The Echoing Plea – I Can’t Breathe

As the evidence emerges, and the final tally for this season of tremendous change reveals that our most significant losses of life would not have come from a novel strain or an invasive foreign microbe, but from familiar echoes of the battered poor, serially segregated and quietly forgotten. That understaffed, ill-prepared and weakened triage centers, emergency departments, and intensive care units across the U.S. will have rung in the recognizable and proverbial anguished pleas of a citizen street merchant suffocating and dying under the carless, vicious and criminal abuse of power from civic authority – “I Can’t Breathe.” 

Eric Garner’s bugle call foreshadowed the consequences of ignored community indignation. Repeated eleven times while lying face down on the sidewalk was a symbol of public supplication for equity, access, and full accountability. 

Epidemiologists, scientists, and physicians often dispassionately examine death and its toll each quarter and year, analyzing mortality by the maladies, risks, and unfortunate circumstances underlining the counts and the cavernous gaps in outcomes within and between populations. With each shelved plan for prevention, mismanaged and misaligned social endeavor or scuttled request for scalable investment because it failed the measure of precipitous return – “what’s in it for me” – we sadly note the missed opportunities for improved medical infrastructure, public safety, and health in papers, presentations, and conferences where the choir sings from the same song sheet. 

This season will soon turn to the next where heat, smoke, exhaust, hunger, depression, and violence drop bodies in an unmutated and rhythmic rate with no daily report. Where social distancing, the closing of public spaces, lay-offs, and overzealous policing aren’t new strategies of containment and separation to prevent spread. Where poor children, the elderly, disabled and disregarded face tragedy not from myths of a parasitic anomaly born of digestion of blind flying creatures in a remote forest, but from a real, more present and near pathogen that leaves populations, and their systems of care and safety, so easily flanked and overwhelmed. 

When the smoke clears, and the mirrors of faltering truth have been shattered or returned to storage, and after the lines have flattened, scores have settled, and agendas fulfilled will we still be left with the vulgar screams of narrow, narcissistic interests that drown reason and rationality in a repugnant race for ratings, retweets and empty recognition? Or will we have heard and seek to listen to those desperately gasping for air?