As the incredibly long and difficult year of 2020 metamorphasizes into 2021, although I know many will disagree with my position on this very sensitive theme, I believe we have a glimmer of hope on the horizon with the promises of vaccines to fight off Covid-19. But the path ahead of us as a society is long and difficult.
In my opinion, as a leukemia survivor whose lower bodily defenses during treatment made me extra susceptible, that path includes to continue wearing masks, to continue to isolate ourselves from seeing our loved ones, to continue to stay at home.
These imperatives are made that much more difficult by people who refuse to do any of those three things and get away with it, sometimes getting the virus and suffering little from it, and sometimes not getting sick at all. Even if they act this way not out of irresponsibility but out of personal convictions at variance with official policy, is it not better to adopt a preventive attitude, and to conform?
It’s heavy to see how we, as a society, have little to no idea of collective responsibility. Rather, we have been led to believe in the idea that individuals exist in a vacuum. Usually, the power to make choices that disregard everyone around us and center on ourselves as the protagonist of the human experience are the beginnings of epic tales.
I mean, after all, we all love movies like The Matrix or success stories about famous businessmen. So, surely, if you are willing to get Covid-19 because you are young, or healthy, or you just don’t care, the buck will stop there, and no one will suffer from your own willingness to get a virus that likely will not kill you.
But events like global pandemics remind us that we are inextricably, and painfully, connected to everyone around us. Our actions could affect people we have never met – many degrees of separation away from us. People whose names and faces we will never know.
For example, a wedding in Maine this summer is claimed by the state’s health authorities to have resulted in 177 Covid cases, and the death of seven related people who did not even attend.
The realization that fantasies of individualism are actually lived out on a planet crowded with other human beings, a planet where we are never alone as much as we may want to be, makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable and exposed.
Many of us realized our connectedness years ago, when faced by different circumstances. In my own case, it was cancer that made me understand how close I was not only to different people, but to all living things.
I understood this not only as someone who was immunocompromised, for whom a slight cold could prove lethal, but also as someone whose disease’s causes were unknown. No one, from researchers I consulted, to my (incredible) medical team knew why I became sick. Yet, it has become clear that environmental causes play a key role in cancer’s development.
Studies like TheReasonsWhy.Us challenge the idea that humans exist in isolation from their environment. They challenge our complacency about toxic environmental exposure.
It is with this knowledge of our interconnectedness that we should seek answers for the causation of all diseases – and push back against the idea that we exist in isolation.