TO THE EDITOR:

Before we rush to get “back to normal”, I hope we can take a moment to ponder.

Disasters unearth what has been buried and leave us with a choice: tend to the underlying issues or wait for the next wave to strike. At least for America, COVID is much like the infection of a wound left untreated. While revealing many things, COVID has unveiled our isolation.

We’ve been forced into our homes, away from real, person-to-person interaction. In 2018 (so pre-quarantine), the research group Nielsen found that the average American spent 11 hours interacting with media a day (and I don’t think a lot of that was book reading). We already were spending over half the day in our own digital bubbles (not including sleeping - although my roommate talks to me in his sleep sometimes). Our culture and society, unable to accept vulnerability (seeing it as “weakness”), has become wedded to hyper-individualism, rushing through grief and pain to enact quick fixes and put on “happy faces”, furthering rates of depression among adolescents - increasing 5% from 2007-2017 (PEW Research Center).

Our isolation is changing the way real people relate to one another and currently, we have hit the bottom. We can “get up and keep going” as we so often try to do, or we can look around...How did we get here? Are we going to listen to what the Earth is revealing? From the way I see it, depression is not the problem: it’s a memorial. A memorial to the societal pains we have pushed away and ignored. Pain that can only be healed when communities choose to name it, sit with it, and repent instead of just offering some damned cliche about bootstraps. Memorials aren’t problems for fixing, they’re invitations for grief.

Brody Hed,

Becker, MN