HIEA 114 Post #2

I reread letter on a plague year, and I think two things stood out to me for why my perspective changed compared to the first time 10 weeks ago. First, the pandemic is running its course; this quarter, UC San Diego lifted its mask mandate, high schools resumed events like sport games and school dances, and most businesses lifted pandemic era restrictions. This is a big difference from 2020, when Cooke wrote her piece: the whole world was locked down, there were no vaccines, and the world as we knew it was completely upended (as opposed to slightly modified). Second, after this class, I have more historical context for crises, both plague related ones like COVID and more general health-related ones like pollution. One thing that stood out to me was the victim-centered mentality the pollution advocates had in the early 1960s and 1970s had. Instead of focusing on structural issues or corporatism or the environment or conservation when it came to pollution, they focused on the individual human beings that were hurt by the pollution.

I think that idea victim-centered mentality, practiced by the Pollution Research Committee in the 1960s and 1970s, can and should be adapted toward how COVID is viewed and dealt with (Avenell). Cooke’s letter mentions the impact of the plague on communities and on individual people, and she delves into the psychological side of the pandemic for small groups. In my opinion, the ideation of the pandemic, at least in the United States, is focused on larger, structural approaches: vaccines and patent protections, the nationwide COVID counters on the NYTimes website, or the trustworthiness of advice from government officials like Fauci. Humanizing the experience, and focusing on how it affects individual people like the Pollution Review Board did, would help craft a covid policy that better balances impacts to individual physical and mental health while preserving the health of the whole nation/world. I think this additional conversation would have been very helpful at any point throughout the COVID-19 pandemic; even right now is not too late.

Mutual aid and solidarity helped millions of Japanese (and foreign) citizens and residents over decades. For example, the GI movement against the Vietnam War by US soldiers became an international solidarity movement, with a network not only in the United States and Japan but also in the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam itself. Similar ideas could be adapted for vaccine distributions, for example: international mutual aid may take the form of reducing patent protections on vaccines to allow poorer countries to afford to buy vaccines and vaccinate their population. This focus on mutual solidarity can be used to uplift others, but it needs to be taken; if the focus is on individual gain or solely national gain, the whole world will suffer for it.