Rebirth

Today is Easter for mainstream Christians, a holiday auspiciously timed to coincide with when the northern parts of our planet start to wake up from winter. Rebirth.

Holy Saturday, in the Christ story, is the day he spent dead in the tomb before being resurrected. I spent part of yesterday reading this story on Medium, which I saw pretty widely shared in my friends circle. It's about the rebirth we will experience as the COVID-19 pandemic ends. The writer is worried — and rightly so — that all the forces of corporate capitalism will be brought to bear to restore everything to "normal" instead of recognizing all the good parts and truths we've seen in this Great Pause.

As he says, we don't want to get back to the way things were. Instead, what we're looking for is

the feeling of normalcy, and we all want it. We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis. I urge you to be well aware of what is coming.

But we shouldn't forget what we've been through, he says:

What the trauma has shown us, though, cannot be unseen. A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly daily effect on the planet. What’s not fit for a postcard are the other scenes we have witnessed: a health care system that cannot provide basic protective equipment for its frontline; small businesses — and very large ones — that do not have enough cash to pay their rent or workers, sending over 16 million people to seek unemployment benefits; a government that has so severely damaged the credibility of our media that 300 million people don’t know who to listen to for basic facts that can save their lives.

The cat is out of the bag. We, as a nation, have deeply disturbing problems.

When we come out of the pandemic, that is our moment:

If we want to create a better country and a better world for our kids, and if we want to make sure we are even sustainable as a nation and as a democracy, we have to pay attention to how we feel right now.

The writer of the Medium piece begs us all to steel ourselves for the onslaught of marketing messages and government pressure we will face to buy-buy-buy and forget what happened:

From one citizen to another, I beg of you: Take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all. ... We are a good people. And as a good people, we want to define — on our own terms — what this country looks like in five, 10, 50 years. This is our chance to do that, the biggest one we have ever gotten. And the best one we’ll ever get.

Minnesota's governor, Tim Walz, used a different metaphor in his moving State of the State address last weekend. He talked about the pandemic as winter, and how we as people who live in a winter state know how to survive that, and that we will be able to come out of it in the spring.

Rebirth.

That's certainly what our society and the wider world needs, and I hope the pandemic can be made into a catalyst for us to bring about the kind of change we need. Not just from the climate crisis, but from the deep inequities that shape our power relations and therefore our resource allocations. These things are related.

Other writers who have made similar points:

• A Green Stimulus to Rebuild Our Economy (a petition)
• The world after this (from Vice)
• Coronavirus may get America to pass its biggest climate bill yet (from Quartz)
• Here’s what a coronavirus-like response to the climate crisis would look like (from the Los Angeles Times)
• Even Dave Roberts' late-January article called Social tipping points are the only hope for climate relates. It wasn't his intention at the time, but I think it fits in.

And here are some visions:

• How to align economy and ecology (an open collaboration connected with the Transition Town movement)
• Elizabeth Sawin (whom I've written about before) is collecting examples from around the world that show this kind of rebirth.

I'm staying hopeful that this pandemic is a big enough lever to fundamentally shift the layers of concrete and steel that have been laid on top of our humanity over the past two centuries of industrialism.