SunShip Thesis

Fragments on Crisis, Loss and the Pandemic

Terri Abruzzo

The paradox of living through this pandemic time is that everyone on earth is experiencing this crisis, yet it is uncommon to the vast majorities of humans alive today (there are 90,000 American centarians who were alive during the Flu Epidemic of 1918). Yet despite the collective nature of the experience, it is different for everyone due to personal life circumstances.

Notions of crisis, both global and personal, have been on my mind. The last eighteen months highlighted the macro and micro ramifications of crises when the Covid 19 pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns  were overlaid on my beloved father’s dying of heart failure.  At the same time, I left my longtime legal practice in Chicago, Illinois.  For the last few years, I had been representing refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the global crisis of migration impacts individual lives in profoundly disparate ways.  My fresh freedom from corporate strictures and thinking encouraged me to leave formal, mechanistic legal writing behind in favor of the creative exploration and writing that fueled my childhood.

Through the darkness of the lockdown and civil upheavals of the summer of 2020, I was bolstered by virtual talks hosted by Arts Letters and Numbers. I knew ALN’s virtual studio, Thesis, would be a delicious soup of ideas and questions and a great place to explore concepts of crisis, human response to crisis and the losses of this year.

The six weeks of Thesis unfolded each week in the Listening Sessions as a spotlight shined into the different squares on our Zoom grid, illuminating each participant’s  creative world.  Geographically and experientially different, each participant came with their own set of materials and interests, keeping the sessions alive. Our digital grid felt like a repository of trust and encouragement.

I created a PowerPoint presentation called “Fragments from an Erstwhile Lawyer and Practicing Human (Poetics in PowerPoint.)”  Using some personal photographs and other images, I wrote and talked through the issues and memories I have been grappling with throughout our virtual studio. I then tried to convert this PowerPoint into a written piece—this document. During my final presentation, David Gersten, ALN’s founder, was forced to zoom on his phone when his computer died.  Visiting artist, Tine from Denmark, held up her computer to the screen so he could see the full group.  We had talked throughout Thesis about the concept of “living in the still life” and I was struck by the meta nature of that visual. Here is a picture I snapped of that moment.

“What we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” Albert Camus, The Plague
sharp as a scalpel…
a mosaic of macro-musings on
Crisis…Loss …Space and Time

The global Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis that, while impacting the entire world, was and continues to be, experienced entirely individually, depending on one’s personal life circumstances. You may have heard this quote: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. The first represents danger and the second represents opportunity.” This quote is a darling of personal development gurus and politicians like Al Gore, who used it often in reference to the climate crisis. And, as the storm clouds of the pandemic gathered then burst in 2020, I felt like I read it everywhere. It seems like a harmless phrase intended to inspire and encourage, and yet…according to Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language at Penn, ascribing this meaning to the Chinese word for crisis is incorrect. Mair pointed out in a 2009 article that while the first character “Wei” does mean danger, the second character “ji” does not mean “opportunity.” Rather, it means a time of difficulty, insecurity, and suspense when things can go awry. Ji” simply means a dangerous moment, an incipient and crucial turning point with none of the auspicious, favorable connotations that the word “opportunity” implies.
At best, this is an example of imprecision, at worst, a pernicious misuse and misappropriation of language. This interpretation is a capitalist commodification of the phrase. It encourages people to welcome crises as unstable situations with the potential for personal benefit rather than to work to solve the crisis in a way that would distribute benefits across the whole community or population. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and all.
A capitalist perspective was prevailing in the early days of the COVID pandemic. In the initial throes, many looked to exploit the crisis as an opportunity to make money. We saw price gouging on masks, ventilators, and other personal protective equipment. We saw Amazon’s mutation into an earnings superpower overtaking Walmart for the number one spot and bankrolling Jeff Bezos’ trip to the edge of space.
But when individuals focus on personal, material gain without considering the impact on the collective, a crisis often gets worse. Commodification of or highly individuated responses to global inflection points impede deeper, more holistic problem solving that a crisis demands.
However, there is another perspective on any crisis, especially a global one like the pandemic, climate change or the migrant situation. Instead of blindly accepting a capitalist approach, we should be asking, how do we find the global as well as individual opportunities that posit a new, better way of being for all the humans inhabiting earth? Ultimately, “How do we encourage action in a crisis that benefits the community, the collective, rather than simply the 1% or those aspiring to be?”
To encourage action that serves the many, not just the few, it is necessary to set aside the capitalist perspective and reconceive time. A long, biblical view of time, a “cosmological” or “collective” perspective, where humans can see beyond their own circumstances and lifetimes in order to work to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice would yield outcomes more likely to benefit the collective. If we instead focus on the blink that is a human lifetime, the collective good likely will be minimized as each person acts out his or her version of maximizing the brief time we have on earth.
Milton Friedman endorses the marketplace of ideas and the need to think through solutions and have them on the shelf before a crisis strikes: “Only a crisis-actual or perceived- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. “Capitalism and Freedom, University of Chicago Press 1962.
When I took a class on Transcendental Meditation, my father gifted me (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) Marcus Aurelius’ book of Meditations. A central theme to Meditations is the importance of developing a cosmic perspective. Aurelius states: “You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgment, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

