Stay Safe!

Our quest for safety sometimes ends up becoming the equivalent of the search for Eldorado.

Be safe!  Have you heard that lately?  Have you said that lately?  Usually, clichés take a long time to develop; “Be safe” though, seems to have achieved cliché status almost overnight! It’s something that wasn’t generally said in previous generations.  But currently, “Be safe” – and its twin sister “Stay safe” –  are cropping up all around us like weeds encroaching on a forest trail.  Parents no longer seem to express a wish that their children have a good time or have fun, a nicety of ancient times.  Today, it’s all about being safe.  Admittedly, the modern world has some features that previous time periods didn’t have to deal with.  School shootings for example.  But there have always been riots and protests and bad guys and plenty of international hostilities.  And children of the past were given parental warnings about stranger danger just as those warnings are issued now.  Most grownups vividly remember the caution against getting in cars with unfamiliar people. Nothing new there.  A review of the news – instead of the idealized TV shows – of the last few decades – reveals that life has definitely not been a movie musical in any time period.  So why didn’t parents of the 1950’s, 1960’s or even the ‘70’s or 80’s habitually deliver the solemn pronouncement “Be Safe” whenever their offspring ventured into the risky world lurking just beyond their back door? 

     Why weren’t earlier decades lived under the ‘safety-first’ banner?  It might have something to do with perspective.  Have we come to the point where safety concerns outweigh everything else?  Are we less bold-minded than we once were?  Is the Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion now our standard bearer? If so, how did we get that way?  The Great Depression, that tough time when families across the country grappled for survival, ended eighty years ago.  World War II, the even tougher time when the survival threat moved from extreme poverty to Nazi domination, has been over for seventy-five years.  Even the war’s main memento, the scary atom bomb, eventually faded in threat value.  But not before a generation of kids had endured “duck and cover” training to “protect” themselves from a nuclear attack.  (Yes, children were given the “Stay safe” placebo of thinking that their desk could actually shield them from the bomb.)  Even the more recent threat of 9/11 was a generation ago.  Could it be that without toughening struggles to build up emotional muscle, we’ve gone soft? (If so, the present crises should bring about a revival of heartiness rather than a retreat the other way.)

The S-word permeates so much of what adults say to their children and what they say to each other, that it’s becoming a relatively meaningless social ritual, something on the level of “How’re ya doing?”.  Lest you think that the “Be safe” mantra is a product of the Pandemic or the rioting, the S-word had in fact taken root long before the appearance of these trials.  It’s premiere seemed to accompany mothers becoming “moms” and “play dates” replacing going out to play.  There was irony in being “safe” becoming so central, not during a world war or some other catastrophe, but in reaction to the basic scenario of the 21^st Century.

This aspect of the “New Normal” should be considered in two ways.  First, of course we should want our children, ourselves, and each other to be safe.  But on the other hand, staying “safe” as an in-every-way-at-all-times creed is contradictory to the course of historical human progress.  There was no getting around in the world except on foot before sea travel, a highly risky means of transportation.  Later, airplanes added greater speed and increased ease to travel – for anyone willing to risk falling out of the sky from a height of 30,000 feet.  The English colonists in North America who bucked the Mother Country to go independent had almost no reason to believe their raggedy army would triumph over the mightiest military force in the world.  Nothing was more hazardous for an enslaved person in the pre-Civil War period than to attempt escape.  So why did so many try it anyway?  And why did their descendants fight for civil rights against huge odds?  Why did they literally risk their lives? That wasn’t very safe.  When England was getting bombed by the Germans every night, the “safe” solution was making a deal with Hitler.  Why didn’t they “Stay safe” and do it?  Would space exploration have materialized in today’s “Stay safe” environment?  What guarantee did the first men on the moon have of getting back to earth safely?  Yes, the technology was there.  But it didn’t erase the uncertainty.  When you survey history, nothing much of significance has ever been accomplished without embracing an element of risk.  

