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This is what cancel culture looks like.
I’m marveling at how analog, human, and connected the world still is. We very much depend on gatherings, a topic beautifully explored by Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering, and those gatherings are now changing rapidly due to the spread of COVID-19.
I started to feel the effects a few weeks ago, not through a cough or fever, but because my career heavily depends on physical travel and gatherings. Something rattled in my mind when an event in Vegas I was supposed to do got postponed. Another tremor occurred when a gala I regularly host was rescheduled. Then I overheard a group of lawyers say their global partner gathering was canceled altogether, and last week I met a young black man at a conference. That’s not the tremor. Meeting black people is always a joy! The tremor happened when I offered him my newly-customary elbow bump instead of a handshake, but he insisted, “Nah bro, I wanna dap!” And I’m thinking, “DAP EQUALS DEATH!” I hesitated, shook his hand, then held it away from my face like it contained COVID19 in concentrate form until I could wash for 40 seconds. They say 20, but 40 is double!
What’s your Covid-19 handshake and hug substitute? Namaste? Wakanda forever? That Kid N Play dance from House Party??
Those rumbles and tremors I felt are now shaking the world. SXSW was probably a tipping point, as was Italy’s nationwide lockdown, and today, Harvard. In case you missed it, the university announced it’s going entirely virtual for undergraduate classes and asked students not to return after the end of spring break on March 23. Any large gathering that does not cancel or postpone will face a form of shaming that will force the organizers’ hands. “Are you smarter than Harvard?” will be a question one has to answer.
So I find myself thinking less about the epidemiological facts behind this disease and more about the social and economic ripple. This year, 2020, will look like a dip or gap on many charts. When we suddenly reduce the ability of people to physically gather, we short circuit a part of our society. Film festivals, sporting events, graduations, weddings, theatre performances, mass transit all connect to jobs, revenue, information flows, and even joy. Gatherings power culture, and they are being canceled. So, how do we maintain social cohesion in a time of “social distancing?” What happens when people cannot opt out of those gathering places? What if that place is a prison? What if those prisoners are forced to make hand sanitizer they themselves can’t use?
I over-consume information, so I couldn’t really say what “mainstream media” was doing to effectively handle the crisis, but Elizabeth has assured me, they are doing a bad job at prioritizing relevant information, so here are some tools to help.
First, Imade you a Twitter list (no twitter account required to view). It contains a handful of trustworthy voices on the virus and its impact. Because there’s a lot of information out there, some bad and some useless, I think list is one place to start to filter out the noise.
Here’s a review of informational dashboards (thanks to Micah Sifry’s Civicist newsletter). The best ones show infections, deaths, and as important, recovery rates. My favorite is what Singapore uses. Most of us don’t live there, but it’s what a solid government response seems to look like, and I’m jealous.
Most crises reveal the good within us and the bad, the strength and the weakness. From my place in the United States, I am nervous about the political response. I don’t think we have ever been through a crisis like this with such underwhelming leadership. Many assumptions of how “strong” we are will be tested. Like the election. A dark question bouncing through my head is, “Will we even have one?” To an authoritarian demagogue, what better excuse is there to “delay” an election that might end your reign than an epidemic?
On the flip side, with polarization extending deep into our informational realities, could we see wildly different impacts of this virus based on party affiliation? Will the MAGA crowd be more susceptible to infection and harm because they see the virus itself as “fake news.” Any dark momentary satisfaction I get from that retreats when I remember something I wrote above: we are all connected, so their pain is mine too.
That’s a big lesson I’m trying to keep in mind. I may never show symptoms. I may never require hospitalization. But my actions can put others at risk, and if there are steps I can take to improve the health of the public overall, I’ll take them. That’s “civilization” in a nutshell. We look out for each other because we recognize the connection between us makes the distinction between us meaningless. Like the famous line in Glengarry Glen Ross, “A. B. H.: always be hand-washing.”
And now, for your regularly-scheduled content.
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