Encouraging this cosmological or collective perspective is not a simple task. How do we contend with the fact that at some point, capitalist ideals and material success supplanted collective good and became equated with greater rights and moral superiority? Are these ideals so baked into our American society that there is no turning back? The past demonstrates that a purely capitalist perspective does not always prevail. Historically, the types of conditions we saw during the pandemic (e.g., “essential workers” being subject to the risk of harm without their consent or commensurate increase in wages) led to great labor upheaval like the 19th Century Haymarket Riots in the United States. This similarity begs the question whether “collective bargaining” has diminished along with concern for the collective.

A New Social Contract: WE Over ME in an Interdependent World

In all societies, some things are left to individuals and others are determined collectively. The norms and rules governing how those collective institutions operate is the social contract, the most important determinant in the kinds of lives we lead. Because it is so important and because most people cannot easily leave their societies, the social contract requires the consent of the majority and periodic renegotiation as circumstances change. What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society, Minouche Safik, Princeton University Press, 2021. In order to address global crises like the pandemic, climate change and displaced persons, we need a new social contract or at least to revisit and rethink the old one.
Minouche Shafik has been the Director of the London School of Economics since 2017, and her “curiosity about the architecture of opportunity” led to a career that spanned the World Bank, the UK Dept. for International Development, the IMF and the Bank of England. She recently imagined the kinds of policy prescriptions needed to keep our fragile world from pulling apart in her book What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society, Princeton Press, 2021. She wisely notes that though many go through life thinking themselves “self-made” or credit/blame their families for their lot in life, the bigger forces that determine our destinies: the country we happen to be born in, the social attitudes prevalent at a particular moment in history, the institutions that govern our economy and politics and the randomness of just plain luck, are rarely considered. Every country is distinct, especially on issues such as the balance between the individual and the collective. Countries like the U.S. put greater emphasis on individual freedom, whereas Asian countries prioritize the collective interest. Europe tries to strike a balance somewhere in the middle.
Yet, despite the huge material gains the world has seen in the last 50 years, surveys show that 4 out of 5 people in the U.S., Europe, China, India and various developing countries believe the system is not working for them. Shafik argues we need a social contract that delivers a better architecture of both security and opportunity. She lays out the challenges we face and provides a menu of alternatives for a better social contract around families, education, health, work, old age and between generations, encouraging a shift in values to think more about “we” and less about “me.” She advocates investing in people and proactively planning these changes rather than reacting with actions based on, to quote Milton Friedman, the ideas we have lying around. For example, she recognizes the power of education in solving worldwide problems as well as its power to lift each individual in the process and proposes granting each person $50,000 for education to be spent in his or her lifetime, framing this as providing opportunity and individual sovereignty rather than welfare.
Her chapter on the contract between generations and the environmental legacy we are leaving provides a perspective both thoughtful and sobering. She notes that economists think about the inheritance of each generation in terms of the three different types of “capital” that determine the productive capacity, or wealth, of a country: 1) human capital (educated people and the institutions and social structures they create); 2) produced capital (technologies, machines, infrastructure); and 3) natural capital (the climate, biodiversity, land.) While changes to human and produced capital are often reversible (people can change their minds and invest more or less over time), changes to natural capital can be irreversible. Yet, her research shows that each person in the future will inherit twice as much produced capital, 13 percent more human capital, but 40 percent less natural capital. She asks: Does that pattern leave future generations better off?
We know that a hotter planet impacts the world’s water in the form of floods, droughts, storms, desertification, ocean acidification and sea-level rise, all with potential for devastating effects on human well-being. Similarly, biodiversity is being lost faster than at any time in human history. Accordingly, depleting natural capital should be done with a keen awareness of the risks of extinction and careful consideration for highly interdependent ecosystems.
Shafik points to the UN’s definition of sustainability used in developing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and I agree it is the most succinct and workable definition: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” However, she also notes that economists historically discount future generations relative to those alive today and that this plays a central role in a hesitancy to act on climate change. Her prescriptions for environmental redress include: 1) first, do no more harm; 2) invest in restoration and conservation of biosphere; 3) use better calculations to accurately value the services that nature provides and the costs of depletion; 4) use fiscal policy -tax and spend- to incentivize, including compensating low-income populations for disproportionate impacts on them.

