A Blue Sky

unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.

solidarity

For centuries, the ground tread upon by man has been host to war, famine, and disease. The stupidness of war, the silliness of starvation, and the inconvenience of disease have touched us all. For instance, the inconvenient truth is that more than twenty million people died during World War I, but unfortunately, these weren’t the only casualties: “The horrific conflict brought down the continent’s [Europe] established order, loosed the pestilence of totalitarianism, and led to even deadlier World War II. The Great War, as it was originally called, was stupid beyond measure.”

The only thing more ridiculous than war is famine. Marc Bekoff, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, once stated, “A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!” And then there is the inconvenience of pestilence and its tedious interruption.

I think we all can agree there is nothing more annoying than illness. But with all of that said, everyone knows there is nothing stupid about suffering, silly about starving, or inconvenient about world sickness.

Few things chronicled in our global history have slammed the breaks on society more than plagues and widespread illnesses.

Over time, universal sickness has found a friendly travel companion in human progress. In the beginning, most diseases were of the epidemic variety until a shift some 10,000 years ago moved our global community toward more of an agrarian society. Everything changed as our world began to progress, “The more civilized humans became, building cities and forging trade routes to connect with other cities, and waging wars with them, the more likely pandemics became.” Throughout history, nothing has claimed more lives than infectious diseases.

Evanston, Illinois, Tuesday, October 8, 1918

However, there is good news. “Despite the persistence of disease and pandemics throughout history, there’s one consistent trend over time – a gradual reduction in the death rate. Healthcare improvements and understanding the factors that incubate pandemics have been powerful tools in mitigating their impact.” Indeed, as we’ve evolved as a society, the good news is we’ve become more innovative, imaginative, and intelligent. We’re a heckuva of a lot smarter.

Over the past 102 years, our country has seen its share of pandemics. Dangerous and lethal contagions such as H1N1 (Swine Flu), SARs, H2N2 (Asian Flu), HIV/AIDS, and H3N2, have plagued our country and sadly claimed the lives of millions around the globe. During each instance, what we learned from the past aided us in forging gains in the present. Again, we grew wiser.

Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and significant contributor within the global health community, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again.” As we attack the Covid-19 pandemic, we must never lose sight of these two simple responsibilities, but remain ever mindful of the difficulty in seeing both mandates come to fruition. Early detection and early response are the key and fundamental to saving countless lives in every health crisis.

Simultaneously, of equal importance is developing a response plan for future outbreaks. During a worldwide health dilemma, everyone is acutely aware of the significance of eliminating the problem, but it’s the second point with far-reaching, long-term consequences. With little pondering, we begin to understand that not all calamities are equal, but all pursue the same desired outcome: resolve the issue and eliminate it from occurring again.

To gain perspective and understand the potentially catastrophic danger we find ourselves in at this moment, I believe it’s essential to review the most devastating and deadliest pandemic our country has ever seen, the Spanish flu of 1918–1919. As I highlight the deadly flu from over a century ago, it’s not my intent to portray the coronavirus as it’s equal, nor do I want to minimize the potential threat Covid-19 presents. My only thought is when we look back on past pandemics, opinions concerning our current circumstances become more educated, and our views have the potential to take on new meaning.

St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps workers and ambulances waiting to receive influenza patients in 1918.Credit…via Library of Congress, via Associated Press

The 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, representing roughly 1% to 3% of the world’s population. Moreover, Nancy Bristow’s book American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic noted that the virus affected as many as 500 million people around the world or a third of the global population.

In America alone, an estimated 675,000 people died during the pandemic. In conclusion, 25% of the US population became infected with the virus. “The impact on the population was so severe that in 1918, American life expectancy was reduced by 12 years.”

As Spanish flu deaths began to diminish in the spring of 1919, the fact remained that many nations were left decimated. “The pandemic echoed what had happened 500 years earlier when the Black Death wreaked chaos around the world.”

