Editorial

Traditions to Keep

devAl (reshmA) pArAnjpe, md, mBA, fACs

The pandemic isn’t quite over, but the media coverage has ebbed. Most people are either vaccinated or have been infected once or multiple times. Some people have long COVID-19.

We may not be entering “the after” yet, but it seems that we are entering “the aftermath”.

What lessons have we learned, and what traditions will we keep because of what we’ve just lived through? I remember learning second-hand lessons as a child through wary adults who had lived through Watergate and Vietnam: question everything. Don’t blindly trust politicians or the media. These same lessons have echoed through the pandemic, along with a few new corollaries which will no doubt be explored in business and public health graduate schools for decades to come. The best interests of the economy don’t always align with the best interests of public health, health care workers, and individual patients. The best economic interest of an individual may not be aligned with the best health interest of that individual. Government institutions, including the CDC, are more vulnerable to political influence than we thought or hoped. In many ways these have been rude but necessary awakenings to snap us all out of complacency. The children who came of intellectual age in these few years will in turn carry these lessons into their adulthood.

But think about the positive side. What good traditions arose from these few years that we can carry forward?

One small, beautiful, powerful tradition that arose from this pandemic is the friends and family check-in. At first, friends and family checked in on each other regularly to ascertain: “Are you sick? Are you well? Are you alive? Are you vaccinated?” Now, the checkins may grow a little sparser and less intense, but no less loving. We don’t take good health or recovery for granted anymore. We don’t take each other for granted anymore.

Another tradition to carry forward- Rediscovering and strengthening old bonds. Many of us reconnected with old friends from high school, college, medical school, and training during quarantine. We suddenly discovered that we have a long-neglected network of trusted physicians in various specialties at our disposal from medical school and residency/fellowship. We trust them clinically because we remember who wasn’t a slacker and who had the best scores and who was the good egg who’d go the extra mile. We trust them personally as friends because we remember who was there when we needed someone to lean on and ask for help.

Many stories of reconnection with old friends have emerged—from 2 am curbsides and impromptu zoom reunions - to sharing vital new medical knowledge from different areas of the country and tips on how to stay safe and protect our patients, our families and ourselves.

Then there’s the tradition of Random Acts of Kindness. The pandemic has taken a toll on everyone’s mental health, and some people have made a point of lifting each other up.

I have a friend who started sending me the most beautiful little gifts during the pandemic in the form of texting me music out of the blue in the middle of the workweek or weekend. Sometimes as a hello, sometimes as a thank you, sometimes just as an expression of joy, always as a desire to share something beautiful in the middle of a humdrum day. I never realized in all these years how much we had in common in terms of our musical taste. Sometimes we’ll have entire conversations which consist of: “have you heard this artist yet? You need to!”, “this is my favorite cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah,” and snippets of everything from bluegrass to opera to doo-wop to jazz.

You don’t need much to spread joy, just the desire to lift someone else up and pay it forward.

The pandemic tradition of cooking fun and delicious meals at home instead of dining out will serve us well during the forecasted recession ahead. The pandemic tradition of working remotely may stay in place longer than expected due to unprecedented gas prices.

Many of us, having lived through the extraordinary sight of bare store shelves, have resolved to keep an ongoing reserve supply of stuff in our basements. Never again will we be caught without laundry detergent, canned goods, paper towels, or toilet paper. Our grandparents may have had the Depression-era mentality of saving and/or mending everything. We will adopt the pandemic mentality of hoarding and always being prepared for sudden disaster and scarcity. We are shaped by the hardships we have lived through, and though we may not realize it yet, our grandchildren’s generation may laugh at us and our compulsive toilet-paper hoarding decades from now.

What else have we learned? We’ve learned that human nature hasn’t changed much over thousands of years. A few semiconductors, some cryptocurrency and electric razors are all that separate modern man from long-ago ancestors in history books. Pride, greed, stubbornness, lack of consideration and care for our fellow man, avarice: all of these very human faults were on remarkable display in the past few years. The thin veneer of civilization that makes our society palatable showed considerable cracks and chips. We’ve learned that “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” makes such great sense as a societal maxim. And yet, how few people adhere to it!

We’ve learned that some evil and societal ills go underground during times of crisis. School shootings disappeared only because school was closed. Mass shootings only disappeared because of curfews and quarantines. Stress and strain accelerated domestic violence and child abuse and drug abuse, and quarantine made these horrors invisible. Given the motive, means and opportunity, evil will act. It’s impractical to have purely virtual school and neverending curfew and quarantine, so the opportunity will always exist. But what will we do about reducing the motive and the means of these heinous crimes in the future?

We’ve learned that all the scientific and societal progress of the last few hundreds of years can be undone with the ravings of a few highly vocal uneducated people who engage in magical thinking and challenge common sense public health measures. We’ve learned that even within the scientific and medical communities there are varying degrees of buy-in, resistance, fear, politics, and intellectual curiosity. No more do I wonder: “how could the Salem witch hunts have happened? How could McCarthy get away with his anti-communist hysteria? How could the Inquisition have happened?” The seeds of hysteria, magical thinking, and rejection of the scientific method were to be seen everywhere around us. For heaven’s sake, people were actually drinking bleach. No more will I declare blithely “this could never happen today.” There is a reason why the survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides have adopted the slogan “Never again.” It’s because they recognize that the flaws of the human race make such an awful thing possible at any time. We haven’t evolved past our collective, faulty, uncouth, tribal human nature, nor are we likely do so in the future without concerted and continual effort.

And yet, there are better angels all around us and among us. These souls have demonstrated the best of human nature in the worst of circumstances and are beacons to the rest of us trying to do our best. They live the creed we all should strive to follow: Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself. What a wonderful tradition to keep.

The opinion expressed in this column is that of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Editorial Board, the Bulletin, or the Allegheny County Medical Society.