This editorial originally had a less hopeful tone. What changed it was news out of the United Kingdom that a Black man rescued a white counter- protester who had clashed with anti-racism protesters in London. According to news reports, Patrick Hutchinson, described as a personal trainer, used a “fireman’s lift” to carry the man to safety. “I wasn’t thinking, I was just thinking of a human being on the floor. It wasn’t going to end well had we not intervened,” Hutchinson was quoted in news accounts. As another of the rescuers, noted, the efforts not only spared the man’s life but those of his assailants who would have faced life sentences had they succeeded in doing their worst.
Unfortunately, about that same time, back in the U.S., another Black man was killed by a white police officer, after a routine sobriety test went terribly wrong. Far worse than that. It piled on top of events that already are making this one horrible year.
COVID-19 is killing people at a pace not seen since the global Spanish flu pandemic just over a century ago. Unemployment has reached levels rivalling the Great Depression. All those troubles are layered on top of the original sin of our western civilization — the inequitable treatment of the descendants of African slaves and of the original inhabitants of this continent. That dry tinder was ignited by the viral video of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of an African American man, George Floyd, for nearly nine minutes.
Bad as things are and they are very, very bad indeed it’s no time for despair.
The Second World War lasted five years. It resulted in the deaths of 65 million to 85 million people. Estimates for the Spanish flu death toll range from 17 million to 100 million. Combined with troops returning home from the Great War, the flu sparked a recession. But it soon gave way to the Roaring Twenties, which made way for the Great Depression, and the Second World War.
The few people who lived through any of those are at high risk for dying from COVID-19.
Residents of a Montreal nursing home were left to die alone because staff were too sick or too fearful to come to work. Similar scenes played out at nursing homes in Spain, New Jersey, and Ontario. The Canadian government even called in the military to aid Ontario nursing homes. The military then issued a scathing report about the conditions.
Since the early days of the pandemic, the public health advisories were never about protecting otherwise healthy young people. The advice was clear and unequivocal stay home, don’t gather in large groups, wash your hands. Later, people were advised to wear a mask, although the initial nonsense about that foreshadowed other cognitive dissonance that came later.
At first, the expert advice was don’t wear a mask because masks don’t work and we need to save them for healthcare workers. But why would healthcare workers need them if they don’t work? Then the advice became people shouldn’t wear masks because they can’t put them on properly.
Now, we are told to wear a mask to protect other people in case we have the disease.
One consistent message was to act as though you and everyone else is infected. Thus those who gathered to protest the lockdown measures were rightly criticized. It was interesting to see public health officials pivot and endorse protests of a different sort. Yet the coronavirus doesn’t differentiate based on the cause. Masks help but they alone can’t assure immunity or abate the anger.
A movement to “defund” the police is building momentum. A majority of councillors in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, vowed to disband their police department. Who had that in their predictions for 2020? Last August, a poll of Minneapolis residents found that 63 percent of respondents supported adding 250 police officers. Among respondents of color, support was 65 percent. That was less than a year ago but it seems like it was in another lifetime on a planet in another galaxy.
Amid all the bad news, U.S. unemployment dropped slightly to about 16 percent. Yet at the same time, COVID-19 cases were creeping up again in several states.
Because of a lag between exposure and symptoms, that increase can’t be pinned on the protests. It’s likely from states relaxing lockdown measures. Yet we shouldn’t be surprised if the numbers spike again in the near future. Or not. This year is full of surprises and even the occasional rescuer.
