Suffolk Closeup: Every crisis is an opportunity

Voices from around the world — including one from a Suffolk County professor deeply involved in work at the United Nations — see the COVID-19 pandemic as a turning point.

Scott Carlin, Ph.D. of Hampton Bays is a representative to the UN Economic and Social Council. He was a planner of a UN conference last year for nongovernmental organizations to discuss and find solutions to challenges including climate change and building sustainable communities.

Professor Carlin taught at Southampton College for a dozen years and then, when Long Island University closed its Southampton campus in 2005, moved to LIU Post to teach, including courses on the environment and sustainability.

“COVID-19 creates a new context for speaking and acting with conscience,” he said. He speaks of how in this crisis “mutual aid initiatives will flourish as people create new pathways for sharing resources and inspiring others … Selfless actions will shine.”

Indeed, the heroes in health care, the doctors, nurses, aides and others treating the ill, along with police officers, EMTs, and other first-responders on the frontlines, and the many other heroes in this calamity, risking their own lives, are people involved in selfless actions.

Professor Carlin sees the pandemic and response to it as “one human family and one Earth community” having “seized this moment to dramatically expand” commitments to, among other goals, biodiversity, clean water, education, economic and ecological democracy … human rights, interdependence of all life, non-violence, public health, or, more simply, a world committed to sharing, caring and solidarity.”

Indian author Arundhati Roy is writing about the pandemic being a “portal,”a “gateway” to a new world. “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” Ms. Roy wrote. “This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

She continued: “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our … dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through … ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

We can hope somehow the pandemic might lead to a better world. More importantly, after all the deaths, the profound misery, we could and must work for a better world.

This pandemic has made clear the oneness of the peoples of the world. “Seen from space, the Earth has no borders. The spread of the coronavirus is showing us that what we share is much more powerful than what keeps us apart,” wrote former astronaut Scott Kelly in an OpEd piece in The New York Times. “All people are inescapably interconnected, and the more we can come together to solve our problems, the better off we will all be. One of the side effects of seeing Earth from the perspective of space is feeling more compassion for others.”

“I’ve seen humans work together to prevail over some of the toughest challenges imaginable,” wrote Mr. Kelly, who spent a year on the International Space Station, “and I know we can prevail over this one if we all do our part and work together as a team. Oh, and wash your hands — often.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is appealing to warring parties on Earth to pull back from hostilities, put aside mistrust and animosity, and silence the guns. “It is time,” Mr. Guterres said, “to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives.”

“The virus drastically demonstrates both the mutual global dependencies and the irresponsibility of military conflict,” said Susanne Grabenhorst, leader of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. War has “massively weakened” health systems “and made millions of people particularly vulnerable to the current pandemic.”

“There will be change,” said social critic, linguist, historian and MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky. “The question is: what kind of change?”

Dr. Chomsky was interviewed on a TV program produced by the Media Innovation Center where I teach at SUNY/College at Old Westbury. His interviewer was Julie Goldsmith, a fine journalism student. The half-hour video can be viewed at youtube.com/watch?v=lciwaaFQqCk&feature=youtu.be

Professor Chomsky asks whether the pandemic will provide an opening for “more repression?” In the program he alleges a drive afoot of figures “working to institute the kind of change they want.” They’re “carefully constructing” a push “headed by the White House, encompassing the most reactionary states in the world.” Among the countries he singles out as planning to use the pandemic to foster authoritarian rule are Hungary, Italy and India.

“Will there be counter-pressure?” he asks. People need to understand that it is not enough to just show up on Election Day, Professor Chomsky said. They must be “all the time working, pressing, making changes — that’s the way things are done — and it has to be done on an international scale.”