Where does this leave us?  First, we shouldn’t abandon safety as a consideration.  No reasonable voice would advocate recklessness.  But we need to acknowledge the frailty of our safety.  Often, the safety measures to which we cling are more mirage than bulwark.  My father, an Air Force pilot, dismissed fear of flying on the grounds that more people perish slipping in their bathtubs than die in airplane crashes.  I’ve never checked his statistics, but his general point is something to consider. If the Soviet Union had nuked the United States during the Cold War, would back yard bomb shelters have kept us safe?   Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  Worthwhile human endeavor always involves risk.  We walk with risk whether we open a new business, or open our back door.  Risk is always there.  The difference between succeeding and floundering may be in how we see it.  If we recognize it without cowering under its shadow, we can move forward.  We have to give ourselves permission to have adventures. And adventures aren’t normally found in the narrow confines of the safe box. In the words of William Shedd, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” That is not what we are built for.

Fear Factor

Fear wears disguises to distract us from our real dread.

Fear.  We know fear before we know the word for it.  In childhood it’s the scary feeling that comes from waking up in the middle of the night and imagining that every sound might be the movement of a monster.  Later, we learn to fear getting caught doing what we’ve been told not to do. Then we fear the consequences when we are caught.  By the time we’ve grown up, our fears are solidified.   They’re part of our personalities.  We fear heights; we fear snakes; we fear spiders; we fear close spaces; we fear open spaces; we fear flying; we fear the dark.  If you think about it, every fear has something in common. Fear limits us.  Fear holds us back from doing things we might otherwise do.  Sometimes that’s good.  (For example, hopefully we’ve seen enough movies to be scared of walking into dark alleys on lonely city streets.) But often, fear makes our lives narrower.  Because we fear meeting new people or speaking in public, or asking someone out to dinner we confine ourselves to a tight, bland existence. In these cases, we let fear make life a less interesting experience.

We’ve seen this played out recently. Do we even need to mention why we’ve been in hibernation for months?  Political leaders have jumped at the chance to direct the minutia of our lives, wielding an unprecedented power fueled by fear.  You don’t want to catch “it” do you?  You don’t want to spread it, do you?  This was the banner under which they told us we couldn’t go to church (more than ten people: bad) but we could go to Target (WAY more than ten people: good in this case).  Government, in order to protect us, chose the winners and losers.  Walmart: Winner, J.C. Penney: Loser.  Fast food establishments: Winner.  Hair Salons: Loser.  The government told us which businesses and which functions of life were “essential,” and which were not.  Anyone who got antsy and questioned the mandates was dismissed as anti-science, a Neanderthal, a danger to the continuance of civil society.  In fact, when some groups of people turned out to demonstrate on behalf of reopening businesses, media commentators expressed their dismay at the violation of the plus-ten rule. 

Okay, we realize that there was a clear and present danger and that government could not stand by and do nothing.  We will even stipulate that most governmental voices were sincere in their stated goal, that of preserving the health of populations as much as possible.  But there has been a certain fear factor present too.  If you don’t do this, you are risking that. It’s a control tool. As we started to crawl out from under our collective rock, we were being warned not to crawl too far because the plague could come back.  Our leaders and the “experts” warned that another round – maybe/probably an even worse one – was waiting to strike.

But just as this particular fear was decreasing, just as we were starting to smile again (albeit under our surgical masks), we’re back under the rock again.  This time we’re hiding from a different plague, that of policing gone wrong.  Very wrong.  Or rather, we’re hiding from the violent forces that have instantly materialized in reaction to that and other wrongs going back a long, long way.  Citizens of cities and towns across the country have been told to stay home again under fear of the window-smashing, store-looting mobs.  Even appeals to reason by the slain Mr. Floyd’s family seem unheard beneath the unreasoning fury.  Oddly, the media in this case, has expressed none of the concerns about numbers and social distancing it previously directed toward the reopen demonstrators. For the moment, we’re living through a resuscitated French Revolution on steroids.  We’re shell-shocked because there wasn’t even time to take a breath between COVID and the current crisis.

Sometimes fear is more shadow than substance.

We will always have something to fear. We have to deal with fear, not simply hide from it.  Do we, in FDR’s words, have nothing to fear but fear itself?  We have more to fear than just fear.  Every generation in every country has had things to be afraid of.  The Assyrian army, the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan, the Black Death, and Polio were all fearsome in their day.  The world has been shaken and stirred over and over since it first started spinning.  Through all that time, we’ve shared one basic fear that has worn the clothes of other fears.  What we’ve always been most basically afraid of is isn’t spiders or heights or riots.  Underneath it all, we’re afraid of being exposed and unprotected. Yet we’ve kept going, somehow moving forward (though usually not in a straight line).   After all, what has ever been accomplished by hunkering down in foxholes?  What progress has ever been achieved under the paralysis of dread?  We don’t solve problems -especially big ones – by being afraid; we solve them despite being afraid. Ostriches don’t make history.  We humans need sunlight and fresh air to thrive.  And we won’t find those under a rock.    

