Instant Impact

If the COVID-19 crisis has taught the world anything, it is that dystopian doomsayers are dead wrong. When devastation strikes, when widespread crisis hits everyone like a board to the head, civilization does not crumble and devolve into a Mad Max movie. Quite the opposite. From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 to the current coronavirus pandemic, mankind continues to come through in ways big and small.

In crises past, churches filled, volunteer centers sprang up overnight and donations – from money, to blood, to food, clothing, shelter and love – overflowed. The mechanics of this pandemic are different. We must, by regulation and common decency, stay away from each other and avoid the kind of physical contact that has bonded humans for millennia. But that separation hasn’t stopped an outpouring of giving. If anything, forced isolation has brought us closer in that way. No government agency mandated the rampant giving. No bureaucracy managed it. This has grown from the bottom up, people organizing in seconds, donating in minutes and making a p...