Unprecedented in Our Lifetimes

None of us has seen anything quite like this before. Every shop, café, restaurant, bar, mall, movie house and sporting event in New Mexico is temporarily shut down or has had to dramatically alter its business practices. Who could have imagined two weeks ago that the circus of modern consumerism would have come to such a jarring halt? And apparently, it’s much the same across the whole country and in many other nations. And it’s all because of a public health calamity, with dire social and economic consequences, that we have been forewarned repeatedly to expect because of climate change.

Our political and financial leaders didn’t pay attention. Now, we’re admonished to keep our distance from one other to avoid spreading coronavirus throughout our communities, so that New Mexico and the rest of the country won’t become like Italy, Spain, China and other places with soaring numbers of deaths and the horrific possibility of countless more.

You might say Americans and much of the world are on a forced retreat, which could prove to be a unique opportunity for contemplation and rethinking our lives. Will this strengthen us as individuals and families? Will we be better prepared, mentally and emotionally, to handle the next pandemic with more grace and efficiency?

That the coronavirus caught the federal government flatfooted could well prove to be a massive tragedy for tens of thousands of American families, if not more. Since the Trumpians have taken charge, they have done no long-range public health planning that we can tell because they are mostly now all flat-earthers who don’t believe in science any more than they believe in government. Thank heavens New Mexico’s governor was a public health professional and has been planning with her staff for such an outbreak, apparently, since she took office early last year.

The temporary end of consumer culture in New Mexico and elsewhere could devastate economies, wipe out savings, ruin lives and destroy small businesses. But it is temporary. Recovery is possible. We all have to remember that. Death by infection, however, is not.

The heroes on the front lines — cashiers and staff in supermarkets and pharmacies, the people who run homeless shelters, elder care facilities, home care aides, police officers and fire fighters, bus drivers, post office workers, nurses, doctors, hospital workers of all kinds, EMT pros — they all deserve our deepest respect and gratitude.

What is one to think about a moment in history like this? Perhaps the first thing is that despite it being called the largest behavior modification experiment ever run, most of us appear to be doing the right thing, following the advice of public health professionals, patiently, even at the cost of our livelihoods. Partiers and scofflaws notwithstanding, most us don’t want to be an unknowing carrier of this bug, becoming the accidental cause of someone else’s death.

This is new to us, I think, because most Americans with a public school education were never taught about the Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919, which infected a third of the world’s population (500 million people) and killed 50 million worldwide, with some 675,000 deaths in the United States. The Spanish Flu caught the world in a state euphoria over the end of WWI, with its total death toll of some 40 million. You’d think it would be a lesson we’d never forget.

But coronavirus of 2020, to which no one in the world is immune (except perhaps those who got it and survived), blindsided everyone, even the best prepared. Certainly, no one could have predicted the exact nature of this “novel” virus; researchers are desperately trying to explore that now. But the idea of a “pandemic,” a disease with possible global consequences, should be nothing new to us, if our education system and the mainstream media hadn’t turned a blind eye to their reality.

Climate change scientists have been warning for decades that a hothouse atmosphere could so change the nature of the world environment that epidemics with horrible local consequences, Ebola in Africa and the Zika virus in Brazil and the Caribbean, would become common place and that epidemics that are not locally contained, like the Asian Flu of 1958, or the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, or the less lethal Swine Flu of 2009, could sweep upon the world in waves of disease.

Of course, coronavirus is not the flu. Nor is it the “Chinese flu” like the president calls it. And, by the way, it cannot in any way be compared to automobile deaths, in the sense that lots of people die in their cars, but we don’t ban driving, as one Republican U.S. Senator complained. Wouldn’t it be better, some GOPers are asking, if we were allowed to take the risks we choose to take? And let the devil take the hindmost? That’s exactly the way pandemics spread, by people following their own habits and desires rather than thinking of the health of those around them and following communitarian guidelines. With coronavirus, this is especially true because people who are “asymptomatic” can spread the contagion without knowing it.

We do know now that our health system, touted as the best in the world, is almost criminally unprepared for such an inevitable pandemic, given climate change. We know that we don’t have nearly enough coronavirus tests, enough sedatives to intubate all the people with serious lung issues so that they are not going through living hell to stay alive. We know that we don’t have enough respirators, or enough protective gear for healthcare workers. We know that there is almost no federal leadership, no national pandemic planning. We know that states have been left on their own, abandoned by the federal government.

We have to remind ourselves all the time, however, that even though this could be something vaguely like a new normal, it is temporary, that there will be moments of respite and relief, but moments that could be dispelled almost instantly. This will require us to develop a mental toughness and agility, as well as a cultivated sense of generosity, that haven’t been required of American civilians since the Great Depression that lasted from August 1929 to March 1933, a catastrophe most of us have experienced only through the memory of our parents and grandparents.

This is an ideal moment, in fact, for all of us to reinvigorate our sense of community, to think more about ourselves as citizens and neighbors than as rugged consumers, and to explore our memories for the wisdom of our families and of those who survived the terrible tribulations of the past and lived on to contribute ever more honorably and devotedly to the welfare of their society and their world.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Background image by Karen Blaha)