Banging Pots

At 3:30 a.m. this morning, I got up and looked at the stars. “They’re shining so brightly,” I thought. “They don’t know how much we’re hurting here.”

I knew even then how dumb that was, that the stars are indifferent, and even if they weren’t they would by now be used to the never-ending tragedy and folly of the human inhabitants on this third planet from the sun, and none of this would be worth a blink.

Monte sent me a tweet by a British sociologist that he thought summed up the irony of the current situation:

“It’s a strange world. A viral pandemic occurs, which epidemiologists saw coming a mile away .. the government conspire to mess up their ‘response’ .. nearly a thousand die each day .. but people are not rising up - instead they watch more TV and bang some pots once a week.”

It’s true. We are floundering around, banging our pots and railing at the universe. In our country, we got off to a bad start, of course—how could it be otherwise with the lunatic in the White House? But I am lately just beginning to absorb the full impact of what is happening, and it is only possible to comprehend by reading and listening to actual virologists and scientists. It seems absurd to have to say it, but this should not be handled as a political circus, or an opportune reelection campaign. This is about science––and those who are unwilling to respect science are doomed to be destroyed by it. Denial is not a strategy, even if the necessary actions are unpleasant.

Similarly, as has often been said, those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I had not understood how cyclical and common such pandemic events are throughout history, and how foolish and self-destructive it is not to keep accumulating and building upon knowledge, and maintaining a degree of preparedness. Many lessons were learned from past pandemics and apparently forgotten. Social distancing, for example, and shutting things down really do work. It’s ignorant and selfish to defy these measures.

But I have a new theory about why we have been so inept and impatient in our response, favoring symbolic gestures over real remedies. As a society, we have forgotten how to distinguish between performance and reality. We are watchers. We have forgotten service and sacrifice. Is it the cumulative effects of TV and social media? Has life become a spectator sport? Has “experience” been replaced by presentation of curated and contrived images of experience? (Certainly the still-shocking fact that you-know-who is president underscores the blurring between reality and television, and the dangers of lazily succumbing to the latter.)

It relates to something I noticed a long time ago when I was hearing reports of people videoing accidents and fights instead of helping or intervening in some way. Many of us have forgotten how to take responsibility. I understand that the current time is hard on all of us, and confusing, and we’re bumbling around without informed or inspiring leadership, but I think we had long ago fallen into a self-absorbed approach to life. Obviously, I’m generalizing, but it’s hard not to notice patterns. That’s why so many people resent social distancing and other restrictions and think it is just an infringement on their personal “freedoms”...they cannot conceive of a shared action for the collective good. It’s all about each individual’s personal desires and sensations. The rest is just abstract.

The ethical implications are sobering. The late Tony Judt wrote this twenty years ago in an essay about The Plague: "Albert Camus’s insistence on placing individual moral responsibility at the heart of all public choices cuts sharply across the comfortable habits of our own age. His definition of heroism—ordinary people doing extraordinary things out of simple decency—rings truer than we might once have acknowledged."

Simple decency. What a concept. Perhaps this terrible time will yield a resurgence in decency. Consider the effects on others of what we do and don’t do, the heroism in acting and the nobility of restraint, depending on the circumstances, and the recognition that as part of our cherished notion of individual freedom, there is the freedom to choose to care about others. None of us will emerge unscathed, and I believe that things will never resume in the ways we were accustomed. It doesn't mean panic and hand-wringing; it just means we should pay attention to facts and heed wise advice. There are people who have actually studied and attained knowledge and experience more useful than our gut feelings. And we need to assimilate the fundamental awareness that we are all interconnected, and that it may be necessary to endure some deprivation or sacrifice for the benefit of others, the collective good. Yes, there is such a thing.

In the meantime, in my own life, I realize that I am fortunate, and we are thus far only mildly inconvenienced. The price tag for me (assuming we, or someone we love, do not get sick) is that I may not be able to travel to England to be with my daughter and family there. That hurts. And we will likely not be spending our retirement years as we had hoped. But I don’t see it as a personal affront to my “freedoms”. I see it as life––the indifferent eruption of volcanoes, the shining of the stars. I want to learn from it and try to navigate with grace. We need to properly value preparedness, education, and cooperative endeavor, and find ways to cope that will yield better outcomes for future generations. We can be smart and kind while singing songs and banging pots. I hope this all leads not to a resumption of our society but a reinvention of it. I even think it might.