Isn’t it ironic?
No one wants to be buried in a shroud of irony.
For that reason, I have generally avoided writing about our activities during the time of Covid. What’s more, it seems disrespectful to those who have been touched more directly by this tragedy. We aren’t pandemic deniers; we just happen to live in a part of the world that has been less impacted.
My wife and I have more or less followed the CDC guidelines when it comes to Pandemic-era socializing, but we have refused to hide away in our house. More recently, we have been in restaurants, on airplanes, and in gyms as the state opens up. We see friends. But to talk about it is to tempt the Fates. Britain’s Boris Johnson was the poster child for this: the oafish prime minister who ends up on a ventilator. Who’s laughing now? It’s a Bertie Wooster moment, though inconveniently for the scolds Johnson failed to die. His date with irony remains unconsummated, as Jeeves might say. (Not to be outdone, Trump has pulled well ahead in the schadenfreude sweepstakes with his own case of Covid and hospitalization.)
All this is prelude to confessing that, yes, we went to see two of our three daughters recently – one in Denver the other in Utah. (See King Lear reference here.) The plane was unconscionably crowded – thanks, United – but otherwise the trip was generally uneventful. On the outbound leg we encountered two women at the sparsely populated Raleigh-Durham airport dressed in what appeared to be see-through dry cleaning bags. They were both of a certain age, and beneath the plastic sheathing wore what looked like gym clothes, in retrospect perhaps not the wisest of choices. But such are the times we live in.
We landed in Denver and spent two nights there. Downtown, where we were, was pretty quiet but the restaurants out in the neighborhoods were bustling along. Masks, etc., but people were out. As the pandemic winds on, the world is starting to adjust. The science on this has never been as settled as some would have us believe, and it’s not now. Early on the problem looked like a nail, so we hit it with a hammer. That turned out to be too blunt. Now, as we learn more every day about who’s effected and how the virus is transmitted we also see the enormous collateral damage that has been inflicted on the world by the shutdowns: drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic abuse, depression, heart attacks, undiagnosed cancers. These people aren’t camera ready, they’re not rolling up to the emergency room in ambulances, but they are getting sick and dying nonetheless.
Another casualty: school age children who have been isolated and seen their ability to learn impaired. Unfortunately, public policy has been slow to take all this into account. These, too, are slow-rolling disasters and they mostly take place out of sight.
As a country, we need to adapt our behaviors and our policies as more becomes known. A vaccine may be in the offing; it may not. But either way, human nature hasn’t changed. We have an intrinsic need to congregate, to share ideas, to share laughter, to share meals. If we’re going to succeed in managing and hopefully, eliminating this and future pandemics, we need to find solutions that take this into account. That remains true in spite of the recent uptick in cases.
In Colorado and Utah, we spent most of our time outdoors, hiking in the national parks and walking the sparsely populated streets of Denver. We wore masks when needed and stayed away from people. Most everyone we saw was doing the same. We’re now back home, wrapping up two weeks of quasi-quarantine. We have no interest in getting sick, but even more we don’t want to be a vector in someone else’s illness. We’re not as young as we used to be and neither are a lot of our friends. We take this seriously.
But the dialogue is starting to move a little. You’re no longer automatically accused of devaluing human life if you aver that the issue of lockdown is “complex.” Martin Kulldorff, who focuses on statistical and epidemiological methods for disease surveillance at Harvard and is one of the signatories of the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, has written that, “The media suggests there is a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown, but that is not the case. I have two concerns. One is about the collateral damage lockdown causes to other aspects of public health. One of the basic principles of public health is that you do not just look at one disease – you have to look at health as a whole, including all kinds of diseases, over a long period. That is not what has been done with Covid-19.”
His second concern is that the locking things down, contract tracing approach will not solve the problem; it will, he says, “just push it into the future.” Instead, he argues, the “key to minimizing mortality in the long term is to do what we, in the declaration, call ‘focused protection’: focusing efforts on high-risk individuals, and letting young people live their lives normally.”