Is the “New Normal” the Old Twilight Zone?

Not a corner in your average restaurant, unless said restaurant happens to be in the Twilight Zone.

Let’s talk Twilight Zone.  No, not the pale echoes (the various new versions) that have only the name in common with the stark, black and white original.  People have been voicing and writing TZ allusions since the first appearance of the TV classic more than sixty years ago.  The title is used to refer to anything that seems out of the realm of our regular daily existence.  When something seems even a little bizarre, people immediately offer their imitation of the iconic theme as though that says it all.  But of course, that doesn’t say it all.  The Twilight Zone was never about strangeness; it was about portraying human nature and the twists and turns of life, often with unflinching honesty.  In the newly-dawned COVID Era, the Twilight Zone may be the best cultural reference point for understanding the strange times into which we’ve been thrust.

Two classic TZ stories come initially to mind.  The first is “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and the second is “The Shelter.”  The monsters turn out to be all too human, and the shelter is a refuge from nuclear attack but not from rage-crazed neighbors.  Both stories tear away the thin veil that stands between the people we appear to be when all systems around us are running well and the beasts we can become when those supporting systems collapse.  In “Monsters” it takes only electricity going on and off and some cars starting and stopping on their own to turn an idyllic community of peaceful suburbanites into a jungle of senseless slaughter.  In “Shelter” a small-town doctor is teased by his neighbors for building a bomb shelter.  Until they think a nuclear attack is imminent.  Then we learn that there are things more destructive than nukes.

And what, you may be asking, do the afore-mentioned TZ tales have to do with our contemporary lives?  Everything.  Submitted for your analysis, the case of a woman strolling into a Dollar store (Maybe you’ve already heard the story?) with her adult daughter.  The woman is masked but the daughter isn’t.  A security guard tells the pair that masks are required for all shoppers.  And then the monsters arrive.  There is screaming and spitting, and the cashier is told not to ring any transactions for the women.  The women leave in huff.  But, as you may know, that’s only where the story starts.  Like a scene in a spaghetti western, the women return with their men folk, one of whom draws a gun and murders the guard with a shot to the head.  May I suggest, gentle reader, that when the doors of this Dollar store swing open, you’re being invited to browse through the wares of the Twilight Zone.

As the Dollar store incident reveals, the monsters of our New Normal are invoked by matters far smaller than those depicted in the Twilight Zone.  A male 7-11 patron went so berserk at a cashier’s mention of the M-word that he knocked her to the ground and then proceeded to punch and kick her.  While I personally feel that my mask may not be the plague-preventing instrument of survival that it’s cracked up to be, I have never thought of breaking a security officer’s arm at Target or spitting on a police officer about it.  But these things are happening regularly, and as Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling observed in his closing narration to “Monsters,” “the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

Unfortunately, the nature of our New Normal isn’t manifested solely in the realm of retail outlets.  You may soon be seeing it in the faces of your fellow diners when you patronize a restaurant under the social distance rules.  The distancing mandate has combined with various lockdowns to make our streets closely resemble the deserted avenues of “Where Is Everybody?” in which a perplexed young man wanders through a town wondering why the closest thing he can find to a fellow human being is a mannequin sitting in the passenger seat of a store supply truck.  Then there’s that other TZ story, “The After Hours” in which a female protagonist learns that her peer group consists of, yes, mannequins. Unlike “Monsters” or “Shelter,” the idea of mannequins closing in on us seemed more a concoction of fearful imagination than a commentary on the darker side of human nature.  Until now.  Restaurant crowds are changing.  Your dinner reservation may be for a table in the Twilight Zone.

Chef Patrick O’Connell who runs the Inn at Little Washington Restaurant, a Michelin-starred establishment, has announced a unique way of keeping his tables filled, even while observing the distancing rules. Blank tables will be occupied by specially costumed mannequins.  He describes his creative vision in the following way: “We’re all craving to gather and see other people right now.  They don’t all necessarily need to be real people.”

