Urgent need to reform MEDICAID

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Not Just One Month, Always

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New Year and Hope

 

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Will the pandemic spell the end of globalization?

AT THE END OF FEBRUARY 2021, the pandemic’s global toll is staggering: 113,467,303 confirmed cases worldwide and 2,520,400 deaths, including 510,000 fatalities in the US alone. Not a single country has gone untouched and for almost a year now, countless borders have been essentially closed. COVID-19—the first modern deadly global pandemic, rivaled only by the Black Death in the 14th century and the Spanish Flu (1918-20)—has brought to a screeching halt the free movement of peoples and goods across the world; the dream and promise of globalization have been dealt a blow from which they may not soon fully recover.

In fact, the reassertion of the individual state, throwing off the yoke of global forms of governance and policy making had already begun in recent years, well before the pandemic hit and made closed borders a necessity. President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ model severely affected US trade with many countries, especially China; the Trump Administration also limited immigration and put the overall focus on building up the US, with international relations taking a back seat. 

In Europe, the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union, in part to be exempt from liberal immigration policies and to re-establish the country’s sovereignty. Other examples include Hungary and Poland, which had been closing their border for non-Christian immigration. The pandemic, and all the emergency measures it triggered, will undoubtedly further diminish the globalization utopia, intensifying trends that have been already well underway. The global financial crisis in 2008 also put a major damper on the enthusiasm for—and workability of— globalization.

Globalization had gotten its main impulse from the neo-liberal policies of the 1980s in key countries, in particular Ronald Reagan’s America and Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain. The role of the state was curtailed. Instead, free-market policies won the day and set many countries on the road to economic liberalization and the creation of a global network. Exceptions included the insular nations of the China and Russia, among others. The European Union, too, played a major role in promoting global trade and open borders.

With the arrival of the pandemic, governments were forced to strengthen state institutions, to protect citizens’ health, maintain social cohesion, and protect and repair national economies hard-hit by financial losses and liabilities due to the closure of businesses and the unemployment crisis. Not surprisingly, international solidarity has also declined, as most countries are failing to help nations that are particularly struggling; in that vein, Italy and Spain, both overwhelmed by the pandemic, complained about the lack of support from their northern neighbors.

The pandemic has interfered with the world economy in all its phases: production, distribution, and consumption. The increasing complexity of the distribution and supply-chain network, the lifeblood of the global economy, makes the structure very vulnerable. After the end of the Cold War, the victorious powers designed this complexity so that, for the sake of peace, countries would be interdependent. Any particular state would have to rely on other states for goods, materials and parts essential for the functioning of its economy.

That elaborate international system has now been dealt a blow by the pandemic, which has been prompting individual nations to try to become self-sufficient, within its borders, as within a closed system. The global economy, with all its moving parts, its delicate structure is very difficult to repair. Matter are made still worse by trade wars and accompanying tensions between major powers like the US and China—the two principal drivers of the world economy. What’s more it will be a long road for many countries before they are able to fully participate in the world economy before their own economic house is in order.

Aside from the health and food industries, rebuilding a country’s overall economic productivity will be extremely slow while—due to the pandemic—the systems of transportation and distribution are not optimally functional and when consumers are unable or hesitant to go shopping. Matters are made worse by the relative abandonment of the free-market system so eminently suitable to and essential for globalization, with its free movement of capital. Instead, just as happened in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the state begins borrowing and investing heavily in public services, especially health care. This dynamic scares off private investment, shrinking the free flow of capital so essential for the process of globalization.

Yet, this shift is called for in the battle against COVID-19, such as massive spending on the coronavirus vaccines, which is obviously a drain on the economy. And all this emergency spending is very likely to continue in one form or another once the pandemic has been truly defeated, such as spending on research on COVID-19 and other deadly virus strains, and on developing ways to protect the population from the next pandemic. 

It is thus that the pandemic will hurt globalization. Logistically, globalization will continue in the form of the rapid exchange and distribution of information, air travel, and commerce. What will likely also survive the pandemic is countries going it alone, downplaying international cooperation, taking care of their own, and manifesting a xenophobic bent. That inward-looking orientation will rob globalization of its humanist, internationalist soul.

