Community in the Commonwealth
“The greatness of a community is a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members,” is a famous quote by Corretta Scott King (Scaffa and Reitz 22). King perfectly said it pointing out that though a community would be a group of people connected by mutual goals, the actions of its people is what makes it powerful. The impact can be established to inspire change in communities and across the globe through compassion. Organizations and brands may use their resources and wide reach to empower groups and people to create such impacts. While community values are founded on certain initiatives and programs to give back to the community, brands worldwide have established a history of empowering communities.
We can see people from various regions working towards the objective to serve and support communities based on a deep understanding of the community’s language, beliefs, culture and priorities. As community members, we have the capacity to relate to clients based on common life experiences. The bond allows them to determine the challenges and difficulties that the communities are facing amidst the Covid-19 pandemic (Golden and Williams). The trusting connection allows essential service providers to serve as intermediaries between the challenges and barriers that communities face. Teams are making efforts to find the most suitable resources and support people’s needs. In particular, they are offering services for people who have recently been tested positive for Covid-19; they are volunteering in vaccination sites on various duties and assisting communities in scheduling a vaccine appointment as per their living areas. All this drives us to Keller’s saying that, “Alone we can do so little; together, we can do so much.” (Louden)
The present situation proceeds to call for compassion as the animating drive behind our thinking about health and thoughts regarding how we should inform our choices to contain the novel threat, such as Covid-19. Compassion is known to extend beyond empathy. In particular, compassion motivates our actions since the phenomenon observed are unfair and not worthy of the world everyone would like to live in. While Martin Luther King Jr spoke about compassion, he enjoined us to see that compassion motivates not to “ [fling] a coin to a beggar” but rather to “ see that the edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring” (Ǧahānbiglū and Dallmayr 57) Compassion convinces us to understand how we have structured the world. It also tries to look at how we can structure it well, possibly not because we can suffer but instead because others are suffering, and that is not the world that we should live in.
Indeed, it is in the interstices of these bonds that compassion reigns. While compassion appears to fill in the spaces and join broken souls, it is clear that there have been exceptional moments of compassion. We have seen many people signing up to the NHS volunteer schemes, the clapping for the care services, and essential services workers working in villages and cities (Anderson et al.,). Also, there are unseen compassion acts in communities where neighbours check in on each other or even purchase groceries of people who had come off long NHS drifts as a sign of gratitude. Such kindness, however, did not start with the Covid-19 pandemic since it was with people. However, the pandemic has given us the space to view it and the allowance to be compassionate. At present, light is being shone on what happens daily in most places in the United Kingdom. Today, everything that was remarked upon and hidden is being recognized as an important part of our existence, allowing us to have hope for the future and believe they can get through this pandemic.
As cited by Alter, Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem gives us hope each and every day. Below is an excerpt
… the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken …
At present, there are opportunities to hold on to what is at hand, celebrate and grow it. With time, compassion is becoming a driver for change. The compassionate actions involve the acts of courage, support of people in distress, standing up for the oppressed or even challenging authorities when they take the wrong course of action (Gilbert 240). In recent days, there have been terrible evidence of how the pandemic is taking on human life across the world, especially in low-income nations. At the same time, intervention to contain the pandemic has contributed to efforts of tackling climate change that several conferences have been working at over time. Reduction of flights and cut in the usage of fossil fuels have seen a decline in carbon emission. It is ironic that a virus impairs people’s ability to breathe and has shown compassion to the world by providing clean air for the ecosystem to thrive.
We all can agree with Lagarde that, “we were standing on one side on a massive uncertainty and hardship… We are now seeing the other side of the river.” (Parker) Indeed, life after the Covid-19 pandemic will not be the same as before. At present, the world is at the beginning of the world as it waits for a new beginning (Dwivedi et al., 102211). It is unless we revise our behaviour that the world will break its cooperation agreement with humankind. While forecasts appear one by one, some are optimistic, and others are not. However, most of us agree that humanity will continue finding strengths in efforts to recover regardless of the decline on such an unprecedented scale. Lives, habits and values are forecasted to change and also, the home will change under the influence. With such a mindset, there are predictions for changes that may happen.
As Ray states, indeed “In every crisis, doubt or confusion, take the higher path — the path of compassion, courage, understanding and love.”(28) The post-Covid globe will be shaped by choices made in the fight against the pandemic. The profound uncertainties regarding the virus and the trajectory and how nations will respond only increase leadership significance. Leaders across the globe need to work together in the fight against the virus to eliminate it collectively (Jetten 8). They ought to achieve this without being distracted by political differences by focusing on the challenges which lie within their borders. Also, they ought to make the case to their people that safety at homes needs cooperation. Therefore, we will have to invest in neighbours and in poor parts of the globe for the economies to thrive.
That discomfort that you feel is grief. It seems hard to think that the traumatic experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic will disappear or be forgotten fast over time. The losses of human alone will remain as reminders of the impacts of change at the level of individuals and society. The new beginning after the lockdown will offer opportunities and risks for all. The governance systems in several ways of democracies will continue being at the core of the recovery journey. After the pandemic, there is a risk that the globe will be divided, nationalistic and conflictual though an optional scenario is within reach (Tandon et al.,). In such scenario, collective actions within communities and where necessary will be needed to make quick and peaceful from the crisis in the aftermath of the pandemic.
I believe that by integrating a compassionate attitude, emotion, and mindset, we can use the opportunity to turn greed to generosity, the ill will to kindness and delusion to wisdom. This can be done through compassion from people to states and in the general global governance to reach what is described as Humane Global Governance. It will involve proposals of global governance and aspirations in pragmatic and functionalist ways of dealing with realities. Thus, compassion is a key element to end the global pandemic of greed, ignorance, and fear. Doing such will strengthen the ability to align the common interests in public security, policies, and economic and health development.
Overall, amidst the pandemic of Covid-19, people have witnessed several manifestations. For instance, the adjustment of health and public policies to assist the people in need, provisions for the unemployed, private and public spaces offered as shelters and the hygienic measures to avoid infecting other people through social distance and wearing facial masks. It can be argued that if the measures are guided by compassion or are ways to control public opinions, though, with other emotions, compassion poses great risks when it is the basis of social and political actions. It is affirmed that compassion needs to operate beyond personal relations in public, translate thoughts to actions and avoid charges of irrationality as right for politics by the approaches of the exercise of judgement in the course for a shift from feelings to actions. Therefore, according to Ludwig in the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye;
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.(60)