March 18, 2020
It may sound trite, but tonight I’m hearing Atticus Finch’s observation that it is quite difficult to understand things from the point of view of another until we climb inside his (or her) skin and walk around in it. When I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time in 1989 and taught it first in 1996, I didn’t picture the scenario we are in now.
But it’s true. As truths tend to be.
What is happening now to us all is different and it is the same. We are each experiencing this new reality of isolation and dismantled normalcy and fear and we tend to see it from the confines of our own skin. Whether I am a teacher who has to reconfigure my strategy to deliver learning, or a health care worker who is on the front lines and exhausted and in peril, or an hourly worker who is losing livelihood each day without work, a CEO struggling to keep an empire afloat, a worker doing the job while at risk, a student who has to figure out a whole new way of learning, an athlete who has lost a season or a championship, an elderly person secluded and frightened: we all have a mountain to climb. And that is to say nothing of the sick. Oh, my…
I have observed in past days people seeking to help one another and ease these burdens (which restores with great joy my faith in humanity) and those somehow needing to prove that their burdens are the greatest to be borne (what?).
Whatever skin you’re in, the 2020 you rise to each day surely proves that the realities of your neighbors are unique and relevant and important: our skin is different and the same. It’s not a contest. Atticus was right: understanding is the thing. And it might just be the greatest lesson a pandemic can teach us. We shall see.
“Experience is a brutal teacher,” C.S. Lewis wisely noted, “but you learn. By God, you learn.”
