Understanding Leads to Calm Resolve

We were warned at least a decade ago  that a viral pandemic was inevitable.  In a way, we had already had one. As a research assistant for the president of a Spanish chapter of Médicos del Mundo some 20 years ago, I did a deep dive into the history of AIDS, which took me to Africa, where deforestation and habitat damage impacted food resources for chimpanzees. Malnourished, they became ill. Impoverished villagers, in the absence of better options, ate some of the chimpanzees. Some villagers fell ill. Just one viral jump in Africa--a place that too seldom arises in our awareness-- from an ill chimpanzee to a poor villager, and then: you know where that story goes, into the heart of our nation and almost every other on earth. There are now good retroviral drugs, yet 1.7 million people contract HIV every year. As of 2018, 37.9 million people were infected with the AIDS virus. This is 40 + years after I first learned of it. Forty years later, with treatment, with education, with research and millions of dollars spent, the dangerous visitor is still among us. Forty years.

Bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS: we couldn't ask for better advance warnings. A friend of mine asked me if Covid-19 was "the plague" God "sent down" in the Bible. "No ma'am," I answered. "We made this one all by ourselves."

We made it in large part by hideously mistreating God's creatures and their/our environment.  Pigs kept in deplorable circumstances, birds cooped too tightly, unable even to stand; cows not allowed to live natural lives (add Mad Cow Disease to the warnings); exotic animals marketed illegally and, exposed in the process, to--who knows? The list is long and complex, involving many countries, and thousands of people wanting, some even needing, to make money from treating and consuming animals as objects, or, if possible, something less than an object (I'm at a loss for the right word), certainly nothing close to a being, alive and breathing.

While I don't think God created Covid-19 to punish humanity, I don't mind turning to the Bible for some wisdom on the subject. I found: "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast."  Proverbs, 12:10.  KJV

And: "For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." 1 Timothy 6:10 NIV

We've been fed many slogans for 20 years and more about globalization and connectedness.  The proponents of these have shown themselves all too ready and willing to use international "unity" to make money. When the US started doing business with China, I heard numerous conference speakers on "the numbers." It was worth whatever the US had to do, because profit potential in China was on a planetary scale. Yet, in the process of developing business there, we sacrificed standards, intellectual property, quality control, and much more. The FDA no longer inspects pharmaceutical plants in China, for example. Heparin is no longer made in the US, but in huts in rural China, where women harvest pig guts, from which Heparin is made. Most of those huts have no indoor plumbing. (See the book China: RX by Rosemary Gibson) If you think you're safe because you don't need a blood thinner, you may not be. Heparin is used routinely to flush IVs in many hospitals.

I have a deep background in marketing and I appreciate what a good business can do and be. I also understand that marketing is not sales; it is the matrix in which sales take place--a complex web of content and feedback that travel through many different relationships. In today's globalized economy, these relationships and their content and feedback pathways display brain-bending complexity. For the sake of profit (not jobs, not prosperity, not communities), "big business" has twisted these historic content and feedback pathways for the big P.

They treat profit as a moral good, as an intrinsic value.  Profit justifies anything and can even soothe one's conscience about certain business decisions, such as the massive offshoring of American jobs. The share holder culture has served the profit goddess very well.  The Profit Goal has become the major justification for a host of evils. This isn't new, but it has reached a new, all-encompassing scale. The current pandemic is invading not only human and animal bodies, but also the global business body, its supply chain, its gatekeepers, its benificiaries, and those whom it has robbed.  When all is global, we learn, in the starkest of ways, all is also local. No one is immune from Covid 19, just as  no one is immune to the unhealthy and sometimes inhuman global business practices which have created the perfect environment for this virus to invade human society worldwide.

As a person whose health has been compromised for years, I sometimes feel a creeping terror about the new virus. I will most likely never be able to fly commercially again. When will I see my son and his family, who live thousands of miles away? Right now, I cannot even see my own brother, though we live  just 15 minutes apart.

When I taught a communications seminar for Habitat for Humanity International. I asked the participants to write down words they associated with "village."  Most of them had in mind a beautiful,manicured British township in mind, with vine-covered cottages, a nice local pub, a farmer's market, and very friendly neighbors. One participant, however, wrote down the word "awful." She was the only person in the group who had ever actually lived in a village. Having lived in a village overseas myself, and having grown up in a small rural town, I get it. The Spanish village where I lived was cramped. Everyone knew your business--in good and not so good ways. The streets could be impassable. I turned the wrong way on a one-way street and drew a crowd, including the village policeman, with people screaming at me in Spanish, telling me how daft I was, didn't I see the sign? Well, no, because it was hidden by one of the many cramped buildings jutting into that thread of a throughway.

We are, all of us, now squarely in the global village: the one businesses and trade agreements designed for us, telling us how good it would be for everyone, never hinting about whom it could hurt. Under NAFTA, US manufacturers paid employees at the maquiladoras in Mexico even less than they had made before. Many empleados made only $1/ hour. Some investigative reports have tied the burgeoning gang wars and violence in Juarez to the poverty these insulting "salaries" created.  It's also no secret how many jobs were lost in the US, as one more global option helped seal the coffin for "made in America."

We can kid ourselves with the slogan "America First."  But no one is first when you live on a circle. It's no longer globally possible for any nation to be first (although China's giving it a good run)

It's distressing that a deadly virus should be the agent to teach us this lesson. Like the "butterfly effect," the smallest action far, far away can change all our lives. Refusing to have regard for animals world-wide has given rise to a maleficent, conglomerate beast. Bats housed badly next to livestock housed inhumanely... a virus in one of them silently jumps to a caretaker (who likely has no say in how the animals are treated). One day, this worker coughs or sneezes, or touches a hand to his face. Four months after that cough or sneeze on the other side of the world, more than 1 million Americans are infected with Covid-19. 43 of those are in my home town. No one in my residential community can leave for any reason until....?

Friends of mine who travel widely told me they learned about the new corona virus in a newspaper in China in October, 2019.  We had a great swath of time to prepare, but we just couldn't conceive that we're part of China's "village," and Africa's, and Europe's, and even Antarctica's.

So, I have some understanding of the complex factors that led us to this dangerous point. Profit over purpose, forgetting "prosperity for all."  The massive mistreatment of animals, both food sources and exotic animals, together with the destruction of their habitats. A false sense of security in a country that seems too big and strong to be brought down by a virus. A health care and insurance system too long run on a profit-over-people model, where resources were pared down and assumptions made about what is "enough," without entertaining the question, "And what will we do if?" And, lastly a government that did away with one of the world's best prepared pandemic defense entities and who also cut funding to the CDC. 

Because I have understanding, I also have hope. What we can understand, we can improve. What we don't understand can, literally, kill us. I hope this pandemic will lead many people to understand that we cannot afford ignorance, because isolation is sheer illusion. It's not fun, but we need to understand the business and governmental factors at work in our lives and homes, in our own habits, and certainly in our local health care resources. 

We need to understand that what we do not do to protect the immigrant, the working poor, the disadvantaged, the animals who feed us, the environment that nurtures them and us, even the small business owners in our own communities, will ultimately be what we do not do to protect ourselves. 

Author Walt Kelly's character Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."  
I believe we can say, "We have met the solution, and we are it." 

Not to be overwhelmed. The solution may be as grand as going to a climate change summit or as small as where you shop for your groceries. Anyone who tells you that a small action is unimportant is wrong. Each one of us is enough, each one of us is part of a solution--somewhere--in this gone-global village.