The success of the prescriptions in Shafik’s book rests largely on the recognition of the interdependence of human beings around the world and indeed with the earth itself. We cannot separate our community or country from what is happening in other parts of the world.

“No One Puts Their Children in a Boat Unless the Sea is Safer Than the Land”
Migration and Refugees: A Crisis Both Macro and Micro

It is my hope that in discussing my pro bono work with refugees and asylum seekers, I will be “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” as that expression is used by its creator, filmmaker Trinh Min-Ha. Min-Ha notes that “it is very comforting for a reader to consume difference as a commodity by starting with the personal difference in culture or background, which is the best way to escape the issues of power, knowledge and subjectivity raised.” She advocates a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject, that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without seizing or claiming it. It is also important to me to note that my client and friend Mujtaba gave me express permission to share his story in this context.

Mujtaba was an interpreter for U.S. and NATO forces fighting the Taliban like 50,000 others who helped the US in Afghanistan with the understanding that they would be protected with special immigration visas or SIVs. Unfortunately, a process supposed to take 9 months at the most often dragged on for years. When Taliban forces began threatening my friend’s family, they tried to escape across the Mediterranean on a boat. The boat capsized in the waves and his wife and two children were lost at sea. My friend and his surviving son were sent to Turkey which is when I got his case. We could not restart his SIV process at first because he spent his days scouring refugee camps and websites for his lost family members. He was certain that a voice he heard on a Facebook video taken in the refugee camp Moria in Greece was his daughter, even after it was verified to be someone else. He could not move forward because he wanted so badly to believe his family members were still alive somewhere. When he ultimately decided that resettlement did not mean he was abandoning his lost family members, we finally secured his Special Immigration visa and Mujtaba and his son resettled into a community in New York. In a bit of serendipity, they originally were to be settled in Albany and I was thrilled thinking that I could see them when I came to ALN. Ultimately, however, they were resettled in Rochester.

Migrants’ stories like this one can be quintessential stories of crisis and loss, displacement in time and space, as well as resilience and recovery. The powerful Ai Wei Wei film, The Human Flow, captures the scale and personal impact of the global refugee crisis – at its heart a massive human migration. It contains many visuals that portray the magnitude of this issue on the macro and micro level, but one will stay with me always, so moving was it in its simplicity. It is an aerial shot of a large orange vessel in the middle of the ocean. As the camera pulls close enough to the sea that one can see the waves, it becomes clear that the vessel itself is not orange but rather is filled with tightly packed individual human beings all wearing orange life vests. What an incredible metaphor for recognizing each individual story comprising an issue that has become both monolithic and a political third rail. As my client Mujtaba said, no parent would ever put their child in a boat on the ocean unless it was safer than remaining on the land.

