Category: Uncategorized

The Accomplices of COVID-19

Alvanei Xirixana, a 15-year-old Yanomami boy, has died of COVID-19. His indigenous tribe in the Brazilian Amazon is legally protected from outside contact in order to preserve their health and their way of life. A land reserve was established to do so. But it turns out, that land contains riches, which is the scourge of all indigenous tribes.

While incursion into that area is illegal, gold mining and logging operations make daily forays into the reserve, bringing disease and polluting the rivers with toxic elements. This is how Alvanei contracted the virus. While the government of Brazil has known for some time of these illegal activities and the threat they pose, they have not stopped it. Now, the very survival of this tribe may be at stake.

Greed and indifference are the accomplices of COVID-19. They aided and abetted its spread and have stood in the way of successful control of the virus. Greed and indifference will remain long after this pandemic, fueling future disasters unless we address them as central threats to human life.

Since the 16th century, indigenous peoples of the Americas have suffered massive losses from diseases brough by European invasion. Again, greed and indifference. Smallpox was even used as a weapon to wipe out tribes in Western North America to make westward expansion easier. In 1763, British Field Marshall Lord Jeffrey Amherst concocted the idea of lacing blankets with the smallpox virus and giving them to the Indians as a gift. The plan was carried out with some success. Lord Amherst was honored by having a town in Massachusetts and an elite college named for him.

Another item: the link between poor air quality and severity of coronavirus symptoms has been established. Despite that, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has decided to not reduce standards for soot pollution, which damages lungs and compromises a person’s ability to fend off the virus. Greed and indifference leading to death.

With COVID-19, self-interest and indifference allowed authorities to deny, minimize and delay acting. Indifference leads to not wearing face masks and practicing social distancing. Due to greed, essential medical supplies go to the highest bidder, certainly immoral when lives are at stake. Now supplies purchased by governors are being intercepted and pirated by agents of the U.S. government. Indifference and self-interest allow that to continue. The major pressure to “re-open the economy” is from people who don’t believe the government has any right to restrict their behavior. When restrictions are lifted on our activities, greed, self-interest, and indifference are what threaten a second wave of infection.

So, this isn’t just a war against a virus. The real war isn’t fully over until we neutralize its allies – greed, self-interest and indifference, or they will do other forms of harm. They are the major players in climate change, poverty, racism and so on.

We are winning the war on the virus with extraordinary compassion, courage and determination, in addition to knowledge and skill. These will all be needed to take on greed, self-interest and indifference to the suffering of others.

But who will lead the campaign against greed and indifference with the same determination and skill as we are doing with COVID-19? They may be what it takes to stop such mass destruction. Religious leaders might call for it, but organizing an effective campaign is something else.

What Day is It?

People are joking that they don’t know what day it is anymore. For many of us, the name for the day of the week no longer carries meaning anyway. With having to clear our calendars, one day became the same as the next. This may have been refreshing at first, but no longer. For many essential workers, it is the same, but for different reasons. They don’t know when their next day off will be. There is no hump day for them. Every day is like Tuesday. You worked yesterday and a free day feels a long way off.

For some of people, undefined time is emotionally distressing, even the breeding ground for depression. With little or no definition in time, they just feel lost.

Suppose you were out at sea, not knowing where you were, but you had a machine that gave your location. It gave you numbers for your longitude and latitude. Now you would know where you are, right? Not really. Not if you didn’t know where your destination is relative to those numbers. Without a reference point, all you have are meaningless numbers. This is how some people are feeling about days of the week and calendar dates.

Some people who are used to being busy actually feel ill when they are idle, dubbed Leisure Sickness and Sunday Neurosis. Pastor Rob Bell has written that when he started taking a meaningful Sabbath day free from work and responsibilities, he felt depressed in the early afternoon of what was supposed to be a gift day.

While some people get through this distress to become comfortable, others do not. They are better advised to create structure in time, even if they only have little things to work with. While many people are doing this, others need a nudge. The first thing has been creating online ways of doing what you did before, like Zoom support groups, book clubs, breakfast clubs, music lessons, tutoring sessions, worship and business meetings. Some find it helpful to check off days on the calendar while other find it distressing. It is worth finding out.

There is more, though, to having the name of the day be meaningful, and that is keeping personal structure. So instead of noticing you had a hair cut appointment you now can’t keep, you cut your own hair and schedule the next appointment with yourself. Schedule when you take walks, get groceries, and so on. Decide when to work on puzzles, when to eat what. Couples are keeping date night in new ways rather than letting it go.

