It's History, Write It Down

Earlier, in my regular radio career, I was something of a known quantity in the community. Because of that, I was sometimes asked to speak at Elks Club or Rotary luncheons. But I never had the horsepower to be invited to address a high school or college graduating class, and with no children of my own, I wouldn’t have felt qualified anyway. But this COVID year is an exception, so here are my inspiring words for you young whippersnappers.

You may be tired of hearing, “We’re all in the same boat.” As has been said, we’re all in the same storm, but many different boats.

Suppose you’ve been crammed into one small boat with your own family for two months and simply want COVID to be over, which it won’t be for a while. There are things you can do with this time. It may be your first rodeo, to mix metaphors a little, but it is not this country’s, nor the world’s. You can dig into history and see how folks handled the last comparable pandemic – the Spanish Flu of 1918, and especially the years that followed it. It did end, and people returned to a version of what we would think of as normal.

Even in your own family, you may have ancestors who lived through that  pandemic or other major events. Now, it’s you who are living through history and have a story to tell to future generations. If you don’t already have a journal, think about starting one.

\Write about not just what’s physically happening in your life, but how you feel about it. You may think you have nothing memorable to say, or don’t think of yourself as a journal-ist, so to speak,  but your words will increase in value with time, and may be precious later to your descendants and others studying history. Even now, though, it will have value for you, as the mere act of putting it all down will help you process what’s going on, and you will think of our current trial as an experience rather than just a pain. Write for yourself first, which is the best way to tell your story.

Be aware that as you get older, you will condense, and even revise, history in your head. With a journal, you can go back and see what you really did and felt at the time, which could be something of a surprise, as you may discover it didn’t happen as you remember it at all.

If you do start a journal, I’d suggest hand-writing it or printing it out periodically, as you don’t know what electronic media or software (or whatever) there may be in the future that no longer supports, as they say, what you’ve done.

So go forth, sons and daughters, and those in between -- and oh yeah, put your mask on first.

Spotlight on the Out-of-Sight

One of the things the coronavirus has done is shed light on groups of people who don’t get much attention in what we would call “normal” times. Here are three that stand out now to me.

The first are the elderly – specifically, those who live in nursing homes. What are these places? It has been pointed out that there are likely more of these homes in our culture, while in others, older people tend to spend more of their senior years at home with their families. But in many cases, loving families simply don’t have the facilities or expertise to properly care for the oldest among them. Curiously, though, nursing home residents dying of COVID-19 are often not included in the disease’s casualty figures.

Then there are the prisoners. It’s said that the US is the clear world leader in the percentage of the population behind bars. Most of us are perfectly content to have these individuals locked up so that we don’t have to deal with them or think about them. This group includes those whose offenses are no longer crimes and, of course, those who didn’t commit crimes in the first place, and are disproportionately people of color. Even for those who have fairly earned their sentences, however, we might wonder if they deserve to be trapped in what amounts to a COVID petri dish.

Finally, there are the folks who work in meat-packing plants, often foreigners placed at close quarters, working with animal parts. Many of these plants are in fly-over states, and in those states, they are often COVID hotspots. Most of us meat consumers probably prefer not to know where this part of our diet comes from and how the animals (still another forgotten group) are raised. While I’m sure that most of the vegans and animal-rights enthusiasts don’t support seeing humans get sick, they may be pleased that a spotlight is shining into a corner where the majority of us don’t want to go. It has been suggested by some that COVID itself is Mother Nature’s way of paying us back for the abuse that is done to animals, as the disease itself is believed to have jumped from animals to humans, who are not naturally immune from it.

These groups are the ones currently getting some extra attention due to the virus, and I’m sure you can think of others. It usually takes a really inconvenient truth to shake us out of automatic thinking, and once in a while, we need that.

Nuts and Bolts on COVID-19

In the city I used to live in, they had a weekly festival in the downtown area on Thursday nights. It was sort of a combination farmer’s market and art fair, where vendors could set up booths. One of the most popular was called Ask the Rabbi. To borrow a line from the old billboards in the New York subway, you didn’t have to be Jewish to ask him a question. I don’t remember whether he even charged anything. But if they had a booth called Ask the Virologist, here are a few questions I’d pose about the coronavirus:

*Is social distancing only good for taking the pressure off hospitals, or does it also help cause the virus to “run out of fuel” and eventually die?

*What kind of measurement would you be comfortable with in starting to “reopen” the economy? I’m not asking for a date here, just the metrics.

*As for full testing and tracing contacts of infected people, isn’t it too late for that in places like New York and California? But cam it still be done in the less populated states?

*I know the question of immunity has yet to be settled, but who should be released from lockdown first – is it only those who have recovered from the virus? Does testing negative mean they can no longer transmit the virus to others? Should they wear a badge or carry a card saying they are “clean”?

*What about those who have not caught the virus. Must they stay locked down until there is a vaccine?

*When there is a vaccine, who gets it first? How is that decided?

*At what point can this disease be considered “over”?

*Can this particular virus mutate to another form before it runs its course?

*Most people will survive COVID-19, and many will have only mild symptoms or none at all, depending on their immune systems. Is this resistance or immunity trait passed down genetically to their children?

OK, I admit that I was too lazy to just Google these questions or ask Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Quora, or whomever to help me, but it would be nice if our media, mainstream or otherwise, dug in to some of these things.

Random COVID Thoughts

I’d like to get all gushy and spiritual about how transformative the coronavirus experience is, but let’s not forget that it is a giant PITA (spelled a little differently from the animal-rights group acronym). It is NOT normal and never will be. It will end sometime and we will return to a version of our old lives, though perhaps not quite the same one.

That said, COVID-19 is part of a natural process which involves all living creatures. It’s like the weather. We can’t control it, at least not yet. But just because it’s raining, it doesn’t mean we have to stand out in the downpour and get wet. We can manage ourselves as we deal with this plague. That’s what these restrictive lockdown rules are all about.

We can write lovely poetry about how the coronavirus has taught us how much we value our families and relationships. But we are Americans, and we also like space and the ability to move around. While sitting at home with the kids doing jigsaw puzzles might be amusing temporarily, some of us simply don’t enjoy being cooped up with the same people for extended periods of time. It’s a sad fact that domestic violence is increasing under these lockdowns.

It seems our little contribution at home to pandemic heroism, then, has to be the development of  patience For the moment, though, we can celebrate with newly unlocked Wuhan, China, knowing that our own liberation will come.

One good thing for us now is that autopilot has been switched off. We are learning the true value of all those formerly invisible folks who make what we call normal life possible. We take fewer things for granted, especially paper products.

A thought I’ve had lately is that our President has missed a giant opportunity. If the man who loves distractions so much had embraced COVID-19 as a national emergency much earlier on, he might now be a genuine hero with a slam-dunk re-election in sight. Had he been more effectively guiding us through this single calamity, at least some voters might be prepared to overlook other parts of his record during the past three-and-a-half years. His late arrival to this party is now just another piece of baggage.

But as I have said before, it’s not yet the time to dwell on woulda, coulda and shoulda. The only thing that counts right now is gonna.