Ai Wei Wei explained the significance of his title, Human Flow, and how it relates to flooding. He uses the analogy of either building a dam to stop the flood, which would not solve the issue entirely and could intensify the outcomes, or instead finding a path to let the flow continue. Relating dams to physical borders and walls, he encourages understanding the reasons people become refugees and working to ameliorate the underlying causes to stem the flow at its source.

A former Afghan interpreter resettled in Sacramento called the poorly handled departure from Afghanistan in August 2021 “a slap in the face”, as well as “a big lesson for other nations fighting for the United States” that the U.S. can’t be trusted, and they will “leave you in hell.” LA Times 8/21/21

I was asked in 2019 to speak about the case to the Immigration Law society at the University of Chicago. After my presentation, a student asked if we really thought it was a good use of my law firm’s resources to spend so much money on one man and his son. I told him that I did not see this case and my clients in terms of economic. The fact is that a poetic framework seems more appropriate to me in these circumstances.

The poem below is by Warsan Shire, a Kenyan born to Somali parents who was the Young Poet Laureate for London. She was inspired to write it by a visit to the abandoned Somali embassy in Rome which some young refugees had turned into their home. The night before her visit a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof. Shire states she wrote the poem “Home” for them, her family and anyone who has experienced the grief and trauma of the refugee experience.

Home
Warsan. Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you would not be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one would put their children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
wants to be beaten
wants to be pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one’s skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe it’s because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home unless home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

The Scourge of “I”: You Can’t Have a Refugee Crisis if You Don’t Have Refugees
In a crisis like Mutjaba’s and the one I discuss below, I agree with Manouche Safik that we all need to be ready to do what we can to help others– a ”we” instead of “me” mentality -beyond the immediate circle of our own families or immediate communities. Immigration crises are increasingly recurring and global circumstances suggest this will continue. In addition to planning for safe and controlled migration like Ai WeiWei advocates, we all need to be willing to pitch in and extend ourselves personally to help individuals that but for the grace of God could have been us. I remember reading that a classic test for creating societal rules should be whether you would vote for it blind to the station you would be born into in life.
How did we get so disconnected from the humanity that connect us all? A friend referred to it as “the scourge of the “I”. I as center of the universe. I am entitled to do what I want without regard to others. I no longer have a dream about a better life for a collective group of people because I can hop on my iPhone and scroll through social media feeds that reinforce what I already think and “eye” things I can buy that will distract me from reality with the endorphin hit of consumption.
On January 27, 2017, shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order known as the “Muslim Travel Ban”, which halted all refugee admissions into the United States and temporarily barred people from seven Muslim majority countries. Trump signed the order on a Friday afternoon and by Saturday it was clear that there were people traveling who would have their status affected while in midair. On Saturday morning, I went to O’Hare International Airport in my hometown of Chicago and joined lawyers in about a dozen airports around the country – attorneys from many different law firms and nonprofits, coming together in teams– to file individual petitions to protect people arriving who had been in the air when the executive order was signed and to prevent elderly or other weary travelers from being held in secondary detention against their rights.
We set up a makeshift workspace in international arrivals right next to the McDonalds and I thought, “Justice smells like greasy fries.” The dynamic between what was happening inside the terminal with attorneys ready to go with habeas petitions, motions, and preliminary injunctions, and outside with massive protests and people holding signs and chanting, felt like democracy in action. Mayor Emmanuel showed up and thanked the lawyers. The ACLU and other nonprofits were working remotely with the lawyers on the ground at the airports. There were no templates on the shelf ready to go. Rather, people came together in an emergency, a crisis, to figure out a response as quickly as possible to protect people they had never met. What started as a group of 7-10 people at O’Hare organized into a mobilized group of over a thousand lawyers. That email thread exists to this day and is used as a network to help individuals and families experiencing immigration crises–all on a pro bono basis. A testament to the power of the collective, of we over me.

