Life in the Time of COVID19

When the plague descended on the world I felt it coming even before it was officially

Obviously no social distancing

called.  As I watched the red dots expand on the map across wide swaths of the world in my mind the pandemic was declared.  It took days before the press and government followed suit.  For the historians among us I knew what what was coming.  

In my library there is a book called ‘A Nest of Corsairs.”  It is a brilliant account outlining the story of the Barbary pirates and the early elements of the Marine Corp.  This all occurs in the setting of North Africa and in my mind images of Lawrence of Arabia flourish.  Sand storms and never ending stretches of a lifeless world extending outward into infinity.  Swollen, cracked lips as men with their heads wrapped in cloth trudge across expanses of the world so vast they are seemingly impossible to comprehend.  There is a moment in the story when a consular officer describes his life locked away in an outpost of American sovereignty.  When the plagues came there was little else to do but bar the door and survive.  Isolate from everyone else and pray for it to all end before your food and ability to endure did.  A kind of gunfight where two parties stared at each other, their hands on their pistols while they waited for the other to twitch or blink or simply faint.

Today as a consulate employee abroad I feel much the same way.  Fortunately the circumstances are substantially better than those experienced by my 19th century brethren.  While the consulate is locked down it is not impossible to penetrate.  I don’t live inside it’s walls, I stay in my home.  Food is available and the TV provides a stream of news from the outside world.  While overall the situation of my life is vastly better then those poor representatives of my government two hundred years ago, I still feel a certain commonality in what must be somewhat of a shared mental state.  

Thankfully I don’t watch from my window as rickety wooden carts filled with bodies are pulled by on their way to a paupers funeral.  People are not dying in the streets and birds don’t feast upon their decaying corpses.  In a typical twenty-first (Anno Domini) century approach I pull up a web page at least twice a day that details the number of world wide deaths.  It outlines the mortality in my own country and the countries of those that I love.  Each refresh is greeted with similar horror and sadness as I remind myself that every digit represents someone’s father, mother, brother, sister, daughter or son.  Behind each number are tears, sadness, desperation and vacancy.   I feel at times like the world is dark filled and someone is throwing darts.  

I read someone comment that they finally understand the plump morbid depictions in Renaissance paintings.   Paintings created by artists in times of plagues when people were living extended periods of their lives in quarantines.  No wonder they are all fat.  I feel my girth growing as I eat with little activity.  I wonder if I will ever again lose the pounds that accumulate like an expanding onion around my body. 

In the midst of it all I learned that two married former childhood classmates of mine were involved in a horrific plane crash in Alaska.  Caroline Cremo Renner and her husband Mark are still living but on a long road to recovery.  Thankfully their two adult children walked away.   Small plane crashes are an unfortunate part of flying in Alaska.  While many of my friends took to the air the little birds have always frightened me.  Mark and Caroline’s circumstance is a reminder that in the midst of world tragedy the daily tragedies of life never cease.  

Living in a modern day plague is changing the world.  I have often wondered what experience would define my life?  My grandparents had WW2 and the Great Depression.  Their parents had WWI and the industrial revolution.  My father and mother had civil rights and the Vietnam War.  It is now that I am coming to realize this experience will surpass a foot note in history books.  Or maybe not.  I think the 1918 Spanish Flu gets a sentence or two in the books of today.  Not withstanding this, I think we are experiencing a moment of seminal change.  One where various points converge.  There are few moments when all of humanity has a moment of redefinition.  This could very well be such a moment, or not.

I read an article about how in America the pathetically logical and simple use of the mask has become a cultural divide.  For liberals it is a demonstration of a feeling for protecting self and society.  It makes logical and scientific sense.  For conservatives it is being defined as liberal pushing on their rights of freedom and self determination.  Elitist nonsense and science be-dammed.   Next thing it will be taking away their guns.  I wonder if they will resist so vehemently a vaccine when it becomes available?  Of course the horrendously ignorant and dangerous anti-vaccine movement will likely carry their standard into battle with the invisible.  When my child would cry while receiving his vaccine I used to tell him that it was his armor.  Like a knight in a war.  It really didn't help but it was better than the alternative, walking naked toward your death.  Unfortunately these naked walkers don't only risk infecting themselves, the risk killing those that we love.  

