The best thing I read this week was one of today's Op-Eds in the New York Times. It only takes a few minutes to read, so please check it out. It's a fitting last bit of news media for me before I start a 2-week news fast tomorrow. In case you don't have time to read it, I'll quote a few paragraphs that particularly struck me:
“This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.”
Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt.
Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.
If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.”
“Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25 percent unemployment looks like,” she said, “we may also see what collective rage looks like.”
This is the kind of shift I am attempting to think through in this blog series. Though each week's news items can be important, I'm much more interested in the seismic activity happening miles below society's surface than the direction of each day's political wind.
We're all trying to see the silver lining to this crisis, and that's good and necessary. But as a society, we aren't giving enough thought to what the worst-case scenarios are over the next few years, and what we should be doing now to both prevent and prepare for them.
Getting "back to normal" is a fantasy, as the editorial indicates. Sure, most people will eventually be able to go back to work, although local disease transmission will ramp up at various points over the next couple years and we'll have to close down shop again. Each time we have to do that, damage will accumulate-- and not just economic damage, either. The societal changes that will result will be with us for a very long time.
For one, the ever-deepening tribalism defining left versus right, cosmopolitan versus parochial, secular versus fundamentalist, will deepen, just when it seemed we couldn't become any more fractured. Brother will turn against brother and father turn against son. Violence-- especially gun violence-- will continue to increase. And more and more walls will keep going up.
Donald Trump ("the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable") completely lacks the cognitive flexibility to adapt to this novel, very unusual reality. Unfortunately, he's surrounded himself with like-minded egotistical sycophants. So I have exactly no hope that the federal government will take any significant appropriate action until at least January 2021. And this reality has magnified what would have otherwise been a manageable problem.
That problem is that many people cling to the hope that everything will just go back to the way it was in a couple months or a couple years. And Donald Trump has fed that fantasy until it seems like an inevitable reality to the people he holds under his sway. Just around the corner, very soon, we'll have all the testing we'll need, a vaccine, a magical cure. Heck, it might already be in every household's cleaning closet, just waiting to be discovered by Trump's "very stable genius."
I reiterate: there are no easy outs, no deus ex machina, no going back to the way things were.
Take it from me: I live in a county where there has still been no local coronavirus transmission. And after two months, it's tempting to believe that Watauga County is somehow exempt from the epidemiological reality of the rest of the world. But it's not. COVID-19 is coming for us, too-- it's just taking longer to get here.
The pandemic is becoming, in many ways, a war of attrition. The most mentally strong individuals, groups, communities, states, and nations will weather the storm the best. Wartime nations like South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan are killing it because they are not operating under the decadent nostrum that everything you want is just a click and a 2-day wait away. Important, meaningful, and necessary things take time, effort, perseverance, grit, resolve, and patience. You must constantly be strengthening your spirit with solitude and discomfort, and feeding your soul with silence and love if you are going to be able to resist the siren call-- the desire to go "back to normal," in this case.
Weak-willed and feeble-minded hordes are already storming the gates to make everything normal again, to make America great again... again. We are undergoing a national stress test in which the real women and men are being separated from the girls and boys. So if you're wavering, tempted to believe this all has been an uncomfortable dream we're about to wake up from-- don't. Push through the denial and bargaining stages of grief. If you're despairing, do what you need to do to find solace. If you're angry, dig into that feeling until you come out the other side. Beyond all that lies acceptance: not passive acceptance, mind you, but the aequinimitas of the enlightened sage that recognizes the things one can't change while maintaining the wisdom, strength, and will to change the things one can.
No matter who or where you are, there are plenty of things you can and should do. So do them.
Keep love alive. And stay strong. We have a very long road ahead of us.
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