Covid Stories: Hooman

(Photo by Andreas Wagner on Unsplash)

Since COVID-19 officially hit the United States in 2020, I have lost a marriage, a family member, and a job. I was and still am on good terms with all involved. This is no one person’s fault. Loss is part of life and often leaves us wanting to make meaning of it all.

I tend to take extreme responsibility for what occurs in my life. My thoughts, feelings, and actions all belong to me. I don’t ask for anything I haven’t earned. In some ways, I believe this attitude reflects the heart of what it means to be American, and it naturally has earned me the company of some wonderful people whose life difficulties are quite distant from the struggles of my life thus far.

While I don’t identify strongly with race and am unsure of its constructive social utility, I do believe our ethnic legacies have a meaningful influence on our lives. As a first generation Persian-American, I know my family dynamics growing up are largely shared with other first generation children of immigrant families, specifically from non-European countries, who came to the United States in survival mode, seeking any opportunity to establish a safer life for their families and more hope for their children to live more prosperous lives than what’s available in their respective homelands.

For those whose lives were not severely impacted by COVID-19, I ask you to please take a closer look at why not. For us first-generation Americans, we often are the first in our family line to learn about American administrative processes and social dynamics, as well as build professional networks that allow us to make a living. We build these support systems, social or material, from scratch with no safety net. For those who have had families here for multiple generations, or have had a material or social safety net since birth, I encourage you to recognize the privilege you’ve been gifted, see the way it has insulated your life during the challenges faced in our pandemic, and utilize your resources and capacities to serve and support those who are struggling to build these capacities on their own.

Privilege without meaningful service leads to entitlement, and entitlement leads to resentment by the often non-white struggling and downtrodden in our society. Being kind and helpful will go a long way to bridging the gap between the privileged few and the struggling many, and the social dysfunction we’ve all observed over the course of the pandemic is proof of this fact.