While this all seems simple enough for many of us, for some, it takes deliberate effort and reinforcement. They are more likely to just do things when they feel like it rather than keep a structure. While that sounds like freedom, it can unwittingly fade into darkness.

Let us also not forget those of us for whom the calendar now only consists of stressful dates. The day bills are due are anticipated with dread. When unemployment checks come with their additional value, the end date will be burned into the back of the mind. The day of the week you get your weekly food allowance from the food bank has meaning. You don’t miss it. In such circumstances, the above methods for structuring time with positive things matter even more.

While some physicists say time may not even be real, for us humans, it does matter in how we relate to it.

They Care for Our Dead

Have you seen the footage of people caring for the COVID dead? We have been good about naming the heroes in this pandemic and recognizing the enormous sacrifice and horrible trauma they are experiencing. What I don’t see mentioned, though, on the list of those to thank are those who care for the dead bodies. These people don’t save lives, so they are not heroes, I suppose. But their service is essential and it is numbingly traumatic.

In many locations in the world, they deal with hundreds of dead bodies a day. It is very akin to war where the casualties are heavy.  Like the military personnel who have loaded and unloaded cargo planes full of body bags and coffins. In many cases, the dead are being buried in mass graves for safety reasons or are being incinerated.

They might wonder who the people are whose bodies they have responsibility for. Some of these dead are heroes who gave their lives fighting the pandemic. Some are victims of chance exposure or exposure they could not avoid. Some are victims of their own reckless behavior or the reckless behavior of others that exposed them to the deadly virus. The virus got them all.

Unlike medical personnel and first responders, those who care for the bodies of our neighbors, friends and family had no opportunity to get to know the people whose bodies they tend to. No bonding. No sense of the context of their lives. They don’t know who is in the body bag, who is in the coffin. All of the body bags, boxes and coffins are the same. And yet, these dead are not mere statistics. Bodies are heavy, Statistics are not.

It seems that being a grave digger has always been a lowly job. Upstanding people did not associate with them. Yet, these were and are the people who bury those with no money, no known relatives or associates. Without knowing their names or where they came from, grave diggers give them a home, just as they do for those with large monuments.

Let’s name those who deal with the dead bodies among the people we lift up for our thanks and for our blessing. They are servants of our communities.

Survivor Guilt: Destructive or Instructive?

While many Park Avenue tenants are comfortably sequestered in their peaceful summer homes with spacious grounds, their fellow New Yorkers are having trouble sleeping due to the unceasing wail of sirens. Many have died. Many suffered a long time, near death, but somehow recovered. The joy of their recovery is dampened by their guilt – the guilt survivors commonly feel. They survived, while others did not.

Unlike the wealthy New Yorkers, I didn’t have to leave town to be in a safe place. I live in one. Unlike those with inadequate resources, I could have left town if I needed to. It is wise to feel unsettled about that.

Survivor guilt is quite normal. Depending upon what you do with it, it can be either meaningless or transformative, destructive or instructive. It is meaningless when we flee from it like fleeing from the memory of the illness itself. It is instructive when we sit at its feet and learn from it. It is destructive when we torment ourselves with the question “Why?” Why did I survive when so many others did not? Does my life have more value than theirs? Am I blessed but they are not?

Survivors may well have some physiological quality that helped save them. Or maybe they were just lucky. For some, they survived because their wealth allowed them to have decades of better nutrition, less financial stress. They lived in safer neighborhoods. They were not weakened by other medical conditions or mental health conditions.

Even though the wealthy might think that God has been good to them, Jesus pushed the point that it isn’t so. The poor and sick are not out of favor with God. That isn’t what is happening. God’s goodness is scattered equally to all, he said.

These are the kinds of things that are instructive about survival when others perish. They only come with reflection, which is positive use of the guilt.

The wealthy in their safe quarters may not feel guilt for surviving. They haven’t been taken to school about injustice and chance the way survivors have. They might have come out of this more awakened had they stayed and served in their communities.

Awakened, survivors understand their responsibility to work for justice and fairness. It is sobering, as it should be.

Aid Application Frustration

Doing the same thing over and over again, hour after hour without success. The channels are clogged for people out of work applying for government aid. So too for small businesses that face insolvency in a matter of weeks.

What this process takes is very emotionally taxing, frustrating and discouraging for most people. Yet this is what many of us, our family members, friends and neighbors are having to do with financial survival at stake. We see on the news that some people are keeping count of the number of times they have called and not gotten through or applied online and pushed the final submit button and nothing happened. It can be hundreds of times before success comes. Many people are still in that process.

