(i) Properly expanding America's civil democracies to be persistently driven by equality and justice for all.
(ii) Letting go of unhealthy eco-blinded industrialization, commercialism, and consumption.(iii) Learning to work, listen, and build cooperative socio-economic partnerships across localities, regions, nations, and internationally while learning to let go of our trigger finger aimed at resource stealing, post-colonial expansionism, national sovereignty popularism, and ethnic cultural warfares.(iv) And, on the religious side of things, to discern just how bad some Christian teachings have been when promoting fear, distrust, uncertainty (FUD), warfare, self-rights, and self-preservation. Mixing unhealthy beliefs with unhealthy politicking is just bad business for any community or nation.
That discriminatory and inhumane religious beliefs must be dropped by Christians from their Christian faith so that better religious teachings emphasizing an attitude of servanthood, personal sacrifice, service to others, and unbiased stewardship in all things such as non-profits, social aide, education, basic humanitarianism, love, peace and goodwill have much more to offer.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by AntonioGuillem/iStock/Getty Images Plus,Prostock-Studio/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Thinkstock. |
“I Do Not Trust People in the Same Way and I Don’t Think I Ever Will Again”
My grandboss mentioned us going back a few weeks ago and I could almost immediately feel my panic response. I realized I haven’t been around anyone for more than two hours at a time in a year (except for three short occasions), I’m dreading having to wear a mask for multiple hours at work, I’m nervous to be back in spaces with lots of other people (even though I know our spaces are immaculately clean, we’ve still had a few positive cases). I don’t feel like me being there will do any good vs keeping my germs at home and away from people who are immunocompromised. It’s all so fraught and anxiety-inducing.
I have felt like I am the one taking crazy pills the way some of our staff has reacted to my three-month warning that we will be reopening the office at the start of June. I am impressed we have held it together this long, but it has been a LOT of work and we just can’t afford to keep paying fees for missing things and losing time for development/training.
I do not trust people or institutions in the same way and I don’t think I ever will again. Even as we “go back to normal” (and since much of the world is not vaccinated, it is not even close to over yet) I will not forget how our societies treated vulnerable people and essential workers as expendable, minorities as scapegoats, facts and public health as suggestions or lies.
Even when things are as safe as possible, there’s a sense that we’ve been torn apart.
Maybe I was naive, but I always assumed in a crisis, we’d come together as a society and have each other’s back. It’s been over a year of being proven wrong about that over and over again. Knowing that the people I serve at work and the ones I run into in my life may or may not be willing to throw me overboard for their own personal benefit and comfort makes it hard to be around people.
I feel differently about how I view the world and how much I want to interact with it. And I need to work on that, but I think the impact of this will linger.
All of this is true despite the very good news around us—like the rapidly increasing vaccine supply and new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing vaccinated people are unlikely to carry or spread the virus to others. For many people, that doesn’t change the reality that the past year has been a trauma, one that’s still unfolding. You can’t just turn that off when your office says it’s time to come back. (I also want to acknowledge the millions of people who won’t be “returning” to work because they’ve been working on site all along or have lost jobs that might not be coming back. In some ways, this anxiety about returning is the province of the privileged.)
So what can employers do? First and foremost, when possible, plan your reopening for further out than May or June. Think late summer or early fall. Give people plenty of notice, so they have time to get used to the idea, line up child care, and make any other arrangements. And consider a phased-in return: Rather than expecting workers to resume full-time on-site work overnight, bring people back for one or two days a week at first and then gradually increase that if it’s necessary. (It may not be! Many people have concluded that their jobs could be done most effectively with a hybrid setup, working from home some days and in the office others.) This person describes a system that worked well for her employer:
My facility has been closed to the public for basically a year. We did WFH for a while, then a mostly-WFH hybrid for the whole workforce, and then back into the still-closed-to-the-public office since the new year. We are just now opening up for limited programming, which I’ve had some surprising anxieties about even though I just got my second shot. Being able to ease back into things, and having things like mask guidelines, plexi barriers, and sanitizers everywhere has helped.
Coming back online a little bit at a time has allowed people to readjust. And it has given people with health concerns the flexibility to continue working from home, while letting those of us who feel able take care of the physical stuff that has to get done. I can’t imagine doing a year (or months) of WFH then returning to what is basically my pre-pandemic normal, just with masks on. If there is any way to make this a gentle transition, I think that would be the right call for everyone.
But employers should also recognize the significant break in trust between individuals and institutions, and know that won’t be repaired overnight. That doesn’t mean employers can’t bring people back when it’s truly safe to do so, but there’s going to be anxiety in their ranks for a long time—and the more they can be sensitive to and patient with that, the better reopenings are likely to go.
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