The Lessons of 2020; for 2020
There is no guarantee that there will be a respite before the next global pandemic or catastrophe. Just ask those living along the banks of the Mississippi River who have faced ‘100-year floods’ two and three times since 2015.
Listen to scientists and heed their warnings. Science is not perfect, but it does reflect our best understanding. As our exploration into nature (and the universe) expand, we are constantly building on and adding to — and yes, sometimes supplanting — what is known and understood. Rather than discrediting science, this demonstrates its vital importance and value. Scientists have been warning for decades that new diseases would emerge and could ‘break out.’
National leadership must step up. Those of us who lived through the HIV/AIDS epidemic found the slow, uncoordinated federal government response to Covid-19 to be depressingly familiar, absent a Surgeon General like C. Everett Koop who set aside his personal religious beliefs and insisted his role as ‘the nation’s doctor’ was to save as many lives as he could. Dr. Fauci has done a credible job, sharing information as much as he has been able, within the constraints of his role and authority.
Individualism is both a strength and a weakness. French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville saw the American ‘individualism’ as both a positive but also a barrier to working together and collaborating for the greater good — especially at the expense of individual gain. We certainly heard this expressed over the last nine months, as people insisted that wearing of a protective face covering was counter to their fundamental rights. Or that opening business was a greater imperative than saving lives.
Dr. Koop, again, bucked public opinion and risked outrage when he stated;
“ The right of smokers to smoke ends where their behavior affects the health and well-being of others.” This time there was no one willing to take a similar stance, and the consequences are still playing out across our country.
A sense of shared fate. In other writings I have shared that the best way for a business to find its purpose is to go back to its core values, and that nations must, from time to time, do the same. At the very founding of our nation, the idea that individual freedom was inextricably connected to collective freedom was best expressed as, upon signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Benjamin Franklin observed; “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” That is the aspect of our national character and our fundamental and foundational value that we must reinvigorate, so that we understand that ‘life’ is a prerequisite to ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
This may seem an inappropriate time to try to ‘look back at the lessons learned’ but there is no better time than when the lessons are inarguable and acute. People tend to forget and will try to. The fact that the lessons from the 1980s about HIV/AIDS (or even Swine Flu) were not brought to bear against Covid-19, demonstrates the importance of not allowing a remove of time to dampen our sense of urgency. Because the next crisis may come faster than we think.
In fact, if you talk to climate scientists, it is already here.
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.