. At one point, a doctor prescribed a small course of antibiotics after talking to me for less than two minutes over the phone. A month in, I am still coughing, and still experiencing issues sleeping. When I went to pick up the medication at the hospital, an older man scoffed at my mask, and asked loudly why people were wearing those things. To him, this is a joke. An overblown media-created circus. However, to someone like me, a woman who lost one of her healthy young friends to H1N1 while in her twenties, each new sickness could take the vulnerable, as well as the seemingly healthy.
We have learned, on the whole, that the only way to make it through this virus, the next virus, any emergency to come, is that we need to above all, care for one another. Doctors and viral specialists have told us the best way to care for one another at this time is to stay inside, and avoid contact with those who are immuno-compromised. Social-distancing will save lives by avoiding exponential spread to flatten the curve.
Social distancing is the new contract governing our lives, at least for the foreseeable future. But this is not new information. I attended college late in life, in my mid-thirties, and I remember going to bars with friends, and taking note that most of the students I met were studying hard, aware of the few spots in this global economy. They did not socialize with abandon in the ways that young people did when I was wasting my twenties. Hook-up culture is more rare than we think. Young people have higher standards, and less follow-through to maintain romantic relationships. Which brings me to my point. Millennials are not breaking the new social contract.
Every millennial I know is trying to corral a parent who leaves the house for coffee, to jab with their neighbor, or to go back to the store. My millennial friends are passing the same fifty dollars around to help each other make that phone bill before it gets shut off, or to keep the car, or the shared roof above seven shared roommates’ heads. One millennial friend is wringing her hands from quarantine, not eating or sleeping from sickness because she’s just lost her job. Another millennial friend is driving her husband for cancer treatment in a partially crowd-funded vehicle, even though she just got a 30-day notice to vacate her rented home. Just this morning, someone I know had to plead with her mother not to take a planned road trip through several states with her grandmother. We are all adapting as best we can in this new world, and we need to stop blaming millennials or boomers or the red or the blue.
Information can seem complex, and it’s hard to distinguish what is or is not true. But I can say with absolute certainty that what is true is millennials are made of strong stuff. We have grown up in a brutal global technological society. No matter how hard we work, we are not surviving. As a 36-year-old woman, I’m at the top of this age group. Ask me what I’ve encountered in my lifetime. Poverty, loss of life, sickness, war. We have seen the worst of humanity as it shifts. I, for instance, recently lost a job I went back to school to get because I injured myself but was told I could no longer work from home (even though I had not healed and could not walk.) But I know I will survive because I have. I have worked every kind of job from the age of fifteen and put myself through college. I have a partner who still has his job, and we have what we need. We are absolutely luckier than most. I count my blessings for this, and because of this, I share what I have; I use my situation to help my friends, and I try to spend time in a place of emotional care for those within and beyond my sphere, each day. The vast majority of us maintain a positive outlook, trying to be good for the sake of goodness, not for a reward system which we were sold all our lives, but we know does not exist. However, care must be reciprocal. We must give care to receive care. We must practice being good until we learn love, and how to express love.
It is long past time for change. Love is the change we need to make.
Each day we are finding out the rules for our civilized society have been lies. From little rules like how much liquid you can bring on an airplane to life-changing ones like how the police enforce an eviction, we are seeing that these rules never mattered. They have always been arbitrary ways for one human to exert force over another. The time for the exertion of force is over. It is time to take our human responsibility seriously. Each human weighed against any other human is equal. However, what is not equal is the manner in which we express our care to make society better. The central bank should not be offering $1.5 trillion in short-term collateralized loans to bail out corporations. Let the corporations fail.
Corporations don’t matter. Parties don’t matter. The gulfs existing between age or distance don’t matter. People matter. Each person should have a home to self-quarantine in. Each person should have access to food, to clean water, to medical care. We have the space, the goods, the wealth in the world to keep everyone alive. This “I got mine” rhetoric is not conducive to a functioning society. We need to care about more than our friends and family, and stock portfolios. We need to care what happens to strangers. We need to care when we see someone standing on a street corner with a sign. These are our veterans, our teachers, ourselves. We need to see that everyone is a small step from being without in the communities we have cultivated with our lapse of care. We need to care about people outside our own country. Our global community must be healthy, as a whole. This is the only way to improve ourselves, and our environment.
And more than anything, we must hold each other accountable to the damage we do when we are personally unkind. This is worse than a physical virus. This kills more people every day than Covid-19 will ever kill. I urge everyone who reads this to reach out to someone this week, and practice care, even if it’s listening over the phone, sending them $5 to help them get milk from the store. If you can offer more, do. We must take a personal responsibility to do good. Kindness can outgrow the shadow that pervades our world. Practice loving kindness. Practice caring for your fellow human. This is the only way we can survive.