Even with our country’s history of deadly viruses and the devastation it caused, many found the coronavirus to be a complete nuisance initially. In Albert Camus’s 1947 classic, The Plague, he poignantly commented this truth, “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.” Some would find it hard to believe and disagree, but narcissism has its downfalls.

I first read Camus’s classic while in college a lifetime ago, but I notably forgot many details. Such a fate is understandable; I’m old. As I listened to The Plague (La Peste) on Audible™ during the pandemic’s early stages, I found it jaw-dropping, as the similarities were undeniable. The story took place in the small French Algiers town of Oran. This major coastal city suffered from demoralizing plagues during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Camus’s novel, believed to be based upon the cholera plague of 1849, was an epidemic that wiped out a large percentage of the Oran population.

The Plague, by Albert Camus. Published in June of 1947

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957 was awarded to Albert Camus “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.”

– nobelprize.org

In Camus’s existential classic, the bubonic plague entered the town of Oran silently, killing first the rats and then many of the inhabitants. Multiple funerals took place at once without family or loved one’s present. People quarantined, empty streets, and businesses closed were the norm. There would be violence and looting, curfew, and martial law. The plague had become the business of everyone, and it was impossible to remain distant from its clutches.

Sadly, every negative consequence of the epidemic was revealed and represented with each page. As one reads, you began to acknowledge all the traditional necessities and niceties of life were no longer available. Living, as they knew, was off-limits; it wasn’t business as usual. No longer afforded was the proper mourning for the grieving. It’s difficult to mourn when you can’t see the natural process of death unfold in its entirety. It’s hard to know what is crueler; dying completely alone or knowing your loved one is dying alone.

During grave times such as these, one can’t help but become acquainted with the smallness of freedom and how little it truly is. The fragility of liberty is overwhelming. Much like a tiny grain of sand, our everyday privileges can easily slip into the ocean with one breaking wave. We realize our control is more diminutive than the microbes that carry our potential demise during these times.

A man preparing ‘Anti-flu’ spray for buses of the London General Omnibus Co, London, 2nd March 1920. (Photo by H. F. Davis/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

To read, or in my case to listen, The Plague offers a gruesome glimpse into the genuinely fearful. Page after page, a horrific picture is painted of a community being gripped with anxiety and paralyzed by fear. Much like today, noble doctors on the front lines were present; naysayers frowned with disbelief. The coward and selfish personalities were accounted for and leveraged the crisis for their gain.

Yes, represented in La Peste was price gouging and the selling of goods on the black market. And why wouldn’t they? Man, and his predictable human nature, have been ever-present and consistent since the beginning of time. Yes, we’ve evolved tremendously as a society, but the harsh reality is human nature has remained the same for over 2000 years. It’s as predictable as a calendar.

Covid-19 is nothing like the epidemic outlined in Camus’s novel, but the similarities concerning human fallout from the infirmity are eerie. The cycle within human nature that consistently avails itself during wars and mass sickness is undeniable. Denial, discouragement, despair, and dread are the standard continuum of emotions for those in the trenches of a dilemma. Where we fall on the scale, individually or collectively, can differ with each passing day. As days turn into a fortnight, and multiple weeks into months, whatever initially irritates us will ultimately move us toward fear, and eventually back to irritation.

At some point, most of us lose patience with fear.

The sad reality is panic will always spread faster than the actual sickness. Fear is dangerous. It weakens the immune system and ultimately leads to selfishness. Hopefully, a vast majority of us can stave off paranoia, pandemonium, panic, and being consumed with apathy and irresponsibility. Avoiding both camps of thinking will be no easy task.

Experiencing a plague or a pandemic is much like a zebra crossing crocodile-infested waters in Africa; the journey will be dangerous, with most safely reaching their destinations, but unfortunately, the expedition will leave some to perish. Both realities are never easily forgotten by the fortunate ones who live for another day.

The question is, who will the fortunate ones become after this trial ends? Will we, as a society, reevaluate and define our needed new normal, or will we go back to business as usual? Only time will tell.