Let’s stipulate that there is mostly goodwill all around in trying to find the best solution to the problem. There isn’t one group that just wants to make money and another that wants to save lives. Politics aside, the two problems aren’t, to echo a phrase from the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings, severable. We should recognize that with an evolving set of circumstances, individuals can look at the same set of facts and come to different conclusions.
If we lock down discussion, fail to consider all possibilities, and therefore overlook the optimal solutions, that would be the ultimate irony.
Time flies like a kite
According to Einstein, time can run backwards as well as forwards but nobody knows what that might look like. For most of us, time relents only in memories, not in the mirror. You can measure it in years or in milestones, in children raised, promises kept or in dreams deferred. It walks beside you like a shadow, pulls up a chair at the table next to you like Banquo’s ghost.
Shortly after Nora and I set out to move we created a website, 500MilesBlog.com. Our first post featured our two youngest kids flying a kite during a vacation on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I jokingly named it “Time Flies Like a Kite.” What that meant I had no idea, but it seemed to capture the ephemeral character of both time and childhood.
It creeps up on you with muffled oars, as I wrote on the blog. It’s gone before you know it.
When it comes to raising kids and dealing with old age, we mostly have our parents as role models, but that’s a pretty small sample and not always the best one. In my case, my father had a stroke at 68. He never really recovered. He was in intensive care for weeks, then rehab. He came out frail and couldn’t speak clearly. He had to use a cane to walk. Four years later he was dead.
So there was that. The retirement. The stroke. The end. No cruise up the fjords. No evenings walking hand in hand with my mother on a white sand beach. Just a few years in Durham and then oblivion. Not exactly like in the magazines. When I began to think about leaving my company in New York, he was no help. He wasn’t there to talk to, and he had offered no guidance when he was. All I had was what I had observed, which was to say not much.
A favorite saying of mine from the Wall Street days was that “a cat that jumps on a hot stove won’t jump on a hot stove again, but he won’t jump on a cold one, either.” So we do what our parents did if we perceive them to have been happy, or we do just the opposite if it seemed not to have worked out, or, in more than a few cases, just to be contrary. We make our own mistakes.
And all the while, time goes flying by.
No Beach for You
I’m sitting on my front porch watching the sun set.
We’ve just pulled the plug on our annual family beach trip to the North Carolina coast. Our kids would be coming from all over - New York City, Denver, Salt Lake, South Carolina. They don’t want to do it; they’re afraid they’ll kill us.
North Carolina has not been particuarly hard hit by the pandemic but we’ve had our problems like everyone else. In our county we have about 700 cases and 40 deaths, but everyone’s experience has been different and you have to respect that. We’re not in seclusion but we’re not running wild, either. We venture out some, and have people over for socially distant interaction out in our meadow.
Bureaucrats, on the other hand, tend to cluster in herds, like water buffalo on Animal Planet, reducing the odds that any one of them gets gored. It’s a different kind of herd immunity.. Like most politicians, our governor seems to have a strong instinct for survival. “We’re following the science,:” he says in his daily press briefings.
But that’s a head fake, a sleight of hand. The truth is a lot of the science is still unclear. We don’t know, for instance, how much virus, over what period of time, must be transmitted to infect someone. We don’t know the overal death rate from the disease because we don’t know how many people have had it.. We don’t know why it’s less likely to spread if we open up three weeks from now instead of today. And we don’t know, or have yet to care much, about the collateral damage caused by the reaction to Covid-19 in the U.S. and around the world.
But we do have models. It was anthropologist Gregory Bateson who cautioned againstt mistaking the map for the territory. These days we’re all in on the map, but it’s still not the territory. Models are useful the way maps are useful, but they can’t capture reality. The ones we have often don’t even predict what’s right in front of us.
A year from now, maybe, all will be clear. We’ll know if we calibrated our response to this tragic pandemic appropriately. If the carnage - human, economic, then human again as the cessation of commerce compounded the calamity - was worth it. For the present, we wear our masks, we venture out a little more, and we wait and see.