Corona Connection: Rise of the Communities

The last few months have highlighted our need for community. Despite the availability of technology and the ability to easily communicate to whomever and whenever we please, we live in an age of loneliness, where many people feel like they have few people (or even no one) that they can rely on for emotional support.

Social distancing has been a catalyst of personal growth for many of us as quarantine forced us into solitude and a period of self-reflection. It was the pause button on the busy-ness of everyday life that was uncomfortable, but needed. Empty grocery store shelves broke the illusion of infinite abundance, and alerted us to the fragility of modern society. After only a month of reduced transportation, city air and waterways got noticeably clearer.

These experiences seem to say, “You are not in this alone.”

Your actions are inexorably linked to every other person and living thing on the planet.

In the absence of being able to socialize, I realized how much I took it for granted. I realized all the people I wished I had reached out to and met when I had the chance before my university went online. I also remembered the times in which I was in need of help, desperate for community support but felt so alone.

During quarantine, I was learning about lightning and came across the term “Corona Discharge.” It is a luminous effect when an electric field causes charged particles to radiate from a conductive surface. If the electric field grows strong enough, or if the conductive object is brought close enough, this charge can arc between objects, as shown here.

The lesson from Corona is clear: If you want community, you have to reach out!

Similarly, we need to bridge gaps between perspectives.

We are facing many challenges that simply cannot be addressed in isolation. To the contrary, many of our problems arose from isolated thinking—from thinking that the isolated actions of one corporation, or of one person—doesn’t affect others. Now we know better.

The two main issues I will touch on are Black Lives Matter and the environment.

Black Lives Matter

The footage and stories that have been circulating from the BLM movement has been nothing short of a wake up call for me. Police brutality is a problem that simply cannot be ignored anymore. The stories that we hear are likely only a fraction of what has happened, and it highlights the need for serious repercussions and accountability to be put in place that would prevent officers from behaving aggressively without cause, putting people in life-threatening holds, giving confusing commands at gunpoint, and falsifying reports.

The article Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop should be required reading. Some eye-opening quotes include:

"In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is 'changing things from the inside.' They can’t, the structure won’t allow it."

"Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have. One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he 'slept like a baby' that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but 'unofficial training' teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them."

- Officer A. Cab, Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop

The article points out an important question: Why are cops the first people we call for problems that would be better addressed by social workers? When the use of lethal force is so rarely needed, and when cops predominantly get to the scene after the crime has already been committed, why is the primary tool for people in crisis an armed soldier, whose primary tool is a gun?

Why are so many resources being used to fight crime, when preventing crime could be magnitudes of order more effective?

The challenge that the BLM movement faces is that it has periods where it makes a lot of noise, but then fades away. The movement needs more calls-to-action. Besides protesting and signing petitions, what action steps can be taken? What specific changes can be implemented?

This movement is no substitute for strong communities. It can be a source of inspiration, but at a certain point, the baton needs to be passed to local community members, and not dropped. This can come in the form of shared conversations, local events, and the kind of sustained actions that lead to changes in local representation, policies, and culture.

When it comes to social concerns, there is a wide discrepancy in commitment: People either devote themselves wholly to a cause, start a nonprofit, and vow to “change the world,” or like most of us, are far too busy with working full-time to take any action at all.

Your actions are inexorably linked to every other person and living thing on the planet.

Another lesson from Corona is that we can be productive, often from working at home, and by working less hours. A lot of the stress we feel in everyday life is artificial and unnecessary, and we are much more efficient and capable than we give ourselves credit for. In accepting this, we can liberate some of our energy and time from meeting our survival needs for the purpose of building and serving our communities.

Actions don’t have to be large in order to make an impact.

Environment

What’s good for the environment and what’s good for the economy are often two different things. How can we make them the same thing?

It simply does not pay to be a company that cares about the environment. If anything, companies are rewarded with greater profits for doing exactly the opposite: being negligent of, or directly abusing, shared environmental resources. For many corporations, the name of the game is hiring people to lobby state legislators so that environmental regulation never impedes their profits.

Each local area has their own specific environmental concerns, but there are also the global concerns, namely the pollution of the ocean and the carbon emissions in the atmosphere. These are shared concerns that must be addressed, and cannot be addressed with isolated thinking.

We live in an incredible age of abundance where you can order a product from anywhere in the world and have it shipped to your doorstep. A global network of farmers gives you the illusion that crops are in season year-round. Almost anything you can imagine can be manufactured to the exact shape that you envision and mass produced using plastic molds. It is an important question: Can we continue this level of production and efficiency and also be sustainable?