Interesting.  But isn’t he contradicting himself?  After citing our “craving” to see “people” Chef O’Connell contends that the people we see don’t need to be real.  In other words, people don’t need to be, well, people?  Pardon me if that thinking seems straight from a book of logic that can only have been printed in… the Twilight Zone.

In the first version of his opening Twilight Zone narration, Rod Serling referred to a “middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition,” a ground “between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” In the stories running across our news feeds, it appears that under the COVID cloud we’re sometimes closer to the shadow than the light, the superstition than the science, and the pit of our fears than the summit of our knowledge.

Knowing It All (Or My Opinion on Opinions)

Are you familiar with the name “know-it-all”?  It’s not a name that people generally use to complement each other.  Quite the opposite.  A know-it-all is a name used to refer -negatively – to someone who seems sure that he or she, well, knows it all.  Almost everyone has been in a social setting where some blowhard sits pontificating on the ins and outs of some subject on which they are representing themselves to be an authority. Often, the more you listen, the less sense the person’s lecture makes.  But for the know-it-all making sense never appears to be the point.  The thinking seems to be that certainty (not accuracy) is the thing.

But one doesn’t have to be a blowhard to be a know-it-all.  Most know-it-alls (Let’s call them KITs from here on) are under the radar. You don’t imagine how certain they are of their correctness in all areas of thought until you make the mistake of saying something that doesn’t fit their iron mental framework.  That’s when you feel the cool rejection of whatever you’ve just said.  And it usually doesn’t stop there.  The true KIT doesn’t rest until you see that his or her perspective represents the common sense point of view while all other points of view – like YOUR point of view – are sub-caveman. The KIT has nothing to learn from you.  Or anyone else.  The average KIT may have optical damage from doing all those eye rolls.

There was once a time in America when people were actually good-natured toward those who disagreed with them.  At election time, if you liked Candidate A, you didn’t look at fans of Candidate B the way you’d view toxic slime.  In fact, when you took your lunch break, you might come back to the office and find your desk decorated with campaign materials for Candidate B. And everyone – including you – laughed about it. To understand how long ago this was, try to picture that happening today.  The result would likely be nuclear meltdown. Family members have stopped talking to each other over politics.  Why?  Because people have become so certain about their opinions that they have ceased to be opinions.  They’ve morphed into rigid dogmas that an earthquake couldn’t budge. Think Middle Ages.  The sun revolved around the earth.  The earth was flat. Anyone who said differently lived just long enough to wish he hadn’t.  After all, they were contradicting the certainties of the time.

George Washington saw the danger of political certainty early on. In his Farewell Address he wrote, “Let me. . .warn you, in the most solemn manner, against the baneful effects of the spirit of party (i.e. Republican, Democrat), generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes, in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled or repressed; but in (our form of government), it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate dominion of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which, in different ages and countries, has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. . .”

Now, our friend COVID, aka COVID-19 and Corona Virus has opened a new frontier for know-it-alls.   And both sides are sure they, well, know it all.  Masks are a ridiculous placebo.  Masks are a cornerstone of survival.  Sheltering in place is preventing the destruction of the world as we have known it.  Sheltering in place is causing the destruction of the world as we have known it. “Non-essential” businesses should stay closed longer. All business is essential; it’s time to open. Going to church creates dire health risks, and people trying to go to church should be cleared out by police. Religion is the first of our First Amendment rights.  Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ, Plaquenil®) is an effective and safe treatment for COVID symptoms; it is saving lives.  Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ, Plaquenil®) is as effective against COVID as eating gummy bears; it’s a risky and dangerous drug that will probably mess up your heart.  And then there’s the point of disagreement that is based on personal politics: The President has done a good job in combating COVID or The President has done nothing in this crisis, and anything he tries to do makes things worse.  Coming out on the “wrong side” in a discussion of “new normal” mandates like Masks, Social Distancing, or Sheltering-in-Place can put you in the position of a Medieval peasant questioning transubstantiation.

The worst part about being a know-it-all is that often we can catch ourselves doing it.  So the next time you’re feeling certain about something, remember there’s somebody equally certain of the opposite.  Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said it best when he noted that “The difference between the concept of ‘knowing’ and the concept of ‘being certain’ isn’t of any great importance at all, except where “I know” is meant to mean: I can’t be wrong.” Indeed.

