One day, a coyote walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, another roamed the streets of NYC, places open to creatures in the absence of cars and people.
One day, sea turtles all around the globe came ashore to lay their eggs, once the beaches were empty of human beings.
One day, Yosemite National Park started teeming with wild animals, once the park was free of its hundreds of thousands of tourists.
One day, aerial maps of pollution showed clear skies over China, then over California, once the millions of cars stopped travelling and the polluting industries shut down.
One day, a moose roamed the campus of Amherst College, once it closed to fight the pandemic.
One day, Hampshire College, once it emptied of students, opened its doors to the homeless for the duration of the pandemic.
One day, we saw what hundreds of deaths look like, as the body bags were loaded by forklift onto a truck, as the backhoes dug deep, long graves to hold the forgotten victims.
One day, we saw thousands of health care workers, with families and children of their own, become heroes against their 
wills, donning garbage bags as clothing protectors, working soul-crushing hours, because our leaders ignored the well-publicized crisis, then sacrificed both the pandemic heroes and the pandemic victims for the sake of personal gain.
One day we began to see things that we had never seen before.
We saw the planet begin to heal immediately, almost miraculously, because people all around the globe simultaneously stopped practicing dominion over everything and started practicing extreme care for one another.
We saw our shared vulnerability, stripped of divisions between the wealthy and those of poor and low income, the educated and uneducated, the east coast and the west coast, the heartland and the south.
We saw the shamelessness of media programs determined to support disinformation, and the consequent spread of the pandemic in areas where viewers lacked both the facts and the leadership required to keep them safe.
We saw our own shame, as we relied on those who make low wages every day, people who have been pleading with us to raise the minimum wage so that they could have a decent income, people who struggle to make ends meet, people who worked every day for poor hourly wages to help the rest of us who could not go to work: the grocery store clerks and shelf stockers, the cleaning crews, the garbage collectors, the take-out food industry workers, contract workers, transportation workers.
We saw the consequent impact of the pandemic on minorities and people of color, who have been carrying the weight of low-paying jobs on their backs, whose access to health care is as insufficient as their paychecks.
We saw that our Rube Goldberg imitation of a health care system is fragile and broken, making far too many of us disposable.
One day, we will see ourselves as one family. We will raise the minimum wage until it guarantees a decent paycheck for a single job. We will create a universal health care system that covers everyone for everything. We will no longer ignore the 700 deaths each day that are the result of poverty. We will work together to clean up the environment as quickly as possible.
One day we will. Because, we will never be able to unsee what we have seen.