Gratitude in the time of pandemic

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The Pandemic and Easter

We live our human existence, amid experiences both good and evil, on personal, family, social, national, and international levels. Today, all of humanity faces an experience of evil: the pandemic caused by the exponential contagion of the Covid-19 coronavirus, which causes us to change and call into question everything: our way of life, our ways of interacting at the family and social levels, our institutions, and social structures. This experience of evil reveals all our weaknesses and frailties, in addition to the deficiencies of our social organizations, especially those in the health sector. Therefore, we live through these hours of confusion, anxiety, anguish, suffering, pain, and mourning across the globe.

To prevent and stop, as much as possible, the advance of this pandemic, human communities around the world have agreed on days and weeks of confinement, social isolation, and quarantine that has confined everyone in our homes.

The newscasts are saturated, every minute, with the counts of the infected and the dead, with the dire consequences we face in every area—especially the economic and labor areas—of our social coexistence that emerge wherever the pandemic goes, with headlines about initiatives that appear here and there to mitigate the suffering of so many, and with calls to all of us to save what we have built as a society.

For those of us who are alive here and now, at this moment in human history, this is an unprecedented situation—as novel as this heretofore unknown virus is in the world of medicine. All of us—each in his or her respective environment and lifestyle—are learning, as each hour passes, how to face this common enemy and how to survive….

But, in these hours that are difficult for everyone, not everything is bad, nor is everything negative, nor is everything lost. There are lessons to be learned from this evil experience on a global scale.

In the first place, this unusual experience of evil, which touches the most intimate and profound part of our being because it affects our health and, with it, our possibility of continuing to live or die, is an opportunity to recognize, on one hand, our utter weakness, our lack of self-sufficiency and, in religious terms, our “creatureness” and total dependence on a higher being we call God and Creator. But also, this is an opportunity to recognize our interdependence on all other human beings and how strong, essential, and extraordinarily solidary we are in good times, but also in evil times. In a word, we are beings who are "dependent" on God and on one another.

Secondly, social isolation, already declared in most countries, is a precious opportunity to enter into ourselves, to find ourselves again, to travel to the depths of our inner selves, and discover the truth on which we base our personal stories and the values ​​or anti-values ​​that support the fabric of our lives. This confinement to our homes is a unique opportunity—away from outward appearances, visual impressions, ostentation, and the daily bustle—to return to silence, to reflection, to meditation, to prayer. The obligatory quarantine that we are all living is, also, a unique opportunity to return to ourselves and to come together with our loved ones, with our close friends, with our family.

The enormous ease and speed with which the virus is transmitted and infects, also teaches us the shared responsibility that we all have in the construction or destruction of our life on earth. And if the common good, the general consensus, the best interests for everyone calls for surviving this pandemic, then we will all have to banish from each one of ourselves selfishness and all the negativity that it entails and bring forth the best of ourselves and the best of our human values to rebuild the world and our human coexistence with interactions, spaces, social methods, and institutional forms that are more just, more solidary, more equitable, more fraternal, more compassionate, and more merciful. In other words, this experience of evil that touches and affects us all so deeply, is an opportunity for hope that, from now on, we will all be different and build a different and better world.

During these days, Christians will celebrate Easter, the greatest religious celebration of our liturgical year while Jews will celebrate Passover. While Passover, in the Jewish theological system, recalls and commemorates the "passage" of the Old Testament people from slavery to freedom by crossing the Red Sea, Easter, in the Christian theological system, recalls and commemorates the "passage" from death to life through the triumph of the life’s work of Jesus of Nazareth—after his death on the cross—when he was confessed as Living and Resurrected in the community by the first Christians and by all his disciples up through today.

Everything that happens to us can be lived as a curse or as a blessing. I invite you to live this experience of evil, this pandemic, this social isolation, this suffering for loved ones who are sick or deceased as a moment of blessing, as an "Easter," as an experience of "passage" from death to life in our shared search for a more humane, more caring, more fraternal world. 

Happy Easter 2020!