When a culture’s immune system is compromised

More than three years into a global pandemic, it feels almost cliché to suggest that COVID has changed everything about the world. Such a claim might be met in some quarters with deep eye rolls and the insistence that nothing much has changed at all. But many people—those who are immunocompromised, for example, and those with disabilities—must still remain cautious, knowing that a bout of COVID could mean severe illness, even death.

For writer and activist Lyndsey Medford, the pandemic has meant isolation and a reckoning with her own diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune illness. Having navigated a broken health-care system with a body that the abled might likewise consider broken, Medford recognizes well how others’ actions can affect her own well-being. She knows that our interconnectedness matters deeply and that we can be made whole—emotionally, spiritually, and physically—only “when we experience relationships that are radically for the flourishing of others.”

In her beautiful new book, Medford challenges readers to see how the interconnected systems of consumerism, capitalism, and individualism have separated us from each other and from ourselves. Using the extended metaphor of an immune system, Medford argues that when our immunity is compromised, everything can go haywire. Our “crumbling empires” are in need of healing: both in the short term, with “emergency action to lessen the distress,” and also in the long term, with fixes to repair our broken systems and allow us all to be made well.