Hello from one undisclosed bunker to another. It’s been a hell of a month, and it’s looking like it’ll be at least another month of this, maybe more. Maybe much more, given that only around half of us are distancing, and that might not be enough to let us go outside safely.

We’re doing what we’re doing to save lives: our own, those close to us, and strangers. So my question: why did you wait this long?

There’s an old parable: you’re walking alongside a pond, dressed in your best, most expensive business clothes. You see a child drowning. For the sake of argument, you’re an excellent swimmer and maybe trained in rescue techniques. Do your clothes prevent you from jumping into the water to save the child? Do you pause at the shoreline to strip to your underwear? Or do you dive into the scummy water as quickly as you can?

Most of us don’t know the answer to this question, but we know what our best selves would do, and we want to believe that we’d do the same. The problem is: we don’t. Every day thousands of children die from malnutrition, poverty, hunger, poor medical care—you know the story. Maybe you’ve donated to the groups that help. Maybe you haven’t. All we know is, children are still dying.

The standard psychological answer for this is salience. A child in front of you, with only you available to help, calls upon you in a way that a starving child halfway across the country or around the world does not. Other people can take responsibility. It’s not immediate, so it’s not salient—which is to say, it doesn’t break through the barriers which keep you in your habits, which make the death of this particular child more important than whatever it is you’re already doing.

But there’s a deeper answer than that, and that’s comfort. Americans, we like to be comfortable. Other nations, other peoples, other generations of Americans, they knew how to sacrifice. How to send their teenage children to Germany and Japan. How to build barricades in Paris in the 18th century and storm the Bastille. How to form communities that prevented any one of them from going hungry, or provided other subsistence even when the whole town was barely above that level.

Four months ago, you knew that Americans went to bed hungry, that a large fraction of children live in poverty, that millions have no health insurance and millions more can’t rely on theirs to handle catastrophe. Whatever you did in the face of such things, it wasn’t enough, because such things took place.

We’ve invaded countries without reason. We’ve tortured prisoners, sometimes innocent prisoners. We’ve built concentration camps at our borders. We’ve denied basic and necessary health services to every woman of childbearing age living in the wrong states. We’ve disenfranchised millions. We’ve been ruled for 12 out of the last 20 years by presidents who lost the popular vote, and they’ve appointed half the Supreme Court.

And you let it all happen. You, personally. And me. Who, other than Americans, can take responsibility for the actions of America? If you don’t feel responsible—why not?

And that’s the reason why we didn’t act, why we’re all pretty damned sure we never will. It’s not only about salience, and it’s not only about comfort. It’s about convenience. We’ll donate money—if we have any left over after we buy our luxuries. We’ll make time available to volunteer—in ways that don’t push us too hard. We’ll attend protests, but not the kind of protest that ends in mass arrests.

But now, in the face of a threat that can’t be bargained with, that doesn’t brook negotiation, that genuinely is a threat where we’re waiting for experts and leaders to do their work and we’re fucked if they fail, when that happened: we dropped damn near everything that was normal about our lives and stayed the fuck home. We changed every routine we had. We did the uncomfortable, inconvenient, but now salient things that other generations, peoples, and nations have done in the face of a threat to their common sense of humanity.

These other problems, the ones we’ve resigned ourselves to living with (or rather, that we’ve consigned other people to live through): they’re just bad management. They are vulnerable to bargains, negotiation, and just plain getting their asses kicked. We know we can have better health care, more equal treatment under the law, less abject poverty, more human dignity. We know this because our peers do it, and we know this because we instinctively know this. That’s why those in favor of deprivation, those who profit from it, fight so hard to make sure you stick to what’s convenient: they know there’s nothing else stopping you.

When this is over, when we’ve achieved whatever we call “new normal,” we’ll have space to address our other political endemics, or we can return to the status quo. It’s notable that somehow, the government spending and social safety net that would help at any time are suddenly bipartisan during crisis time; it’s almost as if everyone knows this shit works, but we don’t care enough most times to make it happen, or somehow can’t when the wrong party’s or the wrong color president is in office. Or if it costs money that goes to the wrong people. That’s inconvenient. It’s especially inconvenient for those of us outraged by it all, because to act on it effectively would be a lot of effort. Easier to be comfortable.

What will you do next, now that you know what you’re capable of?

Postscript: I wrote this in the second person to be provocative, but I don’t exclude myself from this responsibility or this guilt. I think I do more than the average bear regarding social justice; I’m also pretty damn sure I’m grading myself on a curve and have frequently rested on imaginary laurels.

But I can say that for the past two years, I’ve taken on a volunteer role that’s caused me real hardship and sacrifice, that’s been regularly inconvenient and uncomfortable. I’ve done this—and pretty much only this in terms of activism—because this has been the best place to put my time, effort, and resources; it’s been a lever where I think I can make a real difference, more so than in the other volunteer work I’ve done.

That doesn’t let me off the hook for all the ills my work doesn’t address. But if anyone asks me what I did during the final collapse of a sustainable environment, or when we were ruled by a Nazi sympathizer, or when our democracy was trashed, I can point to what my nonprofit sets out to do, then to roughly 4,000 hours and counting and say, “I did that.”

Now, like everyone else, I’m discovering what other sacrifices I could have made sooner, and that what I thought was my utmost maybe wasn’t. It’s up to me to decide what’s enough. It’s up to you, too. What will you point to? Will that satisfy you? And when you insist it was the best you could have done—will you believe yourself?