By Steven P. Dandaneau, Associate Professor of Sociology at CSU. Originally published by the Coloradoan.

Opinion: This is no time for panic or cynicism

From where I stand, among the greatest challenges we face vis-à-vis the coronavirus pandemic, but one that we can certainly meet, is to keep our collective heads.

It’s not just panic that threatens to distort thinking, but cynicism too. Let me explain.

Trauma can result in panic disorder and panic attacks, while natural disasters, wars, and pandemics can produce something similar on a collective level. When routines are upended, goods and services become unavailable, implicit rules about what one should and should not do in various situations are increasingly unclear, communities and even whole societies can become overwhelmed and disoriented.

The immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks produced such a moment in the United States, although, due to effective leadership and widespread goodwill, it was short-lived.

This much is easily appreciated but I would also caution against the polar opposite of panic: call it cynicism. Instead of being flooded by fear and anxiety, individuals might close themselves off from their feelings and shut down their normal capacity for empathy, care, and concern for others.

Likewise, societies might attempt to erect walls and raise draw bridges in hope of circling no less metaphorical wagons. Social policies and collective actions that isolate and balkanize one community from another flow from, and reinforce, cynicism.

Individuals once built fallout shelters and defended them with firearms; today, societies refuse refugees, cage children, and promote fear of “foreign viruses.”

Instead of falling prey to panic or cynicism, what if we cultivated a flexible emotional amplitude within ourselves and encouraged it in others? Would we not stand a better chance of benefitting from level-headed thinking?

Let me suggest a few pragmatic outcomes:

• Our concern would be principally for those at greatest risk: 80-year-olds and those older; people with health concerns that make them especially vulnerable to respiratory illness; people in the U.S. and the world over who do not enjoy access to adequate health care.
• We would focus on protecting those on the front lines of the pandemic, health care providers, as well as adding to their number and increasing resources available to them.
• We would understand that, in pandemics like the one we are fighting, most will eventually contract the virus, and most will manage symptoms successfully, which means that our many actions designed to mitigate its rate of spread have everything to do with alleviating stress on health care and other social systems and little to do with protecting ourselves.

We stand at the precipice of what is likely a societal crisis that will persist for months. This is an opportunity for us to put our best foot forward, to realize our highest values in practice.

We are much more likely to think clearly and compassionately (and aren’t they really the same thing?) as well as take the right and best steps (ditto?) to meet this challenge, if we can avoid panic and also cynicism, at both individual and collective levels of reality.

Let’s not give either short shrift.