On the Rise: Resiliency during a pandemic

Resiliency During a Pandemic: Young People Were Made For This

By Trina Ryan

Dawn Royster, who is 17 and a junior at Timber Creek High School in Orlando, typically runs at night. But this March day wasn’t a typical day. Having been out of school for nearly a week, due to a statewide effort to stem the coronavirus outbreak, she was determined to make the most of an abnormal situation. So she laced up her light blue Nike Zooms and set off in the early morning light.

She loved being out in nature, the soft breeze caressing her face. She ran harder than usual, barely catching her breath. And while this morning jaunt offered a therapeutic release from days of isolation, something felt eerie. At the sight of a human face— once a source of comfort—an instinctual survival mechanism kicked in, a flinching need to protect and distance herself. She ping-ponged from sidewalk to sidewalk, avoiding passersby. Was this practicing ethical social distancing, she wondered. Or was this society’s new normal?

At the beginning of March, the novel coronavirus, referred to as COVID-19, seemed an innocuous specter, contained to a far-off land. Symptoms can include fever, cough and breathing trouble in healthy individuals, and can lead to death in the immunocompromised and the elderly. However, considering that there is no vaccine nor an adequate number of tests or hospital beds for those who fall ill, all Americans are at grave risk.

Now that the virus has wended its way to the States—more than 100,000 cases

Mikaela Hutchinson, 17, is the outreach deputy director of Zero Hour.

have been cited in the U.S. to date, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University— social distancing (staying six feet away from other people) and news alerts of the virus’ spread have become part of daily life.

Walk outside and signs of a looming apocalypse begin to appear: grocery aisles ransacked, streets emptied, businesses and restaurants closed (some permanently). What feels especially unprecedented about the current pandemic is not just the unknown period in which it will last, but the prolonged isolation—the lack of human interaction during a time when it’s needed most.

Though the outbreak has stoked widespread panic among different classes of society, young people—the millennials, the Gen Z’ers—are, in many ways, built for such a crisis.

Facetime, text, virtual video games: young folks are leveraging their innate ingenuity and technical know-how to stay connected, hallmarks unique to this demographic.

“Because so much of what we do is already digitized, communication right now doesn’t feel that different,” Royster said.

“We’re still coming together as a community, even though we’re physically apart.”

Millennials and Gen Z’ers are well accustomed to trauma. Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, witnessed 9/11, the Iraq War and the 2008 recession. Gen Z’ers, aged 23 and younger, spend their youth worrying about the consequences of a rapidly heating planet: raging wildfires, melting glaciers, extreme weather disasters such as hurricanes and flooding. Here in the U.S., students face the scourge of gun violence, as prevalent for Gen Z’ers as mass unemployment was for the Silent Generation during the Great Depression. Is it any wonder these generations are so willful and angry?

While it is true that some young people have ignored the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s warning to avoid large gatherings—“If I get corona, I get corona,” one spring breaker in Miami told Reuters—by and large millennials and Gen Z’ers are taking social distancing seriously. Perhaps because COVID-19 adds to a long list of fears that already threatens their future.

“The beginning of this year you saw the brink of chaos, with the fires in Australia and the Amazon,” said Anaiah Thomas, 18, deputy director of finance for Zero Hour, an international youth-led climate movement. “It all felt like it was closing in—but it didn’t hit home until corona.”

COVID-19 is, in some respects, a metaphor for climate change: a problem that starts small, but if allowed to continue unabated, grows into an uncontrollable, worldwide disaster. It’s an issue that’s ignored, until it no longer can be.

On the upside, there is no greater opportunity than the present for young people to shed light on their environmental and cultural concerns—as well as find solutions for not just how to control COVID-19 but how to mitigate its effects on vulnerable populations, namely people of color and the working class. (That COVID-19 disproportionately affects minority and low-income communities is another quality that makes it analogous to climate change.)

“Younger generations are interested in understanding an issue and using current technology to solve problems,” said Victor Ibeanusi, Ph.D., dean of the School of the Environment, Florida A&M University. “They’re curious … and have a need to understand their environment, which is critical in times of crises.” As he put it, young people are poised to be “the voice of solutions.”

Though COVID-19 has kept young protesters from meeting in person, many youth-led movements, like Zero Hour, are using social media, podcasts and other digital platforms to recruit supporters and spread awareness about climate change and environmental justice. Minority communities have long borne the brunt of global warming, with higher exposures to air and water pollution, as well as pesticides from industrial agriculture.

“When you think of the people who are going to be hit the most and hurt the most during a crisis, it’s always going to be people of color,” said 17-year-old Mikaela Hutchinson, volunteer outreach deputy director with Zero Hour.

One promising attribute of modern culture is that it invites questions that challenge the status quo. More than any other

Students, from left Yazmin de la Rosa, Lorena Sosa and Dawn Royster at a youth climate protest in front of City Hall in Orlando in September. Photo courtesy of Dawn Royster.

generation, millennials and Gen Z’ers are boldly disrupting the norm and asserting their roles—as the most educated and racially diverse demographic cohorts—in society. “I feel like that’s the dividing line between generations,” Thomas said. “We have access to so much more. Our world isn’t just our neighborhood or our town; our world is the world.”

When Royster got back from her run, she did something out of the ordinary. Feeling “super tired,” she put down her phone and collapsed on her bed. The texts and social media posts would have to wait. She closed her eyes, soaked in the quiet, and enjoyed the stillness of being alone.