How the Midnight of Crisis Will Bring a New Dawn
I had planned to write about the 77 million. That’s how many volunteers our nation’s health centers, food banks, homeless shelters, senior centers, childcare centers, blood banks, churches, temples, mosques, and millions of other organizations rely on. That’s how many people are now unable to fulfill much-needed volunteer roles as we all social distance during the COVID-19 crisis. And that’s what motivated Rob Peabody (CEO of VOMO) and me to launch the Be a Neighbor Campaign to help these nonprofits muster the help they need to keep serving their communities.
I planned to share the incredible ways people are “serving in a time of pandemic” — especially those who are doing it virtually, without leaving home, or in ways that stretch our traditional ideas of what volunteering looks like. And I was going to share why research I’ve been working on for the past three years shows that serving and solving actually belong together rather than living in separate spheres of volunteering and entrepreneurship.
I will still write that post because there are so many incredibly heartwarming stories — moments of grace as a friend called them this morning — that can uplift us all. But over the past few days as I wrestled to put pen to paper, I’ve been completely broken.
This crisis is so enormous and overwhelming and frightening, and I want to be able to inspire and bring comfort and hope. But I know, right now, most of us are struggling with what’s right in front of us — staying safe, caring for our families, keeping our jobs, paying our bills. I wept this morning knowing that millions of Americans would not be able to make their mortgage and rent payments today.
Something has been burning in my spirit so I’m just going to share it. I am 100% certain of this (so aptly said first by Martin Luther King Jr.):
The darkest hour of our struggle is the first hour of our victory.
Here’s why. Yes this crisis is unlike anything most of us have experienced or could imagine. It’s a war being fought on multiple fronts, and it feels like we’re losing. But it’s happening at a highly unique moment and context in time, and it’s unfolding in extraordinary ways. If we can understand that, we will see that the midnight of this crisis is bringing the dawn.
The Healthcare Front —
Make no mistake. We have an urgent and immediate healthcare crisis. The worldwide death toll from COVID-19 is rising exponentially and, in the US, we’ve already lost more lives than on 9–11. Healthcare heroes are doing battle against this novel coronavirus in millions of awe-inspiring and heartbreaking ways every single day. Running toward an unseen enemy while the rest of us shelter in place. Working 12-hour shifts without the full gear and equipment they need to stay safe. Putting themselves in harm’s way. Separating from the empathy, hugs and love they usually get from family and friends. Day after day after day.
The battle to find a vaccine is just as urgent. As is the battle to accelerate testing, the battle to slow the spread, the battle to supply the frontlines with protective gear and ventilators, the battle to add more beds and more capacity to care for those who are sick or dying, and the battle to innovate around the Grand Canyon-sized gaps in our infrastructure.
The Economic Front —
COVID-19 may be a virus that infects our bodies, but it’s also wreaking havoc on our economy. The first dominos of financial suffering are already falling as critical and correct public health decisions are driving employees out of offices, businesses to downsize, and spending to diminish. Vox does a spectacular job of showing how this is unfolding right now in nine charts.
Unimaginably, all this pales in comparison to what lurks beneath the economic surface. Small and medium sized companies (most of which have no financial cushion) employ 55% of all employees. Half of them are now on the brink of closing. Some of them (even the high growth startups upon which much job creation relies) are already laying people off. And, if the coronavirus-related decline in venture capital investing in China is any indication, we can expect to see a reduction of $28 billion or more in startup investment in 2020 alone. The global economy will feel these shock waves for at least a decade.
The Community Front —
This pandemic is much more than charts and figures for families all over the world who are losing their jobs and struggling to pay their bills. Most families don’t have enough saved to cover even minor emergencies, let alone go for months without work; and, for most people, healthcare was already a significant source of economic stress. Millions will miss their mortgage or rent payments today and the downward financial spiral will near the point of no return.
Families and communities, already at the epicenter of a flywheel of brokenness in our country, will bear the brunt of this global health and economic crisis.
