FOCUS ON THE MIRACLES OF KINDNESS

By Amy Laura Hall
I wish I’d used my phone to record it. A masked man in a NASCAR T-shirt and his daughter were sitting beside me on the airplane. A woman who did not speak English was trying to fit her suitcase into the overhead compartment as one flight attendant warned that if we didn’t take our seats quickly, we’d miss connections in Dallas. Another was trying to communicate that the bag would need to be checked. Passengers glared.

The masked man stood up. He nodded to the woman with the bag, rearranged backpacks, turned wheels and fit it up top.

She said thank you in Spanish, smiling with her eyes. The flight attendant rushed to the next task, and the momentary glimpse of Solidarność was forgotten. But in the time it took for the mood of social Darwinism we expect in air travel to reassert itself, it occurred to me how the dislocations of the pandemic — the masks and social distancing, the politics of vaccines — have made scenes like this rarer and a survival-of-the-fittest morality the dominant theme.

You can see it in the trending news stories of “anti-vaxxers” getting their due. The recipe goes like this: A person was anti-vaxx, or denied the seriousness of COVID-19 or actually used their radio show to talk about government control or implanting chips. Now they are ill, or worse. When we hear of anyone who has come down with COVID-19, we ask: Did they get the shot? On Twitter a quip making the rounds says, “It started out as a virus and mutated into an IQ test...read more