In the final paragraph of The Plague, Camus wrote these words:

“And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what these jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and book-shelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city.”

The truth is, we will always struggle against suffering. Another pandemic will come and render us almost powerless in every facet of our lives. And when this tribulation comes again, what will we have learned? Who will we be on that fateful day?

Richard Florida, an urban studies scholar, outlines in his 2010 book, The Big Reset, that there is an opportunity to “reset in times of great economic dishevel.” Florida laments that the US economy has endured significant downturns in the past. Specifically, the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s are historical moments of triumph after despair.

Such upheaval times are “great resets,” when the economy thankfully re-prioritizes and remakes itself for a new kind of prosperity. As Florida so succinctly put it in the March 2009 article entitled; “The Great Reset,” by Conor Clarke, “Times of crisis reveal what is and isn’t working.”

Will this same phenomenon collectively take hold in our personal and professional lives? Will this be our start-over moment? Again, time will only tell. Will we, as a society, take greater joy in long walks and the simple things of life? Will we value the daily gathering around the dinner table to share food and togetherness? Will socially distancing cause us to cling close to what is important and embrace the beauty of spending quality time with family and others?

Again, no one knows if any potential changes will be long term, but for me, this is the reset I needed to reconstruct my priorities and acknowledge what is truly important. Ultimately, I’ve come to understand how little I need to be happy during this awful time.

In 1976, M. F. Weiner, a geriatric psychiatrist, and Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Medical Center at Dallas, Texas, wrote an article in the journal Medical Economics entitled “Don’t Waste a Crisis — Your Patient’s or Your Own.” Weiner’s thought was “a medical crisis can be used to improve aspects of personality, mental health, or lifestyle.”

Rahm Emanuel, the former advisor to President Obama, would later popularize the quote. In Emanuel’s November 19, 2008 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he stated, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Emanuel went on to elaborate: “Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Emanuel’s declaration, made in response to the 2008 financial crisis, became a frequently repeated slogan for many economists, policymakers, and businesspeople who sought to improve the world’s financial and economic systems. The question of the day is, will we let our current crisis go to waste?

The decisions we make today are paramount and will shape tomorrow’s future. There is no choice, personally or societally, that isn’t important. The effectiveness of leadership is found within the choices made for the greater good. Camus reminds us of the importance of continually remaining vigilant: “We must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him.” With each passing day, we will choose to follow the current guidelines, or we will not; we will decide to put “us” first or pick ourselves first.

I like the words of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte—“Let’s remain distant today so we can hug with more warmth and run faster tomorrow.” In the end, we can act as if we’re alone, which is selfish and self-centered, or we can embrace solidarity even with social distance demands. There is no getting around that we all have a role in this fight.

Imagno/Getty Images

During this challenging time, we would all do well to remember the way of the great elephant. “Elephants always walk at the pace of their slowest member, with infants surrounded by nurturing members of the herd . . .” And as they journey, they do so many times in a single line without pretense or fuss. The elephants forge on in one direction and with one cause. To live to see another day is all that matters.

What matters for our “herd” is the pace we travel to protect our most marginalized, our most vulnerable. We will either move at a clip that protects all, or we selfishly hurry down a path of our own making that sadly puts many at risk. Whatever we commit to, the world will be watching. Our children are observing as well. How we, as parents, handle this crisis will shape how our children will grasp the plight of their day. A lot is at stake.

Lastly, it’s simple what lies ahead of us. We have two responsibilities, one choice. Our commitment must solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again. The two options we have before us are selfishness or solidarity. History will show if we choose the gray skies of self-centeredness or refuge in the blue skies of connectedness. As a country, we will pursue a common goal and the collective hope for a better tomorrow, or we won’t.

Camus correctly spoke with veracity the words, “To state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” I agree; residing in all of us is the capacity to do good. Now is the time to share our goodness. Let’s never forget this truth: who we are will always be revealed in the valley of life, and what we believe to be accurate, right, will always determine the destiny of our days to come.

sbb 4.4.20

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