King Croesus, My Father and Loss:
Count No Man Happy Until the End is Known

My father was an ardent and enthusiastic student of history. The word history comes from the Greek “historia” meaning “inquiry” or “knowledge acquired by investigation.” Herodotus (484-428 BC) coined the term history to mean research or study and, indeed, from the time I was very young, my memories of my father are of him deep in thought with a thick history book in his hands. I wrote short stories about this when I was eight, which my mother recently found and gave to me.

Several years ago, to stave off the tedium of raising small children while I was on leave from my law firm, I enrolled in The University of Chicago’s Basic Program for Liberal Arts and studied the ancient Greek classics. One of my teachers’ favorite works was the Histories of Herodotus, in particular Book One and the story of King Croesus, the ancient king of Lydia.

As Herodotus tells it, King Croesus was once visited at his palace by Solon, a wise sage and Athenian lawgiver. The king was delighted to have the itinerant philosopher in residence and welcomed him with warm hospitality. Croesus instructed his servants to show off the full measure of the king’s enormous power and wealth. Once he felt Solon had been sufficiently awed by his riches, Croesus asked him: “Who is the happiest man you have ever seen?” certain that he would hear his own name. Solon, however, was not one for flattery and answered with the names of three common men who had lived and died honorably.

King Croesus was livid and could not understand how three dead nobodies were happier than he with all his power and riches. Solon explained that while the rich did have some advantages over the poor – “the means to bear calamity and satisfy their appetites”- they had no monopoly on the things that were truly valuable in life including civic service, being self-sufficient, and honoring the gods and one’s family. More importantly, Solon continued, not a single day in life is the same as the next in what it brings. In other words, just because things are going well today, doesn’t mean they won’t fall apart tomorrow. Thus, a man who experiences good fortune can be called lucky, but the label of happy must wait.

The king dismissed Solon as a fool and put his words out of his mind until tragedy fell. His beloved son died in an accident and Croesus embarked on an ill-advised war and ultimately was burned at the stake. As the flames began to lick at his feet, Croesus cried out, “Oh Solon! Oh Solon! Count no man happy until the end is known!”

Happiness according to the ancient Greeks differs from our modern-day associations with the word. Happiness was not a variable emotional state to the Greeks but was encapsulated in the concept of “eudaimonia,” which best translates as human flourishing, based on an assessment of whether a person attained virtue and excellence with respect to family, health, self-sufficiency, and honor. Aristotle used the term to mean “the highest human good” and according to Aristotle, the highest aim was to achieve it and spend one’s life studying how to achieve it…

Until the end is known….

For my Dad’s 80th birthday, I created a memory book of his life. Although he was sick, we did not know at the time it would be his penultimate birthday. On each of the many pages was a letter and photographs from all the most important people in his life, reflecting back to him all the love he emanated so profusely for eighty years. The book told the story of his life as an educator, a historian, a reader, a profoundly beloved husband, father, grandfather, son, uncle, friend. In its final form, it was the size of a phone book for those old enough to remember those.

With the end of his life near, unbeknownst to us, Dad himself filled in the ending of his book of life to demonstrate what he held most dear. He took the things he carried with him in his wallet and added them to the very last page. I saw these for the first time leafing through the book after he died. There are photographs of him and Mom at two of the many high school dances they attended when he was principal (they joked that they would never graduate and they could never stop going to prom-always with the same date), a dog- eared photo of Mom she sent when she was waitressing on Cape Cod one college summer (and rumors reached her that her sorority sister had designs on Dad) and Canadian money from their honeymoon in Niagara Falls. He always said that her love was the most important thing in his life.
In our Thesis seminar, we’ve talked a lot about cognition and recognition–how we know the things we know. When Dad got the news from his doctors and tuned into the signs his body was giving him, he cognitively understood that his time on this earth – all the summer days, old movies and favorite cars, first love and young children, politicians to hate and politicians to revere, books to read and ideas to discuss – all that and more was coming to an end. And in recognition of this impending loss, and the realization that nothing further was available to help his heart repair…he began to prepare. He organized his possessions, he expressed his love to all his family members, and he told us repeatedly, he had been very lucky, and he was happy.