Click Here: Government and COVID-19

The COVID-19 epidemic and the ensuing lockdown continue their brutal journey across the globe. As days stretch into weeks, and weeks stretch into months, the overwhelming nature of the crisis and the extraordinary difficulty of emerging from it are weighing heavily on everyone, from those navigating the chaos alone to nonprofits shifting more deeply into crisis mode to governments scrambling to respond to the cascade of events as some of their leaders fall ill.

Marcie Bianco (@MarcieBianco), editor: When it comes to civil society, I believe the greatest engine of change is government. While the US federal government is currently in shambles, there are still beacons of hope who are trying to honestly and ethically serve US citizens. Elizabeth Warren is one such beacon, and in her interview with Ezra Klein at Vox she outlines her plan (SHE’S GOT PLANS, FOLX) on how the federal government can work to “flatten the curve” and distribute resources quickly and effectively. Yes, it’s a bittersweet read, but also reassuring. To be honest, the absolute best article I’ve read this past week was author Alissa Nutting’s GrubStreet Diet. Her description of eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch evoked my own memories of being an ’80s latchkey kid, watching cartoons all day while chomping on not a few bowls of cereal. It was a pure pleasure to read.

Rethinking Social Change in the Face of Coronavirus

In this series, SSIR will present insight from social change leaders around the globe to help organizations face the systemic, operational, and strategic challenges related to COVID-19 that will test the limits of their capabilities.

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Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu), editor: When I’m not scrolling through the daily horror show that is the news on social media, I’ve been reading Phil Christman’s Midwest Futures, a fascinating engagement with one of the most deceptively strange regions of this country. But when I hear people talking about going back to normal, treating this pandemic as an interlude or a spate of unpleasantness that will shortly end, I find futures to be the hardest thing to imagine. So I’ve been trying to picture something else, thinking about what Arundhati Roy wrote—in the Financial Times of all places—about how, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” And I’ve been thinking about the world imagined by Naomi Klein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in their Message from the Future, a video I find so poignant for how hard it can be to have the courage to hope, and so helpful because you can actually see it (in Molly Crabapple’s beautiful illustrations). Going back to “normal” can’t mean going back to the conditions that produced this terrible crisis.

Eric Nee (@ericnee), editor in chief: An important issue that has gotten scant attention this past month is the impact that the coronavirus is having on the US elections. That changed some yesterday when Wisconsin voters went to the polls in a highly contested election process that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which sided with Republican Party efforts to use the pandemic as yet another way to suppress voter turnout. The fight over election rules—with some trying to find ways to make it easier for people to vote during the pandemic and others trying to block those efforts—will continue all the way to November. The upcoming presidential election that was already shaping up to be an epic battle has now gotten a whole lot messier.

M. Amedeo Tumolillo (@hellotumo), deputy editor of digital: Madonna called COVID-19 a "great equalizer" because it could affect anyone. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York tweeted more or less the same. Their well-intentioned statements may be technically correct, but they're a bit like saying that someone on a perfectly functioning yacht faces the same risk of drowning as a person stuck in an inflatable tube with a leak. As Roberta Timothy writes in The Conversation, the impact of the disease is shaping itself to the contours of longstanding injustices. ProPublica reports that "black people are being infected and dying at higher rates." Discrimination infused the criteria that determined who could access testing for the virus. And indigenous communities around the world are seeing their vulnerability multiplied. What will societies do with this implacable and uncharacteristically illuminated view of the inequities that have long roiled them?

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