Last week,  I attended a memorial service at Mercy Medical Center noting the anniversary of the official start of the pandemic here.

It was very moving as three speakers – two nurses and a doctor – were overwhelmed by grief as they addressed the audience.

It’s been a year, that the growing spread of the pandemic caused the shut-down of Massachusetts along with a number of other states.

Every conflict, every emergency, every tragedy has its opportunities to provide lessons for the future.

What did I learn in the last year?

The pandemic showed the very best of humanity and the very worst. There were so many moments in which Americans reached out to their neighbors, friends and strangers with help. Many people supported charities, such as emergency food programs, to help people who through no fault of their own found themselves in bad situations.

We saw the unlimited dedication and professionalism from the health community. The personal sacrifices they made are overwhelming.  

That dedication to a profession was evident in so many places. From first responders to restaurant staffers to grocery store workers to delivery personnel, so many people rose to the occasion.

Educators showed their mettle by adapting the best they could to new and more difficult ways of teaching. The job of a teacher is not easy in the best of times, but in the past year it was hellish.

Parents faced huge challenges balancing work – oftentimes from home – with taking care of their children.
 

These were people of which we could be proud.

The pandemic taught us another lesson, though. We saw the inequities between class and race, between those whose income was secure and those who faced economic apocalypse.

The pandemic has shown us our weaknesses as a society, weaknesses that hopefully we can address and fix.

It’s as straight forward as providing hardware, software and high-speed Internet access for all families, no matter where they live. It’s about providing equal opportunities to use the tools that can build businesses and advance lives.

To clarify, I  said “straight-forward,” not easy. We have seen the problems, now we must have the political will to attempt to fix them.

The pandemic showed, though, how some people in this country did not share in the kind of shared purpose as others did.

Instead of taking steps to prevent the spread of the virus, too many Americans chose to not to listen to science but to view the pandemic through their own political lens. They followed the announcements by the former president as if they were being presented in a Biblical fashion.

The blind faith they showed soon translated into conflict, as many people were ridiculed and worse for wearing a mask in public, as well as spikes in the spread of the disease.

States opened up as a political statement and then closed again as the pandemic took little heed of politics. Social media was too often filled with blind hate.

The lowest point for me in the past year is seeing in social media, how the people who died were completely disrespected by those who claimed their numbers were not enough to matter or they were old anyway or they had some pre-existing medical condition.

The fact that the pandemic was at the same time as the most grueling contest for the presidency in recent history with the most traitorous and criminal after effects only added to the profound sadness in this nation.

We have the opportunity, though, to learn and to act. We have the opportunity to prepare for a pandemic or similar wide-spread emergency. We have the opportunity to address inequities and to define what it means to be an American.

Perhaps Charles Dickens was predicting 2020 when he wrote in “The Tale of Two Cities,” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Hopefully in the next year all Americans will move forward.