It’s that time of year when everything is in transition. There is just the barest tint of color on the stems and bud-tips of the red maples and the greening willows. The first two tiny miniature daffodils have poked up heads, and our new squill are shimmering blue like reflected sky-drops. The forsythia brought inside is sharing its purest of yellow flowers; the outside shrubs still tease us with just a tinge of gold. The grass is unmistakably greening, but patches of beige prevail. Two days ago, the sun was warm and bold; today it is gray and windy, chilling enough to make us reach for gloves and scarves and to acknowledge that face masks provide a little warmth as well as COVID protection.
We just recovered from the second dose of COVID vaccine. A day of sleeping was required. The whole experience was oddly representative of the time of year. We go feeling hopeful, in bright sunshine; then retreat as aches and tiredness and shivers kick in; then emerge more hopeful than ever a day later. We know we will still wear masks outside the home but a visit with friends will be possible in a couple of weeks. Imagine.
And imagining we are — hugging our kids, snuggling our grandkids, seeing dear and distant kin and friends. It’s still a ways in the future logistically but more adventures will be possible as we slowly reassemble our abandoned routines. The imagining is almost too much to bear, until we think of those for whom the pandemic has already brought loss and ruin. Then, the ability to imagine feels like a gift — the possibility of what can be, for all of us, if we seek “community immunity,” as Sen. Comerford has so elegantly put it.
President Biden has just posed a bold plan for rebuilding the country’s neglected infrastructure. Thankfully, he has defined infrastructure broadly, including not just roads and bridges (which are sorely needed across the country) but also energy infrastructure, communication and transportation systems, and more.
This is the first time in my lifetime such an investment has been proposed. Yesterday, our daughter in California sent pictures of the grandkids climbing in a handsome park created by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of Roosevelt’s initiatives in 1935 to pull the country out of its deepest economic depression. Three generations later, the workmanship and design grace their neighborhood and enhance their lives.
Republican members of Congress have chided Biden for “politicizing” his investment plan by including climate-focused projects. But they are wrong. The average citizen, plus many, many businesses and now even some huge energy, finance and insurance corporations, know climate change is threatening their homes, their livelihoods, their futures.
Some will say there’s no need for our government to take action, that the economy is recovering on its own. But restarting the old planet-killing economy is not the path. It is government’s role to do what is best for the whole and that means investing in serious climate action, among other things. Our government is meant to do the heavy lifting on the things that are hard for most of us to do alone — roads, bridges, public schools, communications, retirement, health care. We have lost our way on some of these important priorities, allowing profit or private interests to hold sway. Now is the time to recalibrate and recommit to a healthy public sector devoted to solving and securing big, essential services. To this list we must add climate action and related, robust job creation to overcome the damage of the pandemic.
The weird warm/cold/sunny/cloudy nature of these days reminds us of the transitions we are living through. The anticipation of the possible — beating Covid, correcting ancient wrongs, building a framework for survival — this makes the energy flow and rouses us from the winter now past. Let’s savor the burgeoning spring and the anticipation of the transitions ahead. Let’s gather our energy — we have a lot of growing to do!
Judy Wagner is a retired environmental planner who lives in Northfield.