My grandmother’s optimism

My grandmother was born in 1928 and grew up without medical care, electricity or running water. Her family endured the Great Depression by growing their own food and foraging in the woods, and her brothers were on the front lines fighting for democracy in World War II. She lives at home today in rural Alabama, and despite being nearly completely alone since the pandemic struck, she remains optimistic.

I’ve tried to internalize her sense of perspective and her sense of hope.

This is the worst pandemic in 100 years, and it represents the most seismic change to Americans’ lives since World War II. My grandmother’s generation was remarkable. Few groups of people confront and vanquish threats as daunting as the Great Depression and fascism, much less face them back-to-back within a decade. By comparison, tackling COVID-19 should be much easier, and yes, we can triumph over this threat and emerge stronger than before.

I wish my grandmother and her generation could remain with us forever to remind us of the profound sacrifices Americans endured in fighting the Depression and fascism. It is mind-boggling to review the history of Congress and the Roosevelt administration enacting unprecedented changes to our economy and the role of government. Those leaders had to cast off a century of economic dogma in order to defeat a depression. (Those policies certainly had an impact on my family, as one of my grandmother’s brothers went to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps hoping to get dispatched someplace exotic — Georgia would have qualified. They ended up a few dozen miles from home.)

As my grandmother lived through the Depression as a member of an economically destitute family and saw how a democracy can resurrect a prosperous economy, it’s understandable that she would see the COVID-19 recession as an imminently solvable challenge.

There aren’t many Americans left with first-hand memories of the rationing, victory gardens, war bond campaigns, draft, industrial mobilization, battlefield fatalities and injuries of World War II. My grandmother remembers, as her brothers fought in the war. I can see how donning a face mask and maintaining social distance would seem like the smallest of sacrifices compared to what Americans did together to defeat fascism.

COVID-19 has killed a quarter-million Americans, and death tolls are rising to nearly 2,000 daily. We cannot discount the severity of this virus. At the same time, it represents nowhere near the scale of threat that we faced with the Depression or World War II. We have the technology to understand and combat the virus. Now all we need is functioning public health policy to achieve high enough levels of face mask usage, social distancing — and soon, vaccination. We have the fiscal and monetary framework necessary to invest our way out of a short-term economic shock produced by COVID-19. Those fiscal and monetary tools didn’t exist when my grandmother was a little girl, but if we use them today another Great Depression will be avoided.

We can defeat the virus and invest federal funds necessary to get the economy back on its feet. Yes, that means public health policies implemented by our government of the people. Yes, that means infrastructure investment and federal funds to sustain local and state services. The only thing we have to fear is fear of democracy itself.

Through the power of democratic government, we can defeat this virus and get the economy growing quickly again. My grandmother is correct to be optimistic, because we have faced far greater threats than this and defeated them with the power of democracy.

Zack Fields represents downtown Anchorage in the Alaska House of Representatives.

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