As the reality of the pandemic redefines our way of life, fear is seizing our imaginations and forcing the question: How do we handle the terror? During times of radical peril, we naturally turn to our leaders for practical instruction and moral guidance.
In his March 11 address to the nation, the president assured us that our “vast economic prosperity gives us flexibility, reserves, and resources to handle any threat that comes our way.” He boasted that “no nation is more prepared or more resilient than the United States.” We were informed that “the risk was very very low.”
The president’s speech offered rich illustration of a dysfunctional response to fear and continues to do so in his daily briefings, namely avoidance and denial. Words intended to deliver reassurance are so riddled with self-promotional boasts and misleading appraisals that each performance requires a stream of reversals and revisions. So much for full churches at Easter and a speedy reopening of the US economy! Our president has become the poster child of magical thinking.
More distressing than the recurrence of feckless and contradictory predictions is another classic response to fear, one that threatens national and international collaboration. Our president is a great believer in walls, and he has consistently maintained that the threat comes from outsiders. We are threatened by aliens, a “foreign virus,” immigrants and asylum seekers who have more in common with the walking dead than fellow members of the human family. To be sure the influx of travelers from infected lands does demand draconian measures. Like other nations around the world, we must take extensive precautions, not only to keep this disease from coming in, but also to make sure that we do not spread the infection outward to other quarters of the world.
We nonetheless need to remember that the fearful distrust and contempt for migrant workers have a long and brutal history in our country. In the late nineteenth century, American populists branded the immigrants from Asia as a “filthy yellow hoard” that stole employment from the white working-classes and endangered Christian civilization. In Los Angeles, racial fears of “the Yellow Peril” ignited a massacre in 1871 in which 500 white men lynched 20 men of Chinese origin. The recent spike in anti-Asian assaults is a predictable outcome of the inflammatory rhetoric of the current administration and its hostile immigration policies.
When our president and secretary of state label the COVID-19 “the Chinese virus,” and others glibly dub this plague “the Kung Flu,” they are recapitulating a xenophobic reflex: the impulse to divide the world into opposing camps, “us” and “them,” “the good guys” and “the bad guys,” “the children of light” and “the forces of darkness.” This dichotomy may offer up an evil adversary onto which we can project our anxieties. But this tactic blinds us to the true nature of today’s viral enemy and alienates us from vitally important allies whose assistance will prove indispensable in the global battle.
As David Bier reminds us in a March 15 USA Today column, “we also need doctors, nurses, and home health aides — all occupations where immigrants are disproportionately represented. In New York City, 45 percent of the doctors and 58 percent of the registered nurses were foreign-born in 2016. Among home health care aids who are particularly important for the elderly population most at risk from the virus, the share was 76 percent.” We are discovering as never before that our destinies are interwoven.
The saying goes that in the end we are confronted with an inescapable choice: to fear or to love. At this perilous moment, the line that separates fear and love has become tangled. After all, fear may be instrumental to our survival. We must identify and avoid behaviors that threaten the spread of coronavirus. The reciprocities that served us in the past now present us with the threat of contagion. We dare not hold our neighbor’s hand or welcome their kids into our kitchens. This virus renders friends as well as strangers a lethal menace.
Yet we must not let the discipline of social distancing undermine the recognition that we belong to each other. To hold in check fears that can spread as uncontrollably as the virus, we must find ways to affirm the solidarity of the entire human family. Now is a time for a hard reckoning that tempers our instinctive fears with the compassionate recognition that we are one.
We will need to find new sources of inspiration and different models of leadership. But this we know: The future that we pass along to our children and grandchildren will depend as much on the moral character of our response as the medical expertise that is deployed here and around the world.
Christopher Leighton is the founding director of the Institute for Islamic, Christian & Jewish Studies in Baltimore, Maryland. He now lives in New Harbor.