How do I keep from feeling hopeless?

Facing a crisis — from the pandemic to climate change — sucks, big time. But we're making progress.

Welcome to Not a Doctor, the only newsletter about health and science that sings off-key that it’s Friday, Fridaaaaay, and we made it through another week!

I’m Melody Schreiber, a journalist and the editor of What We Didn’t Expect. I’m not a doctor, or a scientist, or really an expert of any kind. I just like to ask questions and try to find the answers to them.

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One hell of a month

As of today, it’s been one month of staying home for our little family. Four weeks. Twenty-eight days. Many, many minutes and seconds.

It’s been a month of emotion. Fear, frustration, worry, anger, grief. There are moments of joy, too, that we try to catch and hold on to as often as possible.

But one of the most frustrating, worrisome, rage-inducing parts of this pandemic for me has been all of the preventable damage.

If we’d only started testing earlier and more accurately. If we’d recognized the risks and responded according to plans that experts have been developing for years, perhaps we could have avoided some of the worst pain and damage.

Perhaps less of the burden would have fallen on us as individuals if our nation’s leaders were able and willing to acknowledge what was happening and what would happen.

Physical distancing, for instance: it’s a last-ditch method. Why did we have to halt our lives when some of our leaders knew this was coming months ago, with plenty of time to prepare, and did nothing — nothing but make themselves richer?

I’ve been following this epidemic since the first reports of a mystery pneumonia in Wuhan (thanks to the wonderful experts I follow), so I’m all too aware of how much time and resources we squandered in our national response.

So yeah, I get a little heated. Especially because I’ve seen this before.

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Oh, right, that other crisis

Watching this pandemic unfold has been like watching a speeded-up version of our response to climate change.

First, it’s no big deal. These sorts of blips, these unusual events, happen — and then they fade away, right?

Then, okay, maybe it’s becoming a bigger deal, but only for the people over there, far away; not here, it won’t hurt us.

Oh, crap, now it’s affecting us. But what can we do? We never saw this coming, we had no plan (ignoring all the many, many plans). This is too massive to fix.

In the abdication of national leadership, the responsibility falls to individuals. Mayors of cities call for roads and schools and sewage systems that can weather the coming storms; they beg and plead for resources while waves batter their coastlines and wash away homes.

Meanwhile, everyday people vow to eat less meat, to drive and fly less, to recycle more and to waste less water and to try, with thousands of tiny actions, to create a swell of a movement — because they know doing something, anything, has to make a bigger difference than doing nothing.

Image: Tony Hisgett/Flickr

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We’re doing it

Watching another crisis unfold, on an even faster timeline, filled me with dread. I’ve seen how hard it can be to try to stem a rising tide with individual action. It can be so deeply frustrating to feel as though fixing this is on all of us, with separate small actions that sometimes never seem to add up.

But in the face of crisis, we’re still doing it. We stay home whenever we can, and we are careful whenever we can’t. We scrub our hands and we share our Lysol supplies and we talk to loved ones on Zoom, even when it’s never quite like the real thing. We sew masks and we share advice and we keep each other from going past the breaking point.

We do all of this because we have to do something. In a time where we feel so helpless to protect ourselves and others, any small action gains much more weight; any example of kindness and goodness is magnified.

And now, look: It’s working.

We’re beginning to flatten the curve. We’re staying home for those who have to show up. We’re beginning to slow the spread — not everywhere, not yet; but in some places.

We’re actually doing it. We’re fighting this pandemic with every damn tool we can find. They may be blunt tools; they may not be the tools we thought we had as we scrounged around in our metaphorical workroom.

But in force, taken together, all of these seemingly small actions gather into a wave. We’re making progress. We are moving toward something better. We will keep going for as long as we need to.

I’m so proud of us.

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Next week, I’m planning to post an open thread about the role of faith in your life in these times — how your beliefs have or haven’t changed; how you’re practicing your religion given physical distancing; the ways you feel called to minister to others. This is not my area of expertise, so I want to hear from all of you.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, feedback, or thoughts on weathering crises, please comment below or email me at melodyaschreiber@gmail.com.

As always, if you know someone who might appreciate this newsletter, please feel free to forward it to them.