Over the past decade, a few “superstar” cities captured the economic spoils and attracted the lion’s share of jobs, capital, companies and talent. Now, they’re dense hotspots for the coronavirus. The rest of our cities will add yet another crisis to their continuing struggle to recover from the Great Recession, the housing crisis, and globalization. They’re already grappling with the impact of automation and the shift to the digital economy. They’re struggling to jumpstart job creation, deal with declining economic mobility, shore up fractured social safety nets, stem the opioid crisis, confront loneliness and suicide epidemics and grapple with rising “deaths of despair.” All while dealing with deeply divided citizens who don’t trust the government, elected officials or each other.
Winners And Losers —
We are already a broken, harshly divided nation with a sharp differential between the winners and losers. This crisis is shining a harsh light on exactly how unequal we are. Before the pandemic, 44% of our nation’s workers were low-income wage earners. They’re disproportionately black and Hispanic and they were already barely making ends meet. Now, a tidal wave of layoffs and furloughs are hitting, and our workforce and safety net programs are ill-equipped for job losses of this magnitude.
Many who are still working — in grocery stores, warehouses, and other essential areas — are faced with a horrible daily tradeoff between getting sick or economic ruin. Everywhere you look, the pandemic is magnifying America’s class divide:
“The rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy.”
All of this puts us squarely in a place that assures this crisis will shift from being a global pandemic to something much bigger. And, as Walter Scheidel put it in his book The Great Leveler: “From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality…and inequality never dies peacefully.” His research shows that, throughout history, there are four ways inequality has been leveled: major wars, revolutions, state collapses, and catastrophic plagues.
This is one of those moments. The Big Shock. The time historians will look back on and write about as disrupting the established order in ways so enormous that society is forever altered.
The Big Shock —
The institutions we count on to govern, deliver healthcare and provide some semblance of economic security are showing their cracks. We’ve become accustomed to having big governments and big organizations in the captain’s seat, charting the course and telling us what to do so we get to safety. Now we’re seeing instructions that don’t come, guidance that isn’t clear, officials who contradict themselves and each other and, in some cases, information that is flat-out wrong. From the sidelines we see the generals in chaos — both of their own making and in being at the mercy of others’ decisions — and a lot of us are starting to realize that the sidelines might not be where we belong.
As we turn to the nonprofits near our homes, the churches, synagogues and mosques we attend, and millions of other community organizations, we’re finding incredible, dedicated, passionate people there who are, very often, operating with both hands tied behind their backs. The need is multiplying, but they’re underfunded and understaffed, and each of them is tending their own shrinking walled garden of services, donors, and volunteers. Many haven’t yet been able to peer over their garden walls to find ways to serve or solve the waves of need that are coming.
At the same time, the pandemic is forcing us and technology is enabling us to embrace ideas we may have never otherwise imagined or tried. Where we once thought our jobs required us to be together in an office, many of us are now figuring out how to get them done with Zoom calls. Where school used to mean classrooms, it now means computers and Internet connections and a whole lot of creativity and collaboration between parents and teachers. Where once online voting was a distant thought, now states are gearing up to make it happen. Where we once thought our big institutions were infallibly able to handle large scale crises, we’re all now sewing masks for doctors, crowdsourcing ideas to solve hospital supply chain challenges, meeting and caring for the elderly. We are now stepping in to help our neighbors in areas we used to rely on distant government agencies or nonprofits to take care of.
The establishment is faltering and networks are rising to stand in the gap. In seeing just how interconnected we are — both in how furiously this virus is spreading and in how we are easily able to mobilize to meet the crises in its wake — we’re seeing our shared humanity rather than just our own individual prosperity.
“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
That tiny light of hope in this pandemic is the power of new possibilities.
We haven’t yet reached the peak of this crisis. For most of us, the darkest moments are yet to come. But we can and will get through this if we do it together. Small moments of grace are where we will find hope. To make it through the midnight. And for the dawn of a future where every one of us is noticed and loved, where common good matters, and where flourishing truly becomes possible.