The World Just Shrunk

The world just got a whole lot smaller. Whether you live in Milan, Italy or Moline, Illinois; York, England or New York, New York; Johannesburg, California or Johannesburg, South Africa, we are all now sheltering in place and watching a pandemic sweep the globe.

I don’t want to minimize the disparities here. One look at this drone footage of South Africa and you realize that economic disparities all over the world will mean some people experience this pandemic more intensely than others. People living in homeless shelters don’t have the privilege of social distancing. But not since World War II have so many living in wealthy communities shared something in common with those in under-resourced communities. We are under the same restrictions. Those of us who have been insulated from so many threats that others must live with daily have a window of opportunity to lean into solidarity.

Of course, sheltering in place is not new.

Immaculee Ilibagiza, a Rwandan Tutsi, tells her story of being confined to a bathroom with seven others for months during the genocide in, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. In her ordeal she had powerful spiritual encounters and profound moments of solidarity with others.  

The Diary of Anne Frank is another story of sheltering in place.

When the relatively wealthy Frank family had sheltered in place for six days (about the same amount of time that many of us here in the US have at this point) Anne writes, “It’s more like being on vacation in some strange pension … for the time being I doubt we’ll be bored. We also have a supply of reading material, and we’re going to buy lots of games. Of course, we can’t ever look out the window or go outside. And we have to be quiet so the people downstairs can’t hear us.”

For me it’s also been a bit like that, an odd vacation. But that’s likely to change as weeks turn into months. Two and a half months into being confined, Anne went back to that entry and added, “Not being able to go outside upsets me more than I can say, and I’m terrified our hiding place will be discovered and that we’ll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect.”

As the restrictions placed upon us morph from inconvenience to anxiety to terror, I think more and more of people like Anne Frank and Immaculee Ilibagiza. And I think about my global neighbors who are experiencing the need to stay inside today – those living in Yemen or towns where the Boko Haram conduct raids. Places where wandering outside at the wrong time could prove deadly.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that people like me that are confined to our homes are suffering just like those living in war, or who’ve lived through a genocide. I am saying that those of us living relatively privileged lives have a rare opportunity to embrace solidarity, however modest, with our less privileged neighbors.

All forms of terror are terrible. That’s why the words are related. Comparing one person’s anxiety to another’s is unhelpful. Rich and poor are all living with a low-grade, slow-burning fear about the future. But we are doing so together, and that makes a difference.

Let’s embrace our global solidarity during this pandemic. And, let us remember that there will be a time of celebration in the future. True, some will experience tragedy and loss, and there may (or will?) be recurrences of this virus in the years ahead. But in time there will be a massive global party. We will have passed through this dark night together. We’ll have created better hygiene habits. We’ll have adapted and innovated how we live on this planet. Maybe we’ll have improved and expanded health care and flattened, just a little, the wretched inequities of our world.

Humanity has an uncanny ability to bob and weave in our common struggle for survival. After this passes, maybe, just maybe, the privileged of our world will have shared a moment of connectedness with the globally excluded, and all of us will have been made better for it.