I am optimistic that the answer is yes, and that modern society is not incompatible with sustainability. However, much would need to change in order for sustainability to be realized.

It can be hard to grasp how far removed our modern energy consumption is from the span of human history, but it helps to translate the energy that we regularly use and take for granted into manual labor, or the number of slaves needed to generate that energy.

If you convert the amount of energy consumed by a typical individual living in a first world country, the estimate is anywhere from the conservative side of needing 50 slaves to generate the electricity for their residence, to easily over 100 slaves if you include the energy consumed in their transportation, and in growing and transporting the food they eat.

Imagine that: Living in modern society, and living a “normal” middle class life, with luxuries like washing machines, personal cars and computers, and not having to grow your own food, is the energy-consumption equivalent to having 50-100 slaves personally working for you.

To get an idea for the math behind these estimates:

• How much of a slave master am I?
• Joules, Watts, Kilowatthours

When I did the math for myself, doing a conservative estimate of just taking into account my monthly electric bill and commute, the number came to 84 slaves.

The conversion of human mechanical power to electrical power is pretty terrible, as demonstrated by Walter Lewin in this MIT physics lecture. You can turn the a crank until you’re red in the face, and you would be lucky to have some toasted bread to show for it. It’s something to think about while you blast your AC in summer.

It’s important to note, that the energy efficiency of our most used sources of power—be it burning fossil fuels, nuclear power, and even solar—tends to be pretty terrible and at less that 50%. The other half of potential energy is lost as other means, like heat. Yet, despite these inefficiencies, we continue to use these large amounts of energy to satisfy our standard of modern living to live like kings.

All of this energetic abundance is only made possible by the trees and organic life that lived and died millions of years ago. The fossil fuels that we extract from the Earth is, in simple terms, highly concentrated energy in limited supply.

We are facing many environmental challenges, and I am flabbergasted that being concerned about the environment is a political stance. People can devote their lives—decades of hard work—to developing a scientific understanding of the environment, while people with no such training can simply deny their findings and life’s work. If you say the problem doesn’t exist, that doesn’t make it go away.

There is a growing distrust of experts and science in political arenas that is concerning. Skepticism is important, but because of the internet and how easy it is to research, the Dunning Kruger effect is running rampant. People who read about issues for a few minutes believe that they understand the topic more than people who have been researching it for their whole lives. In this regard, coronavirus may be delivering a dire wake-up call.

Connection

The Black Lives Matter movement and the environmental challenges we face at first seem like completely separate issues, but they are connected. These issues perpetuate because capable people are inactive and silent. These problems perpetuate because we believe that there is no harm in isolated actions.

The message of BLM is that black individuals should be respected and honored; not “accidentally” executed without cause and without even an arrest or trial. When an officer’s negligence results in loss of life, they should face justice.

Similarly, we have been mistreating the environment. The Earth has become our slave. We take what we want, abuse, and don’t show compassion or seek to understand how to be a participant in a healthy and diverse ecosystem. When a corporation’s actions result in lasting damage to the environment, they should face justice.

Not only must we demand more, but we must do more. We need to hold each other accountable and support each other. This is what it means to be a part of a community.

How to Be an Active Community Member

Some of these steps are better taken after the threat of coronavirus has lessened, or done cautiously by wearing a mask and social distancing.

• Introduce yourself to your neighbors by bringing them gifts and cards with your contact information on them.
• Clean up litter in your neighborhood.
• Attend local events, such as City Hall meetings, University public lectures, local art gallery events and plays.
• Watch and share documentaries. Or even host a documentary viewing event at your local library or community center. Some good candidates are Our Changing Climate , Rotten, and videos about the Green New Deal.
• Read about issues that are important to you. Some books on the environment that I’ve liked are The Third Plate and The Hidden Life of Trees. Also checkout Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop.
• Shop locally at small businesses and farmer’s markets.
• Donate to important causes, community service and outreach programs.
• Support independent journalists.
• Find a local nonprofit and volunteer.
• Become a role model for an at-risk youth through Big Brothers and Sisters.
• Protest. It is your fundamental human right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment.
• Sign petitions, or even create your own petition.
• Post online. Tell your story and share the stories of others.

If more people believed that their actions were linked to every other person and living thing on the planet, how would the world change?