CARLTON FLETCHER: Our short memories diminish us as members of the human race

“Come on people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.”

— The Youngbloods

We as a people have very short memories. It’s because of that fact that today’s Christmas edition (Merry Christmas!) of The Albany Herald includes a series of articles detailing the battle our hospital system, Phoebe Putney Health System, fought against a pandemic that killed thousands.

The impetus for these stories was a conversation I had with Phoebe President/CEO Scott Steiner in his office about a topic that, initially, had nothing to do with COVID.

During that conversation, though, I started reminiscing with Steiner about the early onset of the virus. We had scheduled a face-to-face on a Sunday, one year after he’d been at the helm of the southwest Georgia hospital system, and we were going to talk about a number of Phoebe projects that were then on the drawing board. COVID quashed that conversation, though.

Steiner, who has proven to be a true straight shooter when it comes to hospital business, had a look that day I’ll never forget. In his eyes, I could see traces of fear and worry but an abundance of we’re ready for whatever it takes.

I talked with Herald staffers Alan Mauldin and Tara Fletcher about trying to come up with, if not an all-encompassing, a far-reaching series of articles to talk about the various elements of Phoebe’s battle with COVID. We talked with doctors, nurses, pharmacists, patients and, yes, administrators in an effort to tell the hospital’s story. I will never forget some of the comments of these individuals as they recounted what was a period of terror for most of them.

What saddens me, though, is that the unity, the community spirit that Steiner and others said helped Phoebe fight through that terror and allowed the region to reach the point where, today, COVID does not have such control over their lives, has all but dissipated.

There was a time during COVID that citizens formed a queue of automobiles that drove through the hospital parking lot to blow their horns in tribute to the health care workers who were fighting against an initial unknown entity. There were stories on a daily basis of citizens baking sweets and cooking food for Phoebe employees, of groups sewing masks when there was a shortage, of cards and letters pouring in to the hospital by the hundreds.

Then, there were few concerns about ethnicity, about race, about economic station. We truly were “in this together,” as COVID was indiscriminate in its choice of victims. We all wore our masks (except, of course, those who were making ill-advised political statements), and we all did what we could to help others in their time of need.

It’s the same kind of united spirit we saw after 500-year floods, 100 mph-plus straight-line winds, tornadoes and even a hurricane — all natural disasters that left a path of destruction smack-dab through the heart of our community. Then, we pulled together and helped our neighbors rebuild, or helped them get to safety, or helped them find food and shelter.

That unity that bound us during COVID has, much as what happened in the aftermath of the aforementioned disasters, ebbed to the point that we’re now back bickering over the petty differences that tear at the very fabric of our community. The togetherness has been replaced by mistrust, by jealousy and by those same old social differences that have long haunted us.

We can only rarely, it’s been proven, change men’s hearts. But we can show them with our actions how to be a voice of reason in a pit of divisiveness. And we can remind them just how amazingly the nurses, doctors, staff and administrators at our hospital pulled together to tackle this dreaded virus that, initially, no one knew how to fight. The amazing thing is, even without the knowledge required for such a fight, these heroes fought on.

To forget their valor and selflessness in the face of such a challenge would lessen us all as human beings.