While vast swaths of America still cannot comprehend what is happening, likely the result of nothing happening in their town, it shows how isolated and regional America remains to this day.  Numbers are numbers.  As long as they are in blue states, who cares?  Perhaps death is acceptable as long as personal rights are not infringed on by a reckless state.  How dare government demand that a citizen wear a mask for the good of society.  It is my right as an American to expose as many of my citizens as I can to disease, this is a free country!   A hundred thousand or more dead is just a number when none of them are personally known.  I can only wonder about the segments of America that are seizing on the medical opportunity as justification to curtail abortion rationalizing that hospitals should be used to fight the infection as they work to roll back all forms of social isolation.  For them the unborn life is sacred.  The existing life is simply an unfortunate casualty.  Never mind the Lord will save us.  

America is so sick that nothing is sacred.  Our society so broken that even a pandemic cannot unite us.  Is killing others or making war on an external enemy justified or simply invented the only way?  For many, everything in this nation is viewed through the microcosm of self.  The actions of these individuals is akin to the virus that plagues us.   The consequence of these attitudes and behaviors in favor of the single over the many is a virus in its own right.  

So many of the issues that confront us as a people can only be faced with uniformity in reality and ambition.  If we can’t agree on a problem there can never be a solution.  It could be senseless killing, a pandemic, global warming or international politics.  Causes that should seemingly be beyond conflict are battered like a badminton birdie over a net.  How can anyone disagree with clean water, clean air or public health?  Decaying infrastructure or failing academic institution. There was a time when we differed on solutions to problems but problems were always accepted. 

How it has been forgotten that the Environmental Protection Agency  (EPA) one of the most vilified agencies of government was the result of the Nixon Administration.   In the past four years it has been effectively castrated.  An institution created by conservatives, in their present mental state is simply a liberal tool for impeding business.  To do so is to impact companies that grow rich creating the various problems that plague us. 

Everything is upside down.  Work is at home, politics divide friends.  Political discord and distrust are such that people are fleeing to sections of the nation that mirror their own attitudes.  This is of course what any despot wishes.  History is replete with  examples of how finger pointing, fear and alienation of minority populations is used to embolden or control a society.  The cost of this is horrendous not only to the minority but also to the souls of the dividers.  I am as guilty of this as anyone.  I will soon role up my flag at my personal Fort Sumter, sell my house in a deeply red state and flee to the west.  I have been driven out not only by job but also by a body politic and it's minions that view society as an affront to their selves.  I could persevere but it seems like living in a place where even the hospital staff refuse to social distance or wear a mask is simply not wise.   

With every disaster you see the best and the worst in human beings.  Selfishness exposed in the actions of some while selflessness is revealed in others.   Health care professionals working diligently to save lives are punctuated by the expressions of others who want only to seize political opportunity.  One particularly horrid example I read was a comment by the right wing talk show host Alex Jones.  He vividly described how he would kill, hang up and gut his neighbors should he need food for his survival.  Right wing gun fanatics march into state capitols fully armed in Michigan, clutching automatic rifles and waving banners of extremism they demonstrate their perceived right to terrorize people with their weapons that in their view are simply for their own defense. 

Lately I find that I don’t want to be around humanity.  Periods of isolation has driven me to spurn crowds.  As stores and restaurants open I want nothing to do with them, only venturing forth when I must out of necessity.  I am led to question my value as a human being.   I wonder what I have to give and what I only take.  I think of the people far away that I love and wish I could hold them in my arms.  I silently shudder as I greet my masked neighbors on the street and rub disinfectant gel over my hands.  

I should be happy for this gift of time, yet time in a prison of my own creation seems to be a spartan gift.  I have often longed for time to sit and write yet I never considered how writing is impacted by my mood.  My mood is my inspiration and lately this has been so low it is a torture to find words of value.  

Is this a beginning or an end?  I suppose time will tell.  I can only hope the festering wounds of our nation torn open, now red, bleeding and exposed will some how be healed.  I suppose post civil war people thought the same thing.  The Civil War is estimated to have taken the lives of 620,000 soldiers and countless civilians.  What is the price of this finality?  I fear in the end the lack of civility and the destruction compassion will prove equally if not more destructive.

Everything is upside down.  I no longer look down at my toes but up at my feet as I peer over my belly with my legs elevated on the sofa. I sit and quietly wonder when it will all end.  Perhaps it is time to revisit several favorite novels, Life in the Time of Cholera or even better, One Hundred Years of Solitude.