Are We All in This Together?

We will be, whether we like it or not.

My backyard “office”; me on one couch, Fiona on the other.

Reclining on a couch in the R&R Spa, our small but relaxing urban backyard oasis, I’m enjoying the perfect 73-degree temperature and bright blue sky. But although it’s Sunday, I’m still recovering from Thursday’s late-into-the night fireworks. What can I say — I’m a delicate flower.

Our neighborhood gets LOUD. I’m thankful that this year we only felt like we were in a moderate war zone, not last year’s full-on war zone. The cats were only somewhat freaked out, not so freaked out that it breaks your heart. But as usual, the noise lasted for hours, well past our bedtime, well into the night.

The fireworks could be seen as just a minor annoyance. As could the warped views of leadership and optimization that I’ve written about recently. (Though I admit that I do get very annoyed by those. Get off my lawn, you leaders and optimizers! That also goes for you thought leaders!)

But what are these annoyances compared to the existential crises that seem to be heaped on us daily? Climate change, fascism, the collapse of democracy, covid.

I’m as shaken as anyone by current events. Every time I see a call for Biden to step down, I feel grateful that my blood pressure is on the lower side. Every time I read about another covid surge, this variant more contagious than the last. Every time I see an image of He Who Must Not Be Named. Every time heat records are broken and wildfires break out.

But I don’t always write about those things. This week, though, I ran out of time to delve into any of the many other topics on my ever-growing list. But in thinking about all the things that are worrying me, and some of the things I’ve been writing about recently, I saw a common thread. So I’m pulling on that thread a bit to bring it to light, in the hopes that I can weave it into something another time.

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend about last week’s Flower Child post. He’s a college professor, so his experience is different from what I’ve encountered in the world of tech and clean-energy startups. From his perspective, we need more leadership. Not in the sense of climbing the ladder so you can tell people what to do. What he was talking about was the need for everyone to get involved and take a role in improving our world — rather than sitting back and waiting for others to take action, for others to lead the way. His definition of leadership encompassed much more than mine did; don’t be surprised if I write about it someday. But I’ll need to talk to him more about it and read some stuff.

For now, though, my thoughts are turning to rights and responsibilities. People tend to eschew the latter when defending the former.

Take covid. Apparently, people’s rights not to have to endure the slight discomfort of wearing a mask in indoor public venues, including hospitals, trumps the rights of others to enjoy health — and, in some cases, even life. (Apparently, for some people, the right not to have to see anyone wearing a mask also trumps those things.) In other words, the right not to wear a mask takes precedence over the responsibility to help maintain public health.

Take mortars in residential neighborhoods, aka fireworks. Apparently, people’s rights to this particular brand of enjoyment trumps the rights of others to sleep at night or not to feel their house shaking as if from bombs landing next to it. It trumps the rights of veterans and refugees not to have their PTSD needlessly triggered. It trumps all of our rights to keep homes and forests safe from fires. In other words, the right to set off any kind of fireworks wherever and whenever you want takes precedence over the responsibility to help maintain public peace and safety.

What do these have in common? And what do they have in common with late-stage capitalism, reactions to covid, a reluctance to take climate action, the rise of fascism — and leadership?

They all center the “rights” of individuals over the common good. They’re all fueled by a lack of empathy and consideration for others that’s sometimes hard to fathom. They all ignore the fact that with rights come responsibilities.

We can think of leadership as moving from passivity, apathy, and disempowerment toward engagement and action, whatever form that takes for each of us. We won’t all be leading organizations or working as CEOs. But we can take an active role in our community. We can do work that helps the world in some way. We can write postcards to voters. Everyone can do something. At the very least, we can aim to do no harm.

We all have a responsibility to the other creatures we share the Earth with, including our fellow humans. We have a responsibility to our communities. We have a responsibility to the Earth itself.

Or at least, we should.

Let me be the first to point out that I’m far from achieving some ideal state of responsibility and action. I fail every day, in more ways than I can count.

But a starting point for me — for all of us — is to recognize the responsibility we all share.

At the beginning of covid, it was common to hear the refrain, “We’re all in this together.” Very quickly, it became evident that we weren’t. We still aren’t. But we should be.

The truth is that while climate change, fascism, pandemics, and all the rest will hit (and already are hitting) some people harder than others, in the end we all will be in this together. Billionaires won’t be able to escape planetary devastation, whether in bunkers or in rockets. They may be able to last a bit longer than the rest of us, but they won’t last long without us. We need one another. Let’s start acting like it.