Generation COVID: From the Eye of the Storm, a New Generation is Born

To fully tap into the potential of women’s strength, we must first endeavor to change the way we speak, worrying less about deliverance and more about the content of our words. This means being unfiltered, speaking without apology, refusing to allow others to speak over us. Perhaps even changing our speech patterns— rather than softening our voices we must speak with a tone of authority. This new approach boils down to a simple rule we as women need to remember: being likeable is not our sole mission.

While it must be each woman’s goal to unapologetically toss aside this archaic rulebook that guides what it means to be a successful female leader, it is not just women who need to change. We must shift our culture, starting with how we raise our children. For example, rather than solely emphasizing obedience, cooperation, and supportiveness, society must encourage girls to share their opinions, take risks, assume leadership roles, solve problems —and praise them when they do so. If we want more female leaders, we need to vote for them, support their business and shine the light on female role models who are unapologetically using their voices to drive change.

The most important culture shift is also the simplest. We must all shift to hear what women have to say. Listen instead of scrutinize. Allow women to express their ideas, in whatever way we choose regardless of how we look or the delivery of our words. When we are able to support women based on our ability to lead, our vision, and our strategy rather than our perceived pleasing demeanor— then we can all smile.

As appeared in The Globe Post on September 18, 2020.

Generation COVID: From the Eye of the Storm, a New Generation is Born Ira J. Bedzow, Ph.D. Ali Jackson-Jolley, M.B.A.

Photo Credit: Devon H. via Unsplash

In a hurricane, life is very different depending on which side of the eyewall you’re situated. Just outside the eye, life is fast and perilous. Here, nothing is clear, since the world is moving too fast – and in circles. On the other side of the wall, in the midst of the eye, there is respite from the chaos, an eerie sense of safety and quiet where nothing moves. The stillness of world makes it seem like life is holding its breath until the violence returns to dole out another thrashing.

In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we adults are at various distances outside the eye but nevertheless in the throes of the storm. With varying degrees of difficulty, we all are enduring this disorienting threat – one that affects our health, economic security, and our sense of normalcy. In a word, our world has been upended. Even the news cycle, which is somehow faster than it’s ever been, resembles gusts of wind, bellowing the same basic stories as it whips up feelings of impotence, frustration, and anxiety of an unknown future. Blasting our faces, burning our eyes and pushing us backwards.

Most children, however, do not share our experience. They see the world around them – they see us –from a very different vantage point. They sit in the eye of the storm. For them, life is unstable in a different way. It is not the frenetic energy of trying to keep everything together. It is the restless energy of not being able to be a kid. Their sense of loss in this moment relates to the missed opportunities that childhood used to bring – only a few months ago. No longer can they play outside with their friends, visit their extended family, look forward to prom, plan for summer vacation. For the moment, all is quiet. All they can do is sit, holding their breath, as they watch from a distance the chaos that surrounds them yet does not envelop them.

The disruption of stopping is greater than the disruption

of moving at a different speed or pivoting in another direction. Think of it this way – when we run on a treadmill or play a game of pickup basketball, we can change our pace or move to an open spot on the court without really thinking too much. In continuous movement, we react in ways that keep us engaged. If, however, we get off that treadmill or take a break in the game, it is much harder to return to the pace we kept before. Starting to move again takes intention and effort.

This hiatus is hard for children. We should not minimize their experience or close our eyes to their pain. We should see how the pandemic is affecting them, knowing that the longer the interruption the harder it will be for them to pick up their pace again. However, maybe that is not such a bad thing. Maybe their necessary stepping off the college preparatory treadmill provides the needed time to consider whether they – or we – even want them to continue or if we all should switch our attention to something else.

Before the pandemic, social distancing was a byproduct of spending too much time online. Now that it is intentional, we are beginning to see and understand the consequences of losing personal and physical connection to others. Before the pandemic, economic growth was taken for granted and social identity was a means for distinction. Now, we recognize the pitfalls of overly optimistic economic assumptions. And we see how emphasizing distinction rather than difference can tear a country apart at a time when unity (not homogeneity) is needed. Only a few months ago, food in America was a given, with obesity being a public health concern. Today, our ability to buy food is disrupted, either due to supply chains, market forces, or our fear of going to the supermarket.

