We have it so easy
I know I’ll be there again someday. (Image by Yanko Peyankov)
It’s winter and there isn’t very good news.
The pandemic rages on — why is that such a normal sentence to write? Why does it feel like I’ve heard it or written it a hundred times? — and here in the United States, the vaccine distribution is slow. There is political unrest to boot.
I miss my family and the bustle of restaurants and coffee shops. I fret over the well-being of my students, my friends, my finances. I long to get on an airplane.
But still, there is so much to be grateful for. I can take nice long walks, as long as I bundle up appropriately, and return to a safe, warm house. There is plenty of food. I can visit with people anywhere in the world via phone, Zoom, text.
In a time of restricted movement and curtailed social connection, I am free. And I am not lonely.
If I ever begin to think about feeling sorry for myself, there is the writing of one Anne Frank to help put things into perspective:
Just for fun I’m going to tell you each person’s first wish, when we are allowed to go outside again. Margot and Mr. Van Daan long more than anything for a hot bath filled to overflowing and want to stay in it for half an hour. Mrs. Van Daan wants most to go and eat cream cakes immediately. Dussel thinks of nothing but seeing Lotje, his wife; Mummy of her cup of coffee; Daddy is going to visit Mr. Vossen first; Peter the town and a cinema; while I should find it so blissful, I shouldn’t know where to start! But most of all, I long for a home of our own, to be able to move freely and to have some help with my work again at last, in other words—school.
I can’t help but notice that most of us have everything except the cinema — although a lot has changed since the summer of 1943, and most of us have more entertainment beamed into our homes than anyone at that time could possibly have imagined. We really do have it so easy.
Even more poignantly, young Anne writes a few months later about more fundamental longings. “When someone comes in from outside, with the wind in their clothes and the cold on their faces, then I could bury my head in the blankets to stop myself thinking: ‘When will we be granted the privilege of smelling fresh air?’”
It just socks you in the gut, doesn’t it? She then goes on to share some sentiments that many of her adolescent counterparts of 2021 can likely relate to:
And because I must not bury my head in the blankets, but the reverse—I must keep my head high and be brave, the thoughts will come, not once, but oh, countless times. Believe me, if you have been shut up for a year and a half, it can get too much for you some days. In spite of all justice and thankfulness, you can’t crush your feelings. Cycling, dancing, whistling, looking out into the world, feeling young, to know that I’m free—that’s what I long for…
Anne acknowledges that “Crying can bring such relief,” but doesn’t trust herself not to slide from grief into self-pity. I find inspiration in her youthful stoicism even as I allow myself to express a wider range of emotions, even as I recognize that my suffering and loss is the tiniest fraction of hers.
It was life and death for Anne, and it’s life and death now for so many of us. But there’s every reason to believe that our kids will survive to be free once again. For Anne, that didn’t happen, making her words all the more devastating.
In 2016, back when Americans could travel freely to almost every country in the world, I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking through those rooms, I became overwhelmed with emotion. This was not a museum at all. This was the very tomb where human beings were buried alive.
In such suffering, one might hope that such sacrifice, such pain and fear, will not be for nothing. Anne left us her precious diary, whose light has not dimmed in its relevance in the years that have followed; indeed, in this period of relative confinement that so many of us are experiencing, it stands as a testament to what humans can endure, showing us that we can explore the worlds of our imaginations and find things to be grateful for until the very end.
What will our legacy be? How will we talk about this time, and how will we celebrate the conclusion of this chapter when it finally comes to pass? What have we learned? What have we gained? It’s too soon to say. I understand on a new level why Anne was clinging to the news broadcasts every night. She was trying to find, if not hope, a sense of control; if not that, a sense of order, of understanding, trying to make sense of the events of the war.
How can we make sense of the senseless, of chaos and randomness and evil? We humans will never stop trying. Every so often, someone gets it so right that we instantly recognize a truth we’ve never seen before, shared in their words, colors, or tones. Anne Frank so perfectly expressed the oppression so many of us are experiencing of living in uncertainty and fear and close quarters with stinky people. And in her prose, it’s also clear how good we’ve really got it.
