Pandemics have not always shown us in our best light. During the Black Death, people abandoned their children and massacred entire Jewish communities. Early Americans blamed cholera outbreaks on the poor, and AIDS gave rise to virulent — and occasionally violent — homophobia. Now, people of Asian heritage everywhere are the target of racial slurs and worse. It doesn’t help that President Trump keeps calling it the “Chinese Virus.”
No wonder people are scared right now, and not just of disease. It turns out Americans aren’t just stockpiling toilet paper and N95 masks, but knives and firearms. Do we need guns to protect ourselves from all the people buying guns to protect themselves from all the people buying guns?
Yet, none of this reflects my experience with our current pandemic. Worried about how some of my more vulnerable neighbors would obtain medicine and food once shopping became a life-threatening activity, I went on Nextdoor.com and proposed that we create a support network for the West Cambridge area where I live. Could we come together to support our neighbors who were most at risk from COVID-19?
Within just a few minutes the comments were filling with neighbors volunteering to join. Later that afternoon someone pointed out that some recent Tufts grads had already created a mutual aid organization serving Medford and Somerville. They’d also created a set of easily navigable Google docs to help organize their volunteers, and had posted instructions on how other cities could easily duplicate what they had done. By the end of the day, two women in my neighborhood had taken on our project, and the Human Network Initiative at Harvard Medical School, devoted to rebuilding such community ties, had come in to act as a statewide coordinator.
As I write this the Cambridge Mutual Aid Network has over 300 volunteers, and similar groups have sprouted up across the region, from Jamaica Plain to Dorchester to Western Massachusetts. The focus has expanded to include not just food delivery but child care, and routing donations to the people who need them most.
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Like most of the other volunteers, I’ve focused most of my attention on my immediate neighbors. We’re still a support network in waiting, but the exercise has already brought us all closer together. Nancy from the yellow house across the street has been helping me set up the listserv, and David from the loft building behind my street has volunteered to do food delivery for folks in his building. On Tuesday, Alexis, a freelance writer in the blue-shingled double-decker up the street, proposed we put up a different symbol in our windows each week so neighborhood kids can “hunt” for them. We’re going to start with rainbows. If this sounds like some dopey activity straight from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, then it’s working as intended.
The point of all this isn’t that I’m a particularly virtuous guy regularly take the last cookie in the cookie jar, and become visibly impatient when the people ahead of me in line get chatty with the cashier. But I think I’m pretty typical: I’m scared of people sometimes, but I’m mostly scared for people. But not as much as before.
So should we look to history? Yes. But we should also remind ourselves that human nature is not a fixed property — and that’s a good thing because the conditions of our existence have changed dramatically in the last 100 years alone, and so have we. In his classic work, The Expanding Circle, the moral philosopher Peter Singer makes a persuasive case that not only is empathy a deeply ingrained, evolutionary trait, but that in recent years we’ve expanded the circle of those we’re willing to extend it to.
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There is a chance that COVID-19 leaves us a weakened and even more deeply polarized society. But if my recent experience is any indication, there’s an equal chance we emerge with stronger faith in our ability to act compassionately and assist each other in dire times.
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Jeff Howe is a journalist, author, and fellow at Northeastern University’s Global Resilience Institute. Email your 650-word essay on a relationship to connections@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue. Send comments to magazine@globe.com