As we desperately cling to a semblance of our former lives and our children sit watching us with nothing better to do, we all recognize that the pandemic razed the idols of our carefully curated lifestyle. Our former “see it, want it, buy it” mentality has been challenged by the realization that parents and children alike barely miss shopping malls, but desperately miss face-to-face human contact. We have forgotten to care about what our neighbors are wearing or driving, but we have remembered to care about how they are doing. It is not that we don’t miss our lives and disposable income, or that our values have changed. Rather, it is that what we used to think was essential is now recognized as being the luxury it always was. We also can see how our values are being tested through our difficulty to act on them at these times.

Children learn how to act, speak, and live from their surroundings. They get their priorities and interests from copying the people they respect and love. They will learn how to live through their own hurricaneforce affront by watching how well we push through ours, even if they don’t fully understand today what we are going through.

When the dust settles, we hope that all of us will have gained an appreciation for the things that can’t ever be bought – like family, friends and human connection. Money will no longer be seen as a means to buy us love. What we once perceived as the little things, like having dinner with grandparents, spending time in the company of friends—even riding on a school bus on a sunny day with the windows open— will become a moment of joy and a feeling that all is well with the world.

We hope that the generation of kids who were robbed of their over-programmed schedules but given endless hours of independent imaginative play will come to realize how valuable was the trade-off. We hope that the time alone serves to stop the rise of social loneliness and becomes a generational reboot for what it means to be comfortable in one’s own skin. This time in the eye should be a time for children to learn how to cultivate themselves and their own interests, so that they don’t have to rely on a curated world which targets them as consumers.

Hope alone does not cause any of these dreams to become reality. And many of us are just way too busy to move the railroad switch, enabling our kids’ life train to take another track. Many of us might not even have the energy to imagine another track is possible. But it is possible – we just have to have the will to see it.

Generations are defined by more than birth years; they are defined by moments. The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly a moment. Our hope is that the moment the COVID-19 pandemic serves is one that allows our children to question society’s goals and values so that we move forward and not backwards to how we once lived.

As appeared in Simply Family Magazine on May 15, 2020.

Edward C. Halperin, M.D., M.A. Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer

The New York Times deserves credit for the invention of the “op-ed” in 1970. As a child growing up in the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s and 60s, years before that first op-ed was published, I was accustomed to a world full of morning and afternoon daily newspapers. They were The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Journal-American, New York World-Telegram and Sun, New York Mirror, New York Daily News, and New York Post. Two Long Island papers, the Star Journal and Daily Press, were counted among those serving the metropolitan area.

Across the Hudson River there was the dignified Newark Evening News, “the paper which made governors quake and brought the state legislature to its knees” and the far less dignified Newark Star-Ledger. The Village Voice began appearing as a weekly in 1955 and covered what we called, at that time, “the counter culture” or “beatnik” worlds. There was a vigorous group of black newspapers led by the New York Amsterdam-News. Then there were the non-English language daily newspapers in Spanish (El Diario La Prensa), Yiddish (Forverts, Der Tog, Morgen Zshumal, Morgen Freiheit) German (New Yorker Staats-Zeitung), and Italian (Il Progresso Italo-Americano). There was also, of course, The Wall Street Journal but I didn’t know anyone who read it unless they were required to do so by their professor for their freshman college economics course. Among my enduring childhood memories, I recall my parents walking around the house looking for today’s copy of one of the papers they had not yet read. “Ruth, did you see today’s Post?”

Then came the crushing strike of 1962, shuttering all of New York’s English language daily papers for 114 days as 17,000 newspaper workers walked out. Over the next few years, most of the papers went out-ofbusiness. Of particular importance was the closure of the upper crust New York Herald Tribune—a direct competitor to The New York Times with a Republican tilt to its editorial pages. When the Herald Tribune disappeared in 1970 it had repercussions in my home. My mother didn’t like the font of The New York Times so we subscribed to the Herald-Tribune, New York Post, Newark Evening-News, Somerset Messenger-Gazette, and Jewish Standard. With the disappearance of the Herald-Tribune, the leadership of the Times felt they had an obligation to break a longstanding newspaper tradition of the only writing which appeared on the editorial page and the facing page was produced by employees of the paper, including paid opinion columnists.

