Amidst a global pandemic, the streets of Italy heard music. Balconies were crammed with people singing, their lack of pitch forgiven by the enthusiasm in their voices. At 7 pm every night, New York City’s sunset is greeted with the sounds of unbridled pride when the metropolitan giant awakens to cheer for the city’s medical workers. While we are at our loneliest, most confused, most lost, we turn to phenomena like New York’s daily concerto to feel more connected. We turned to music and laughter and off-pitch renditions of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” belting from balconies to remind ourselves that there was life in every corner of the world, and that one day, we’ll have it all back. Because now, we know not to complain. We know to go to class and sit through even the most mind-numbingly boring lectures and hug our friends a little closer and thank our blue-collar workers who have proved time and time again to be the backbone of our working economy.
Years of ordering a grande iced coffees on the way to work, and it took a global pandemic with two million cases to recognize that the Starbucks drive-through worker was one of the most essential pawns of our daily lives—not our millionaire bosses that run the companies that hired us, and not the white-collar giants that built up Wall Street. I want to believe now that we know what we know, we’ll be careful next time to remember the little things, but the reality is, there’s a strong possibility that we won’t.
Because that’s the basis of our corporate-led, academia centric culture: to want more. To crave greatness, recognition, a bigger paycheck and more personal and monetary growth, and it’s only a matter of time before we return to our regular programming of overlooking the smaller instruments in the orchestra to chase after the sound of the trumpet. The few weeks following an eventual lift on the stay-at-home order plaguing the majority of the country are sure to be filled with emotional Instagram captions after re-uniting with friends and finally being able to eat at Olive Garden. The month after that, however? And the one after that? How long until we forget how much we missed human interaction and begin to take side conversations with the Trader Joes’ cashier for granted again, and how long until we stop painting and embroidering and reading like we’d been doing to pass time in quarantine and go back to scrolling through Twitter for hours?
We’ve just now learned how much we have to be grateful for, from toilet paper to our social lives, and we’d be doing ourselves a disservice by not remembering how hopeless these months felt in an attempt to rebuild our lives. We shouldn’t and can’t go back to the way things were, knowing what we know now. It’d be a betrayal to the lives we’ve lost and the frustration we’ve felt to smooth over the pain brought with these past few months. Because the fact is, that’s not all they’ve brought us.