April 6, 2020

Days Like This

My mother told me long ago that I came out of her womb with a smile on my face. It’s an image that has followed me through my life. Friends, colleagues, new acquaintances often remark, “Why are you always smiling?” It’s just me. I wake up 99 days out of 100 with a smile, looking forward to the day ahead with a sense of joy, of happiness, of anticipation.

My smile wasn’t there today. A foreboding had wormed its way inside my psyche Sunday night. An all-body anxiety that left me on edge, even before mucking around in the fictional terrors of the Roy family in Succession. Bedtime didn’t ease the feeling. I couldn’t find my peaceful place, where with a half a dozen deep breaths, a quick day-dream equivalent of counting sheep and I’m usually fast asleep. I tossed and turned, feeling bloated, swollen, heart racing. I imagined I heard every song of our normal two-hour Spotify Bedtime 1 play list. That wasn’t true because when I drifted back into a semi-conscious mode, the room was silent. But semi-conscious quickly morphed into full panic mode.

Was I hot? Did I have one of my patented, sinus infection induced night sweats? Was I finally being hammered by the onset of the fear we are all living with: Covid-19 was in my house, invading my body. Had that guy who coughed 20 feet away while we were on an early morning walk six days ago infected me? Had I not sterilized my pants after a one block foray to the nearby market to buy an avocado four days ago? Why had we gone out last weekend for a walk without masks? The cascading torrent of paranoid questions wouldn’t let up. Finally, I swung my legs out from under the covers and found a bathrobe, quietly unlatching the bedroom door and slipping outside toward the kitchen where I had left the thermometer, a tool I’d been finding solace in at least once a day.

For 10 minutes I sat at the kitchen island, thermometer stuck under my tongue waiting for the dreaded outcome: A fever and the start of medical emergency for an at risk 67-year-old man. But it was not to be. The thermometer read 97.6. There was no night sweat. There was no headache. I finally took some deep breaths and headed back to the bedroom. (I mercifully had not awakened my wife who slept soundly throughout my panic). I found a comfortable position, curled up a little on my right side, and quickly fell asleep for another four hours.

But my smile wasn’t there this morning. I couldn’t escape the realization that there were going to be more days like this; not really a fair nod to Van Morrison’s song, which is actually more upbeat than my mood. But I can feel the panic subsiding. I can feel the hope rising up through gloom. I can feel the rose-colored hues start to seep into my thoughts.

I’m sure we’re all riding the roller coaster. Optimists like me need to accept that the anxiety is going to crush us sometimes. Embrace it. Live with it. Then let it go. Some days will be better than others. Some days, the world will seem saner. Some days, the flood of ignorance and stupidity will inexorably drag me into a funk.

So, there will be days like this when the smile isn’t there. But the smile will win out. I’m sure of that.

March 24, 2020

Imagine

            Alternate universes. Different realities. How about a quick look at a hypothetical reality of what might have been.

            Imagine a world that when the first cases surfaced in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the Chinese government felt comfortable enough to immediately bring in the World Health Organization, and maybe even a fully-funded Center for Disease Control pandemic team, to investigate what was happening. What if instead of thousands of Wuhan residents traveling by air in the first month after the first case, immediate restrictions were placed on travel and mass testing was begun, using tests that had been developed and stockpiled around the globe during the previous 10 years, since the SARS and H1N1 outbreaks.

            Imagine a global summit on Jan. 15^th, 2020 when it was already clear that a coronavirus had crossed the human/animal barrier and appeared to be highly contagious, with catastrophic outcomes in certain vulnerable populations with a pandemic profile for the spread. Imagine a consensus among the leaders of the G-7, G-8, or G-20 simultaneously speaking directly to a world audience explaining the science behind their warning. Imagine them asking everyone to start simple sanitary precautions based on the best information at the time, which by that point, would have been information that had been vetted by independent organizations – like the WHO, the CDC and pandemic teams from other nations.

            Imagine a global mobilization in January to manufacture and stockpile masks, sanitary wipes and bleach to set up repositories around the globe, maybe under the auspices of the United Nations, or a private non-profit likes Medicins San Frontieres, to distribute the supplies as needed to nations facing exponential growth of infections. Imagine a concerted global effort to find ventilators, and to order every manufacturing firm capable of producing them to go on war-footing to build as many as they could in as short a time as possible, with a global fund supported and funded by every world government to pay for the effort. Unused ones would be preserved for future outbreaks.

            Imagine instructions issued worldwide to airlines and transportation companies to institute aggressive cleaning protocols of their equipment. Imagine people getting tested in the millions on a global scale at the first sign of infection.

            Imagine all that.

What we don’t have to imagine anymore in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic is an absolute truth: the world is an interconnected network of people and commerce. It has been that way for the past three decades, at least, if not longer. The people of the world move en mass every day. The goods that they buy come from every corner of the globe, and even if a product says, Made in the U.S.A, or Made in China, or Made in India, or Made in Mexico, the parts and materials used in nearly every item comes from all over the world, often produced through “just in time” inventories. We have all benefitted from that global reality, our goods being more affordable than they would otherwise be. There is no going back. To argue that we can return to a build everything at home policy is to ignore the fundamentals of our democratic, capitalist society.

But imagine a world where we all agreed that our fate is intricately tied to every other people’s and nation’s fate. If we can’t handle a relatively simple threat like a virus, imagine what happens if we learn an asteroid is on a collision path, or that a supervolcano, like the one under Yellowstone Park, is about to blow, or we suddenly are actually visited by a hostile alien culture. The only one of those potential cataclysmic events that hasn’t happened in the history of the world is the last one.

Imagine a world where we didn’t have to guess what to do when one of those threats emerges.

Imagine.