Choosing Hope Over Despair: What have we learned so far from our experiences with the global Covid-19 pandemic?

This is the 13th in a series of blog posts beginning on February 4, 2020 focused on justice systems’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic -- SARS-CoV-2 is its technical name and Covid-19 is the disease it causes --and the justice systems’ active participation in a whole-of-society-approach(WOSA) to national security and safety threats such as Covid-19.

Wall Street Journal’s columnist Peggy Noonan reflected on the question in the title above in her  April 11-12 Declarations column:


As a nation we’ve learned that as a corporate entity of 330 million diverse souls we could quickly absorb, adapt and adjust to widespread disruption. I’m not sure we knew that. Crazy cowboy nation cooperated with the authorities. American comported itself as exactly what you thought it was or hoped it was but weren’t sure: compassionate, empathetic, committed, hard-working, creative and, as a friend said, funny as hell. Under great and immediate stress there’s been broad peacefulness and civility.


The Unexpected


While there are exceptions that have made recent headlines – inmates rioting amid tensions in prisons over the virus, and capricious and excessive enforcement of confinement and social-distancing orders in some locations -- Americans by and large have willingly complied with government’s shelter-in-place orders. The Virginia Gazette reported yesterday that crime in the Historic Triangle is down during the pandemic, including a 50% drop in my home in Williamsburg, Virginia. “We have not charged anyone for breaking the governor’s orders,” Williamsburg Police Department spokesman Charles Ericsson is quoted saying. “We have responded to some complaints of groups larger than 10, but we have handled those by giving a copy of the (governor’s) orders to the business owner or property owner. Our goal is voluntary compliance.” 


The same is seen elsewhere around the world. In France, for example, where the population has shown little resistance to draconian stay-in-place measures (“France and Covid-19: The New War” The Economist, April 14, 2020). As part of its lockdown enforcement, every citizen must sign a form justifying any trip away from home. Policemen have monitored people’s movements and carried out 5.8 million checks of such paperwork and imposed almost 360,000 fines. As reported by The Economist, there has been “scarcely a murmur” from the French at this. 


The Expected


This all came as a surprise to me, as it did to other observers who expected the worst. In my March 19 Made2Measure post, I declared that how the courts and justice systems will respond to new development such as social disorder and violations of laws and restriction and the scaling back of privacy protections and civil liberties remained a question, and compliance with law depended on how much trust and confidence citizens place in their courts and justice systems.

Back in February, as the Covid-19 outbreak became evident to everyone, instead of law, order, peacefulness, and civility, I thought we would see the kind of lawlessness, social disorder, and disappearance of social morals experienced  in ancient times during the  plague of Athens in 430 BC which was graphically described by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. “[The] catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law… Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness … As for offenses against human law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to trial and punished: instead everyone felt that already a far heavier sentence had been passed on him and was hanging over him, and that before the time for its execution arrived it was only natural to get some pleasure out of life.”


As Peggy Noonan declared: “None of us want to come back from this time without having gained some insight, some wisdom that we can use to gain greater purchase on reality…Could what we’re enduring leave us less polarized? Not at the top, not so far in Washington, which hasn’t distinguished itself, but across America?” She quotes social psychologist  Jonathan Haidt at New York University’s Stern School of Business,  who has studied political polarization for years and whom Noonan interviewed for her column: “People are doing so much locally and at the state level, there could be a hope for a kind of civic renewal."



Between despair and hope, I settle on hope, even if it is fleeting.

Copyright CourtMetrics 2020. All rights reserved.


Comments

  1. Anonymous1:48 AM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Top 10 Reasons for Performance Measurement

The “What Ifs” Along the Road in the Quest of a Justice Index

Q & A: Outcome vs. Measure vs. Target vs. Standard