Someone has said, “We’re all in this together,” to me at least once a day since this lockdown began. It’s a reassuring thought, time-tested through centuries of team-building and tugs-of-war. “We’re all in this together” is exactly what you need to hear when you’re at your lowest. It’s the many strong arms that lift you out of a pit.
But there’s a caveat. Traditionally, “We’re in this together” is something you say when you’re actually in the same room with somebody who needs the uplift. Removed from the person-to-person setting, the phrase loses impact; it becomes a trite throwaway that banks use to lend warmth to their “increase your credit line” emails. Aside from my girlfriend and our dog, I haven’t gotten closer than 6 feet away from another human being since mid-March, and half of them have been behind hand-sewn masks. “Togetherness” has rarely seemed more abstract.
This day-to-day isolation is painfully difficult, and it’s tough to predict what kind of people we’ll be when it ends. Absent a lifesaving vaccine, every contact we make from here on out will be prefaced by hesitation and questions. No sane person wants to contract a virus that’s scarcely understood and randomly fatal; no moral person wants to be the one to unknowingly pass it on to someone more vulnerable. But as frightening as those prospects are, they’re only a part of what’s worrying me right now. I want to know what happens when some of these stay-in-place restraints are lifted and we venture out into a city that this virus has split into more divisions than the political.
Consider: In its destructive wake, the virus has made four more distinctions of Las Vegans: recovered/vulnerable, employed/unemployed. Divisions, real or imagined, are where biases and prejudices take root. Once these restrictions are lifted, will people who have already weathered the virus enjoy an advantage over the still-vulnerable in pursuing service jobs? Will people resent Vegas’ still-unemployed in a couple years’ time, as the city slowly works back to its full strength? Will the immunocompromised resent the slowly-growing ranks of the recovered as they start to enjoy the lives they had before the virus hit?
LA mayor Eric Garcetti put it best in a recent interview: “We’re not going to flip the switch and suddenly have the economy return to what it was, and everyone come out of their homes simultaneously. … People’s physical interactions, people’s spatial understandings, people’s risk-taking will come slowly.”
This is where, at last, “We’re all in this together” comes into play. We’re going to need to bank up the empathy we’re practicing right now and disperse it for years to come, long after this terrible year has become a bad memory. It’s important to remember that no one wanted this to happen—not the people who’ve contracted COVID-19, not the people who are rightly afraid of contracting it or have lost loved ones to it, not the people who’ve lost jobs because of it, not the small-business people who were told to ask for federal aid they have yet to receive, and not the federal, state and local politicians who might have made career-suicide calls in halting our economy to contain it. We are all of us united in our despair.
Strangely enough, the most compassionate voice that I’ve heard on the importance of post-lockdown empathy comes from—wait for it—the official Twitter account for Steak-umm (@steak-umm), penned largely by Allebach Communications’ 28-year-old social media manager Nathan Allebach. In an April 2 thread, the feed correctly assesses the steaks—err, stakes of our current state: “Every decision has consequences. None of it [is] fair or ideal. All we can do is fight for the best possible outcomes, together.”
The Steak-umm account goes on to lament how politicized this crisis has become, but acknowledges that these things happen: “Life is politics, and politics is fighting,” it reads. “But we can work toward a more mutual understanding, so the fights are more against systemic problems, rather than our neighbors.”
The end of the thread is a simple, heartfelt plea: “Be good to each other. It’s always in you.”
We’ve been through a lot, and there’s more hardship and loss yet to come. But there’s hope, too, that the empathy we’ve shown for one another in recent weeks can stick. Together, we’ve landed in a dark pit. We have to be our own strong arms, lifting each other out.
