END OF 2020

I couldn’t have predicted how this pandemic would affect both myself and the people around me. I knew it was lurking, but I never thought deeply enough about it to realize the consequences it would have for people less privileged than me. And I never could have understood how cheated I was going to feel at the handling of it by this great country, this supposed land of the free. 

I didn’t feel like a literal prisoner during lockdown like a lot of my friends and family did. I liked staying home all day, working, and not having to talk to strangers or get on the grimy subway every day. I got to avoid the stress of normal high school life and seclude myself at home to stare at a screen all day. I rarely left the house and I only talked to my family and closest friends. My grades and productivity rose dramatically. I never realized how lucky I was — both my parents still had jobs and we had enough devices for my siblings and me to work simultaneously. We didn’t have to worry about not having three meals a day or the WiFi going out. As lockdown wore on, I began to see my privilege. 

As the news reported historically high unemployment numbers and ever-increasing fatalities, I began to feel instead like a figurative prisoner of society because I was seeing everything “bad” that the pandemic exacerbated. I saw which communities suffered under American administration. I watched as thousands of people died as others refused to wear masks. I stood by as innocent people of color were murdered by the people who were supposed to protect them, and got away with it. I felt guilty because I wasn’t suffering while other people were, and I couldn’t do anything about it except write emails and sign petitions. I never knew how much or how little that helped, or if it even helped at all. I was so angry at what the United States had come to. I saw pictures of protests smothered by smoke and overheard yet another one of our president’s indescribably infuriating speeches and watched as social media sent flood after flood of desperation and anxiety and sadness into my hands. I felt helpless and hopeless, and I was still better off than millions of other people. The worst thing, I felt, was that the United States had always been like this, but it had taken a global pandemic to force me to see it. I was enlightened, but in a way that forced me to see a harsh reality. 

In America, freedom is a privilege you have to pay dearly for or be born into. “...here’s a situation which you can use as an analogy for the human condition,” Plato wrote in his Allegory of the Cave, “... for our education or lack of it. Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to the outside world. They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way which… allows them to look only straight ahead, but not to turn their heads” (The Republic, Book VII). I am both trapped in the darkness of Plato’s cave and facing the truth of my circumstances — my enlightenment is the realization that I am a prisoner. 

Plato additionally wrote in his allegory that there are people behind the prisoners, who carry an assortment of artifacts that make shadows when paraded in front of a fire. The prisoners who are watching the shadows play a guessing game, trying to predict which object will come next. It is, as Plato writes, inanity. The image many people see of the United States is inflatedand shadowy, obscuring its true injustice and hypocrisy. I know most of my friends and family were disenchanted with the U.S. after witnessing its handling of COVID-19, as you can imagine the prisoners in Plato’s allegory would be upon finding out that “what [they have] been seeing all this time has no substance, and that [they are] now closer to reality and…seeing more accurately, because of the greater reality of the things in front of [their] eyes” (The Republic, Book VII).

 
Writer John Wolfgang Von Goethe said, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” I used to think America was the land of opportunity, that we are a country “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” (Lincoln, Gettysburg Address). This pandemic made me realize we are not, and maybe we never were. As I realize my disillusionment at the state of this country, I also realize that I am condemned to life here for at least three more years. But I can’t hate this country of vitriol and violence and prejudice, because to say that would be to invalidate the progress and struggle of everyone who has worked so hard to make it better. Every movement will face obstacles, and I think the ultimate show of courage and perseverance is to keep fighting — the United States has a debt to pay to all the people it has held prisoner over the centuries, and no one can stop fighting until we escape.