There is a way to minimize mental/emotional wear and tear. These same things work for applying for jobs, when we are at that stage.

First, treat this like a job. This is now what you have to do. Approach it with the same discipline. On this job, you are both boss and employee. The boss part of you makes the plan. The employee part carries it out, even when you don’t feel like it. This really helps. Maybe even physically put on different hats for each role.

Second, as boss, make a plan. What is the task? What materials do you need to collect to make the applications?  Establish a work schedule similar to your usual workday. Set start and stop times. Build in breaks. If you live with other people, let them know your schedule so they will not interrupt you. This can be hard for small children and pets. Set up a conducive workspace to do the task, like phone calls or online applications. Does some music help? What kind?

Then, as employee, follow the plan. Gather the materials. The work task is done repeatedly until an application is successfully filed. Some paid jobs are like this anyway. Keep the schedule, including breaks. Don’t let feelings and thoughts distract you. They are not helpful. You can indulge them when you are not working.

Will counting the number of attempts help? It may for some people, as a mark of your accomplishment. For others, not.

You can’t afford to have the mindset of failure. With each attempt, you are doing what you are supposed to do even if it is not successful. No, “I’m such a loser” kind of thoughts. Be a good supervisor to yourself. Be encouraging. With each attempt, many others are doing the same thing at exactly the same time. So, it is just a matter of luck when you will get the application submitted.

If you are calling to make the application, when you get through to a real person, help make their day. Don’t complain. It is not their fault. Be pleasant, maybe even with some humor. Theirs is a stressful job.

Then, be grateful and relieve. Yes. We are all in this together. That is how it works.

The Greeks and Romans called luck Fortuna.

Good fortune to you.

Is This a Marathon?

I dreamt that I was in a marathon. But I’m a sprinter. I hadn’t signed up for this race, and I couldn’t get out of it either. And no one knew how much farther it was to the finish line. I felt distress and confusion and saw the same in the faces around me. Terrified, I woke up.

I woke up to find it was real. We can’t get out of this and don’t know how much longer it will be. But is it a race we are in to get this over? I decided to go back to sleep and finish the dream.

This time I found myself among a flock of geese high in the air on a long migration. This was very different from the marathon. Despite the dangerous situation, it felt strangely peaceful. Geese can only migrate by sticking together and working together. The flock felt strong and committed. By flying together, migrating birds actually create the conditions that make such a long journey possible. No geese are strong enough to do it on their own. Flying together in formation, they create draft that eases their way so they can go farther and farther. They must stick together, simultaneously helping and being helped. Helping and being helped. Pulled along by their combined effort, they can go many times farther than they ever could alone.

This is how front-line pandemic workers are doing it. It is demanding, dangerous and of unknown duration. And it is only possible by sticking together as a team. Together, they create the conditions that make it possible. Even though they may not know the person working next to them at any given moment, they are in the same flock, honking reassurance to each other.

“I’m here.”

“I’m here.”

This is how the rest of us are doing it as well.

Dangerous Thoughts

“I think it will be all right. It seems safe enough.”

The Surgeon General of the United States is concerned about the next couple of weeks determining our ability to flatten the curve and relieve the pressure on our emergency services. He is asking for greater compliance with the best practices they have established for our mutual safety. This means following them consistently, even when we don’t think we need to. Masks are the latest requests, with compliance not so good. So, it is timely to refresh our understanding of what leads us to make exceptions and not follow best practices, especially when they are being imposed on us. Many of us rebel against that.

While there are several lines of reasoning that tempt us to not comply, they all lead to the thought, “I think it will be alright. It seems safe enough.” We can listen for that thought, and ones like it. When we think like that, we are trusting our own judgment instead of people whose judgment is based on far more data than we have.

“I thought it would be alright.” Painfully, as a psychologist I have heard this expressed by many professionals who knowingly did not follow professional boundaries and best practices. They thought things would be alright because that is what they wanted to believe. But things went bad and out of their control. People got hurt.

“I think it will be alright” has led to many disasters that would not have occurred if people had followed guidelines instead of their own judgment. Lest we think we are immune to this kind of thinking, among the disasters due to not following guidelines was the Space Shuttle explosion. These were intelligent people. So also, were the people who died on Mt. Everest from not heeding the 2pm rule of the mountain, to turn back toward camp at that time regardless of how close you are to the summit. Some of the climbers convincing themselves and each other that it would be alright. There hadn’t been bad weather in a long time. An unexpected snowstorm came up and many people died. Others were put at risk to try to rescue them.

