David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2019 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.
I might not be a white-breasted guineafowl or a giant panda, but there are days when I feel I’m also on an endangered species list. At 75, I’m a member of that group called “elders with underlying health conditions,” people who, where possible, have now been quarantined for our own safety. I am assured by my children (especially my children!), my friends, my society, and my government that the best thing I can do is to stay home. So, that’s what I’m doing.
Staying at home is not a challenge. I work from home normally, and at this time of year when there is a lot of pollen in the air, I self-quarantine anyway lest allergic reactions trigger an asthmatic attack if I go outside. What is different and challenging about this spring, though, is being seen as needing protection when I’m used to being the one doing the protecting and caring for others.
Our neighborhood, which has been terrific in pulling together, has been organizing contact lists of younger, presumably less COVID-vulnerable, people who are volunteering to help those like my wife and me who are deemed at risk. Our instinct, though, is to be the ones out helping, doing the shopping and the errands for those who need it. To find ourselves on the receiving end is strange and not altogether comfortable, though we can see the wisdom in it.
Quite apart from social distancing, I feel an age distancing that I’ve never felt before and a need on my part to recognize that I really do have physical vulnerabilities making the virus more dangerous to me than it may be to others. I am not feeling as powerful in my world as I normally do. It’s hard to be told, in essence, “you are a target, so get behind us and we will shield you,” when you want to be the one holding the shield.
What helps is realizing that by being shielded, I am also shielding. My getting sick only increases the chances of someone else getting sick. Anything that limits the spread of the virus is a service to us all. A humorous ad calls us “couch potatriots,” serving our country by staying home. Not quite a ringing call to arms, but I’ll take what I can get!
Mostly what I feel these days is gratitude. I am certainly grateful for those who are guarding Julie and me, mostly our children. I am grateful as well for those in the medical profession. Having had several surgeries over the past two decades, I can testify to their skill and caring. Closer to home, my mother was an RN. For her, healing was a calling first, a profession second. I see her in all the dedicated nurses and doctors who are going above and beyond what their professions may ask of them to fulfill what their calling demands. As others have said, they and all the other first responders are heroes, risking all to ensure that others will live.
But there are other heroes as well, often unsung and underappreciated in normal times but highlighted now for their efforts. I have friends who work in a local grocery store. As I sit here at home with my quarantine thoughts, I think of them going to work each day in this pandemic to keep this store going so that others can get food, exposing themselves to the virus in doing so. Are they not first responders in their way as well?
In 2004, Robert W. Fuller wrote an excellent book called Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank. In it, he named one of the chronic problems of our society to be “rankism,” which Fuller called “discrimination based on rank.” It means that we value some members of society more highly than we do others due to their position or their job. Thus, a bank manager may be seen as being more valuable than a grocery clerk.
Rankism is so ubiquitous in our society that it is largely invisible, unlike sexism or racism whose offenses are more glaring, yet it can be just as disempowering and damaging for the person who is looked down upon or put down because they are seen as being of lesser rank and therefore of lesser importance.
COVID-19 is upending this. It is flattening the curve that rankism creates as we realize more and more just how important and necessary are those who carry out jobs on which we all depend. Whether a mailperson, a grocery store clerk, a food handler, a sanitation worker, or others who keep society running, there are so many unsung heroes who put their lives on the line that the rest of us can have a place to get food, can get mail, can have our garbage carried away, and can have some semblance of a normal life. They all deserve medals, acclamation, and a pay raise!
I am so appreciative of these hard workers. My friend helping to keep his grocery store going is more vital—and heroic—to me right now than many of those of “higher rank,” the “somebodies” who are now at home like me and equally dependent on the “nobodies” to keep them alive. As the Bible says, the last shall be made first.