How to cultivate hope during crisis

I work in mental health. You might imagine I would hold a modicum of rationality, and reasonable coping skills. I am pretty good at compartmentalization. I can box things quickly, most the time, and deal with the immediate person or situation in front of me. This does not mean I have a monopoly on discernment. I experience fear and anger, derivatives of my expectations- and sometimes I respond to those instead of taking time to compose appropriate thoughts. Not escalating others into crisis is an art. Not escalating others is not the same thing as des-escalating people in crisis. The second, too, is an art. Art for me is a blending of art, science, faith, and if you’re lucky- a bit of insight, earned through experience.

When it comes to me in response to my family- all bets are off. I am easily provoked to emotionalism. The harder I strive towards rationalism around them the more I tend to miss the mark- overcompensation in a storm, real or perceived, leads to erratic driving. It leads to anger, which leads to suffering… When I say family, I include my family of origin, which I have spent the better half of my life avoiding, and my culture of origin. Saying that doesn’t mean I lack love for either- I am simply provoked, because of my expectations and maybe because I care.

We are in crisis. Family. Culture. Country. World. I have allegiances to all. The world is my home; I share it with others. I have experienced crises in the past- crises that affected the world. I will likely weather this one. I have friends and family who will be harmed, economically for sure, maybe even physically and emotionally, especially if their health or the health of a loved one is affected. My first response to the crisis was to do math; I overcompensated. I projected onto the world a belief: “Your math is flawed!” Assuming the numbers given us are accurate, this is not a big thing. 9 billion people? 100K experienced illness and recovered. 20 k potentially still sick. 5k died. Comparatively, more people will die from drunk driving, diabetes, and lung cancer respectfully this year. More men between the ages of 20 and 44 will die by suicide in Japan than will die by this thing. That’s also true in the US. More people will die by accidental gun shootings worldwide than this. That number has held steady in the tens of thousands, with several thousand of those being children. Comparatively, this doesn’t seem to warrant the level of crises erupting.

Yes, I was doing math, I was generalizing, so not precise math, and in a moment, I will show just how wrong I got the first equation. We all do math. We all invariably get it wrong in the beginning. That is why showing our work is so crucial. This is me showing my work. The rush on commodities is an example of bad math. I would call that overcompensation; you’re assuming you just need weather this storm and then go back to normal. Part of that’s true, but you live in a world of others- which means your actions affect others. Hypothetically, if the whole system collapses, there is no return to normal and those pitiful supplies you might find yourself sitting on either makes you a target, or will be the supply cache people find when you’re dead and gone. We live in a world of others. We depend on others. We need others. Do I think we, society, locally and above, are over reacting? Yes! As evidence by the drop in sales of Corona Beer. Seriously, go buy a Corona beer and drink it. Run on Corona Beer!

Death doesn’t care if you’re socialist or a capitalist. I jokingly suggested, in a public forum, that if the government wanted us to stay home, they should pay the electric bill. “That’s socialism,” cited a family member. “Thank God for Trump and the American Way.” I was provoked. I wanted to fight. I chose flight. Who know, flight may have been the appropriate response. In my math, when the nation is having a crisis- it is the government’s task to minimize disruption and ensure reasonable stability. It sounds like they may actually do that, if the proposal to send everyone money is not just a political ploy to overcompensate for what appears to be a poor first response. I wonder if my ‘capitalist’ friends and family will refuse their checks on principal- “That’s socialism!”

I have political opinions. I have moral opinions. They don’t tend to reflect either side of the political spectrum my culture is steeped in to. Polarization is bad math. Extreme thinking is evidence for stupidity. I don’t hate capitalism. I think it was a great mechanism in terms of getting us, humanity, to where we are now: a world where most people have a modicum of creature comforts and access to more food and medicine than most people have experienced in the history of the world. This is not the paradigm that will get humanity through the next thousand years. It won’t get us to Roddenberry’s Universe. It would be completely naïve to say it was ever ideal. Capitalism, by its very nature, takes short cuts. The growing stockpile of nuclear waste is a problem, and it is a short cut that society assumed and is passing the debt to its children and grandchildren to figure out. All the waste that went into the ocean? Short cut. Overfishing to the point we might not have any wild stock in the ocean. Short cut. Cutting down all the forest? Short cut. Not having enough Hazmats suits at each hospital because at the time lobbyist got policies in place to block that expectation, because they didn’t see a need for protecting medical staff- which was right in that moment, with caveats- in order to maximize shareholder’s profits… Short cut! All that revenue gained was just washed out by bad math. Having a virus creep up on you isn’t a crisis- that’s just nature. Living in a flood zone is bad math. Insurance rebuilding homes after a flood as opposed to relocating people, stupidity.