Instead the Times created the idea of an “opposite to the editorial page” or “op-ed” wherein previously unheard voices could express themselves. Thus, the oped was born and 50years later with the transformation of much of journalism from print to electronic formats, the op-ed as a means of expression lives on.

Why do people bother to write op-eds? A few, I suppose, are motivated by the desire to see their names in print. Most, however, feel that they have something useful to say and hope to cajole, persuade, or influence others to either agree with them or, at least, continue the dialogue about issues of public concern. Why do people read them? Because they want to get different points of view and be entertained by good writing—as long as that good writing doesn’t exceed approximately 750 words.

You have to wonder how historians will describe the ways we as individuals, our institutions, and our society responded to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps some historian will come upon this collection of op-eds and opinion columns and use them to understand how we came to grasp what was happening to us and how to respond to it. We can, at the very least, take pride in the fact that the views and voices of the faculty of the New York Medical College were expressed and, we hope, made a positive contribution to dealing with the pandemic.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this collection of essays, columns, and op-eds and, just maybe, think about things a little differently than you did before you read them.

Salomon Amar, D.D.S., Ph.D., vice president for research, professor of pharmacology and microbiology and immunology at NYMC and provost for biomedical research at Touro College and University System

Robert W. Amler, M.D., M.B.A., dean of the School of Health Sciences and Practice, vice president for government affairs, and professor of public health, pediatrics and environmental health science

Amy Ansehl, M.S.N., D.N.P., FNP-BC, associate dean for student experience, associate professor of public health, executive director of the Partnership for a Healthy Population and assistant professor of family and community medicine

Ira J. Bedzow, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and director of the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities Program

Adam E. Block, Ph.D., assistant professor of public health in the Division of Health Policy and Management

George W. Contreras, M.E.P., M.P.H., M.S., CEM, FAcEM, assistant director of the Center for Disaster Medicine, assistant professor in the Institute of Public Health of the School of Health Sciences and Practice

Stacy Gallin, D.M.H., visiting assistant professor of medicine in the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities Program

Vikas Grover, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, assistant professor of speech-language pathology

Edward C. Halperin, M.D., M.A., chancellor and chief executive officer

Adam S. Herbst, Esq., adjunct assistant professor of medicine in the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities Program

Marina K. Holz, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Basic Medical Sciences and professor of cell biology and anatomy

Alan Kadish, M.D., president

Lila Kagedan, M.Ed., adjunct assistant professor of medicine

John Loike, Ph.D., professor of biology, Touro College and University System

Padmini Murthy, M.D., M.P.H., M.S., M.Phil., CHES, professor of public health and director of the Advanced Certificate in Global Health and clinical assistant professor of family and community medicine

Jennifer Riekert, M.B.A., vice president of communications and strategic initiatives

Julio A. Rodriguez-Rentas, M.A., director of communications

Angela Rossetti, M.B.E., M.B.A., adjunct assistant professor of medicine

Sincere thanks to the committed members of New York Medical College’s public relations team — the exceptionally skilled and creative individuals who served as the invaluable force behind the entire process that resulted in Pandemic Perspectives. Special thanks to Madlena Pesheva, for her artistic vision and dedication in creating the design for this publication.

Thanks to the authors who took the time to lend their voices and expertise in order to educate and inform the public amidst this unprecedented health crisis.

Pandemic Perspectives would not exist without the unwavering dedication, intellectual passion and unique talent of Ali Jackson-Jolley, M.B.A. We thank her for all of her vast contributions and applaud her for her new career pursuit as she continues her crusade to amplify diverse voices in the public landscape.

Where Knowledge and Values Meet

About us

Founded in 1860, New York Medical College is one of the nation’s largest private health sciences colleges. A member of the Touro College and University System, NYMC is located in Westchester County, New York, and offers degrees from the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Basic Medical Sciences and the School of Health Sciences and Practice, as well as a school of dental medicine and a school of nursing. NYMC provides a wide variety of clinical training opportunities for students, residents and practitioners. The College has a strong history of involvement in the social and environmental determinants of health and disease and special concern for the underserved.

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