We’ve had to think a lot, over the past couple months, about
what is “essential” and what is real.
As it turns out, CEOs are not essential, but grocery clerks
are. Wall street bankers are not essential, but truck drivers are. Politicians
are not essential, but epidemiologists are. Wars are not essential, but social
services are. Restaurants are not essential, but food is. Realtors aren’t
essential, but housing is. Clothing stores aren’t essential, but seamstresses
who can make a mask are. Haircuts aren’t essential, but hospice care is. Physically
showing up at a church or a bar or a stadium is not essential, but fellowship is.
Travel to other countries isn’t essential, but leaving the house to walk around
and exercise is. Many of our jobs are not essential, but having the means to
get food and shelter is.
We’ve seen that “the economy” is a fiction that we’ve shared
for ages because it was a more convenient way than bartering to keep track of
who owes favors to whom. “The economy” isn’t real. Food is real, and starvation
is real if you don’t have food. Viruses are real, and they will really eat your
living lungs given an opportunity. Friends and family and neighbors helping each
other in an emergency is real. People providing necessary goods and services to
each other is real. Pieces of paper being used to measure whether an individual
has worked hard enough to deserve food and shelter – that’s not real. And the
holes in the story of “the economy” are now threatening to unravel every
structure that human society has built around it, now that it doesn’t work
anymore.
And death is real. It’s the one reality that everyone must
confront sooner or later, no matter who we are, what we believe, or what we do.
And because death is real, the single most essential reality
while we strive to delay its coming is this:
Human beings need each other.
We need each other for survival, and we need each other for
comfort, and we need each other’s touch, and we need each other for meaning and
purpose, and we need each other for beauty and art and music and poetry and
laughter and love and being fully human. We need each other’s strengths to
compensate for our weaknesses. We need each other’s knowledge to compensate for
the areas where we as individuals are ignorant. We need each other to make difficult,
even sacrificial, choices to keep each other alive and healthy.
Most of all, we need each other to be fully ourselves.
Most of all, we need each other to be fully ourselves.
That is real. That is essential. Everything else is a distraction.