In comparison, China flattened it’s curve and is likely on the good side of things- partly because their version of socialism worked for this particular crisis. They were told to go home and stay there until otherwise notified. They did so with a salute and complied without second thought. You ask the American population to stay home, you’re likely to get disgruntled at best, or people with guns in the lawn yelling come and make me. Was China response perfect? No! Had the leaders listened to the Doctors and not shut that conversation down, maybe they could have gotten ahead of the curve faster- and fewer medical people would have died. Could anyone have gotten ahead of it and kept it from going worldwide? Not likely, not when 80 percent don’t get symptoms. Look at the European map, and you will see red where known cases are. How many do you see in Russia? That lack of transparency can be harmful. The lack of appropriate discourse between all level of governments and people needs to happen, regardless of country or beliefs. The response is more appropriate when you have an educated population and scientifically literate leaders.

Again, if you can get out of trying to label which camp I am in, you will see all of this is just math. We all use different formulas for what’s meaningful. I am telling you now, my math sucks. I don’t know enough. I don’t know if the numbers we have are real, if there are caveats, if leaders are responding appropriately. I don’t know if there is something else lurking in the background, some variable that they know that I don’t know. When you can’t trust the government, paranoia goes up. That’s math, too. Overcompensating for that variable leads to insane responses.

I have evidence for hope, though. Assume that this is just a flue, and not as bad as the normal flue, and we are overreacting. People had it worse in the day, right? Birth fatalities were much higher in the past than today and people just had a reality of knowing that you’re lucky if you child survived its first year of life. We don’t live in that world anymore. That’s hopeful! We have an expectation that something stupid like the flue isn’t going to take out half the population. We have an expectation that medical paradigm will help people and we can minimize death and NEWS HEADLINE! 5,000 people dead is too much! That’s hopeful.

If you are a child and you lose a parent or a grandparent, you suffer. That’s a huge impactor. The same loss in your twenties and thirties, it still sucks, but the impact is not the same as it would be if you were a child. The older one gets, there is an assumption you will handle death better. If you make it to 90, having most likely survived the loss of peers, friends, family- you will likely handle death better. Death still sucks ass. Most of us are not medical professionals, and we will not be standing on the frontlines triaging people. Triaging- that means deciding who lives and dies because we lack the resources to handle this. This, too, is math! I don’t envy the position of the medical people who have a serious role to play in this- and in truth, if we are doing reasonable math, we need to do more to protect them than ourselves. They have the highest potential of either becoming ill physically, or experiencing burnout, and or experiencing mental health issues, depression, PTSD, what have you, due to being hip deep in death- a situation made worse by the masses hoarding supplies that might otherwise have been used by trained professionals- or in the rush to get supplies, there are incidental injuries and illnesses brought on by madness. That’s some math! Yeah, maybe you got your family down the road by hoarding supplies, but if the medical community falls because everyone was overcompensating in a short-sighted way, well- you do the math.

Allow me to make this math easier for you using the original Kubler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This is some great math in terms of understanding the process of grieving. Grieving can be the loss of a person or even a way of life. Let’s face it, if you didn’t see a death in this crisis, you are at least seeing a change in world paradigms. We are one world- we rise together or fall together. This is a wake-up call. Life and death transcends systems and beliefs. We have had many wake-up calls. Many come to Jesus moments, if you prefer. I don’t like stage theory, but Kubler-Ross got this math right. I intend to simply it further for you.

Denial, Flight. Anger, Fight. Bargaining, Fight. Depression, Flight. Acceptance, Love. You have choice, fear or love. Math or love. If you find yourself doing math, you are in a fight or flight response due to fear. Fear results in math, not love. It’s normal to do math. We live in that paradigm where we do math more often than not, but that’s not acceptance, and that’s not love. Love doesn’t mean sacrificing self or family or community, either. There is some math here too, and if you were on a plane and it depressurized, it is a loving act to put your life support on first- and then help others. But this crisis isn’t that. We need to use the right tools for the right job, and belief systems are just tools- not absolutes! Reasonable restraint and getting out of a fear response is necessary to cultivate love- hope. There are many things we can do to help cultivate hope and turn this around- staying calm, check in with family, check in with neighbors, and decrease your level of overcompensation.

And maybe, if nothing else, we can hope this crisis helps us be more prepared for future events like these. There will be another- that’s not an if, that’s a when.