How selfish we've become

 

   I can’t find the post, but I remember writing about visiting the Rosie the Riveter National Monument in Richmond while in the Bay Area a year or a year and a half – or was it two years? – ago.  I remember writing about how I had a morning to kill and how I decided to check out this attraction that I had noticed for years pointed out on a sign on the 580 freeway. 

   I remember writing about visiting the small museum hidden in a dock area and about how it felt weird as a pacifist Quaker to be visiting a place dedicated to warfare.  Another thing I’m sure I wrote about was how, in viewing the exhibit on the war effort “at home,” particularly the Bay Area, during World War II, I was really struck by how everyone at home pulled together in this effort. 

   The effort, of course, focuses on women who famously went from working at home, raising the children and cooking and making everything nice, to working in factories, making supplies for the war among other things.  But it also shows how everyone was involved in helping in the war efforts, in growing food in victory gardens, in rationing, etc. Everyone sacrificed and put their personal desires on hold to come together in community to achieve victory. 

   I was struck by this, enough so that I think it’s why I wrote about this little side trip.  It is even more striking today during this pandemic.  I had no idea then how this little exhibit’s message of sacrifice and coming together to conquer would become so painfully relevant.

   When I see people walking around without masks, getting together for holidays and the Super Bowl and now indoor church services and even protesting at and disrupting vaccine sites like Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the sacrifices and efforts made in this country during WWII seem so far off, if not a joke.  A bad joke, as hospitals are jammed with COVID patients, doctors and nurses are exhausted and getting sick and thousands of fellow citizens are dying. 

   Imagine if everyone stayed home as much as possible and wore masks when they did go out for a month, say, for just a month.  We could whip this virus like other countries have.  But no.  Unlike during WWII when everyone came together and sacrificed and did what they could, many people in this country today are just thinking of themselves.  They are too selfish to do a few simple things – much less than during the war years – to help out the community, the country. 

   It is interesting that the comparison is to a time of war.  Perhaps the reason why we have become so selfish is that, without a draft, we are used to wars being far away and not being involved.  Many of us don’t have a relative or friends in the military, off fighting and in danger of being killed or injured.  In fact, there’s another interesting and unfortunate war comparison.  Many in the military now are Black Latino and low-income, just as Blacks, Latinos and the poor, as well as Native Americans, make up the majority of who is getting and dying of COVID.