2 Stark Truths
“Collapse “or “hardship” are our choices right now, front and centre as we navigate the pandemic world, embedded in all our thoughts and actions as citizens, governments, social service organizations and businesses.
We have chosen hardship over collapse. As we navigate our pandemic world we have created networks of feedback loops to help us understand the consequences of our individual and collective actions. We employ scientific knowledge to understand how to best treat COVID-19 and how to best prevent its spread.
We have and will continue to reallocate resources to ensure that helpful actions are prioritized and harmful actions are minimized or eliminated. We reallocate financial resources to fund the best strategies that will keep people at home. Businesses and industry reallocate their expertise to make new products, like ventilators, face masks and hand sanitizer. And to avoid system collapse and minimize human deaths, we will continue to use feedback loops to ensure we move in the direction we wish to move.
There is a strong pull within us to move back to normal, to business as was usual. Opening businesses, ceasing our physical distancing practices too early is collapse behaviour. Wanting something to be as it was is insufficient to make it so; feedback loops are life and death right now and we ignore them at our peril.
“Feedback loops are life and death right now and we ignore them at our peril. ”
I concluded my last post with a question: What feedback loops do you most appreciate right now, even if you don’t like what they tell you?
There’s a conundrum in this question, in the appreciation of receiving information we don’t want to hear. Yet allowing ourselves to hear what we don’t want to hear is vital to how well we make it through the pandemic and the hardship that comes with it.
“Allowing ourselves to hear what we don’t want to hear is vital to how well we make it through the pandemic and the hardship that comes with it.”
There are two stark truths we need to hear and accept. The first is that we will not all survive the pandemic. As I write, the death toll as a direct result of COVID-19 is over 200,000 people around the planet. We are on the cusp of 3 million cases in 215 nations and territories. To avoid collapse, save lives and save civilization in some semblance of how we know it, we are choosing to flatten the curve. We are choosing social and economic hardship to save lives: to survive we choose to be physically distant from each other, close businesses and parks. The movement of money has slowed or stalled and the bills are piling up.
The second stark truth is that our lives are not going to return to the way they were only a couple months ago. We are not in a new normal. We are in an upside-down world that exists between what was normal and a new world in the future. We are in a transition from “who we were” to “who we are going to be”.
Many describe our self-isolating as cocooning, a subtle image at first glance, but an explicit metaphor for transformation. We are in a liminal state, like that of a caterpillar in a cocoon before it emerges as a butterfly. It is not obvious what it will become, but we know it will be quite different. We are reaching for a new normal. It is not now, but what we do now shapes everything. What we think, make and do now shapes who we are and who we will become. We are in transition from something beautiful, in something beautiful, to something beautiful.
Both of these stark truths, that the pandemic threatens the survival of many of our species, and that we will not be able to return to the world as it was, must be accepted to make good use of the feedback loops available to us. The quality of our collective decision-making is threatened when we do not allow ourselves to accept these two truths because we deny the feedback loops. The courage to consider these truths without wallowing in devastation, even if for a moment, enables us to respond responsibly. This courage is needed in citizens, as well as a our governments, social service organizations and businesses.
“The courage to consider these truths without wallowing in devastation, even if for a moment, enables us to respond responsibly. ”
Four simultaneous courses of collective action are needed as we grapple with the pandemic and its consequences. All four are legitimate and required.
Address the immediate and pending health care needs of the population. This is work explicitly in the purview of our nations’ chief medical officers of health and health care systems. They are employing feedback loops to ascertain appropriate courses of action. They rely on the reallocation of resources of government officials.
Address the immediate and pending economic needs of the population. The wisest course of action, like keeping our physical distance from each other, will not take place if people’s livelihood is threatened. If there is no money coming in, people are going to work even if it risks exposure to COVID-19, and its spread.
Acknowledge the trauma and grief associated with our situation. For families who have lost loved ones, there is grief and trauma. For people working the front lines of our health care system, there is grief and trauma. For people who have lost their livelihood, there is grief and trauma. For people who experience heightened hardship with the pandemic, because of race, age, economic circumstances, there is grief and trauma. Allocation of resources to assist now, and in the future, with our mental health is necessary.
Reach forward to new possibilities to choose the quality of our present and future. If we accept that we will be changed by this experience, we can choose what we wish to learn and how we wish to grow as a people. If we put our energy into returning to the world that was, we negate the opportunity to improve ourselves.
The pandemic is giving us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. And it all starts on the ground in our communities and cities because how we make our communities and cities is a survival skill.
“The pandemic is giving us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. And it all starts on the ground in our communities and cities. ”
In what ways have you reinvented yourself, or would you like to reinvent yourself? What opportunities do you see for you city to reinvent itself? How about the human species?
This is the second in the Cities are Survival a Skill Series of posts, about the new work we are generating in our cities to resolve our health, economic and climate crises.
Collapse or Hardship. About the example of healthy feedback loops we are experiencing with the coronavirus pandemic, and how healthy feedback loops enable us to wisely reallocate resources.
2 Stark Truths and 4 Collective Actions. We will not all survive and life is not going back to how it was. There are four needed courses of action: address immediate healthcare needs, address immediate economic needs, acknowledge grief and trauma, and reach for new possibilities.
In the next post, New Work Regenerates Cities and Citizens, I will explore considering new work as adaptation to our changing world. .