Tragically, a community choir recently encountered unnecessary illness and death. They thought it would be safe to get together and sing to lift their spirits because there had been no reported cases of COVID-19 infection in their county. “It hasn’t happened around here. I think it will be alright.” This is called distance bias. Even though it has happened elsewhere, if it hasn’t happened around here, we don’t take the threat as applying to our location. That was there; this is here, the reasoning goes. Well, it did happen to this choir. With this virus, it can happen anywhere.

Of course our minds will want to find exceptions to make things easier, get us what we want or not make us look foolish wearing a mask, for instance. Let us be vigilant, recognize when these thoughts when they occur and not follow them. Thank others for doing the same and encourage those that don’t.

The Sidewalk Dance of Social Distancing

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Going for a walk in our neighborhood, it is delightful to engage in social distancing with other walkers and joggers. People move onto the grass to give safe passage to the walkers they meet. The walkers wave in thanks. Joggers will go into the street’s bike path until the walkers have passed. For many, this virus has brought an increase is situational awareness and collaboration.

The skills of situational awareness and collaboration will serve us well when we again share the roads with many other drivers. Driving is the largest scale cooperative activity we engage in. From the air over a large city, we can see it for the beautiful collaboration that it is. We can also see the few people who make things unpredictable and unsafe. While they are the exceptions, when we are driving, we can stay preoccupied with them.

Collaborative driving involves knowing where you are in the flow of traffic and what your role is at any given time. It only works by following the rules and best practices, just like coronavirus safety. This is a sacred responsibility. Just as with social distancing, with driving, someone’s life is in your hands while your life in in theirs. Sometimes the thing to do is yield to another driver. Other times it is to speed up to make room for them merging. At all times, it is to be calm, aware and in the spirit of wishing everyone well.

Many of us are hoping we can come out of this crisis able to live the awareness of mutual vulnerability and mutual responsibility far better than we did before. Driving is one arena for doing that.

The sidewalk dance of social distancing is a thing of beauty and joy. Driving that way is even more so.

Churches Spreading Disease

For Christians, Holy Week is upon us. Are all the churches in your community holding services that are safe? The answer affects all of us.

According to a Religious News Service report of April 1, 12% of survey respondents in the U.S. say their church is still meeting in person. The governors of Florida and Texas have now classified religious gathers as essential services, making them exempt from the rule limiting gathering size.

The minister of a megachurch in Texas, a pastor in Florida and one in Louisiana have all been arrested for violating state orders against gatherings over a certain size. It was deliberate defiance.

Some Catholics are pressuring their Bishops to re-institute the in-person administration of the sacraments. They are claiming religious persecution from having them be suspended for public health reasons.

There are many justice issues involved in how the pandemic is being managed. Among them, is that some ministers are responding in ways that risk spreading COVID-19 while so many others are staying disciplined. And the ministers are doing this under the cover of religion. They are pressuring governors to classify worship as an essential service, like grocery stores. Some governors are doing so, putting at risk the good work so many people are doing to save lives and create the conditions for people to safely return to work.

One of the criteria for what makes a behavior pathological is that is causes harm. Drinking, shopping and exercise can all be done to an extreme where they cause harm. Then they are pathological, unhealthy. In the case of the pandemic, some religious people are recklessly risking doing harm. There can be various reasons and motives. Pastor Tony Spell claims that it is impossible for members of his congregation to get infected. He believes the virus is attracted to fear. His people are not afraid, so they are not at risk. This is really pathology expressed as religion. Some Christians may be distraught, fearful that without receiving the sacraments in person, their immortal soul is at risk. The element of religion does not make this anxiety less pathological. Some religious leaders may truly believe that the pandemic is a government hoax perpetrated to justify martial law. The cover of religion does not change that they pose a danger to their community. Some who are objecting just seem offended that religious gatherings are being officially classified and nonessential. Freedom of religion does not mean the freedom to do harm.

The vast majority of clergy in our country have worked long hours to make their services be both safe and meaningful with technologies like YouTube and Zoom. Roman Catholics are using the well-established practice of spiritual communion. While some insist it cannot be real worship if it is not done in the usual way, the proof is in the pudding. The vast majoring of clergy are proving meaningful worship safely, without physically gathering,

We are in a campaign to protect each other. We should not stand by and let people be hurt by the pathology or rigidity of a few who happen to be clergy or happen to be expressing it through religion. College students were called out for their spring break carelessness. We need to call out religious leaders as well. It is a justice issue. This is what love of neighbor looks like now.