While we are living through the COVID-19 pandemic, my life hasn't changed all that much. I miss seeing the people in the markets, my students, and faith communities. I am concerned about my doctors as they treat this disease and am concerned about patients in hospitals in need of physicians and staff who are unbiased enough to actually help them without extraneous harm. I have noticed that I have learned more about my doctors in the past few years; this has caused me to be more concerned for them which has been wonderful. I had a lovely Jewish woman and now a younger Asian man -- both primary care osteopaths. She was at least two kinds of minorities, and he is at least one. These concerns, in combination with my own minorities, have caused me to question everyone's safety in medical environments in the past several years.
In all of this mess, people are striving to help those around them, some are exhausted, and some are not striving so much. The power exchange within the pandemic is fascinating to me, especially since I am in a population of people with specific advanced care instructions for current and "decision-assisted" care. Not only have I limited care that I am willing to receive, but I have limited the providers and added criterion for providers from whom are allowed to be involved in the decision making process. While some have seen the restrictions to be overpowering and a result of disobedient control, my medical practitioners and I learned that without them people punish me in hospitals, that people will show up where I work for "social observation," and that regardless of what happens, I won't receive the level of care that others receive, even from well-meaning average skilled people. I had to build in legal protections for current care into my advanced directive just like other other minorities have had to do in the world.
How many of those directives are being ignored during this pandemic? Many will say that dying people can't choose at this point in time who they are getting for providers. Are some dying because they are not receiving the same care as others with COVID-19? Unfortunately, this will be someone's narrative. This is a time when people are negating requests and patient's rights about clergy visiting rooms or bedsides to pray with and/or evangelize patients. Would my removal of clergy from my healthcare be upheld at this time? Would chaplains show up claiming that they have the right because they are trained to do so? Or because this is the crisis to confess, repent, and accept another's point of view before I died? It is this very claim to power that prompted me to remove them from that activity. I don't believe in that religious power use.
Power is powerful. A domination use of animals has caused them to be contaminated and fed to human beings, which is why we are now quarantined and using social distancing from one another. Dominating animals caused the domination of the global community. What humans have created with domination could have been prevented with dominion. The same power of creation forms functional human relationships. It is more than a matter of mindset, respect, and perception. Before a person can even even set an intention for any activity at all, it has to be in the heart of the person to do. Perception is based in education and not in the heart. Heart-work changes the rest of the person and not the other way around. The heart seeks power more than any other part of a human being.
Our world is full of power to be had. Everyone has power to choose what he or she would like to do. Choosing to use power to help keep society full of life and creativity is a good use of it. Choosing to share with one another instead of forcing submission to others is a far better way to live. May this time of continued quarantine and separation cause us to value the choice we have to use our power to uphold one another. During this quarantine, let us not dominate one another as the economy and disease has done. Giving to one another creates dominion; it upholds life. It creates respect and honors the holy spark within each one of us. Give space for the holy within what we might understand to be mundane. Let us be a people who give life as it is difficult to have a life full of power to affect the globe.
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