Will the Real Virus Please Stand Up?

These days, it’s hard for those who write to avoid the topic du jour.  Naming it is almost unnecessary.  We started out calling it the Corona Virus, but since then, we’ve graduated to the more sophisticated designation, COVID-19 (short for Corona Virus Disease 2019).  Mentions of the ailment are usually accompanied by pictures of an ominous gray ball dotted by little explosions of red.  Definitely the kind of thing we don’t want on us or – especially – in us.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the virus is the way we’ve reacted to it.  We’ve fallen into reactive categories, each addressing the situation in a different way.  There are the researcher/monitors, the floaters, the Red Deathers, and the Doomsday Depicters.

A researcher/monitor – at least in the context of the current scenario – is someone who engages in daily – even hourly (in many cases even every ten or fifteen minutes) updates of what is happening with the virus. There is nothing wrong with keeping up with what is going on.  But the researcher/monitor can end up locked in a figurative White house Situation Room, caught in an endless cycle of briefings and debriefings.  What are the top ten COVID countries (maybe we should extend that to the top twenty), and what are their figures?  How many cases do they each have?  How many of those cases are new?  Of those cases, how many have resulted in death?  Where is the United States on the chart?  We’re number 3.  No, we’re down to number 4.  (Phew – a morbid sigh of relief) But uh oh, we’re back up to 3!  Gulp, we’re at 2!  Oh, Italy went up again; we’re back to 3. China has no new cases, so things are stabilizing.  But wait!  Where did 78 new cases come from?!  The only break the monitor gets is in doing research on plagues of the past (hall of fame killers like the Black Plague, the Spanish Flu, and Yellow Fever).

Then we have the floaters, those who sit back and ride it out.  They may not know the latest news, but neither do they suffer from high anxiety.  In fact, they’re the opposite; they’re dozing on a figurative inflatable float adrift on an imaginary swimming pool.  Is there anything new on Netflix since yesterday?  Since an hour ago?  And what about Amazon Prime?  Wasn’t binge watching born for such a time as this?  Nothing wrong with catching up on Candy Crush or finally having the time to more fully explore the nuances of X-Box.  And isn’t there a game called Master Blaster?  That sounds fun.  We can even stay situation-relevant with Doom Eternal.   COVID-19 is kind of like armies from Hell invading the earth, isn’t it?  We need a “Slayer” to defeat the demons and stop the destruction of humanity!  Yeah!  And this Slayer needs some fuel, so it’s time to move from yesterday’s four-topping pizza to today’s five topper with the ultimate goal being TEN.  (And after that peak, who knows?)  But that’s a while off.  Real accomplishments take time.  The floater is subject to the virus of disassociation.  History might be passing them by while they’re gazing at multiple screens.  Of course, they may figure on catching up later.  Netflix is bound to do a documentary.

Maybe a derivative of the floaters are the Red Deathers.  This reactive group consists mainly of “the young.”  They are teenagers and twenty-somethings. Having lived fairly consequence-free lives up to now, these self-celebrators are immune to virus concerns just as they think they’re immune to the virus itself.  Like Prince Prospero and his friends in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” they see themselves in a protective bubble outside of which people get sick and die. Other people.  Not them.  COVID can’t reach them because it knows who they are and knows that they are untouchable.  So they pack into bars (or at least they did before the bars were forced to close), and after that they packed onto beaches (the ones that were still open), and they’re probably packing into other places as well at this very moment, confident that the virus is held back from them like a dog on a yard chain.  That’s what the Prospero revelers thought too, until the skull-faced guest crashed their party.

For Red Deathers, the party goes on.  Social distancing?  You’re kidding, right?

It’s easy to tell who the Doomsday Depicters are. They’re the ones who manage to insert the word apocalypse into every other sentence.  A big percentage of news people are in this group.  They fill their on-air time with grim observations.  According to them, the President and Vice-President are completely incompetent to address the crisis at hand.  In fact, their misguided efforts are making things much worse.  We are, in their hysterical view, on the verge of a death-by-unexpected disease rate that hasn’t been seen in North America since the Europeans infected the Native American populations with germs to which they had never been exposed.  And the doomsday declarations don’t stop there.  We’re also on the verge of economic collapse or as one Doomsdayer recently put it, an “economic inferno!!!!” (you can’t type that name without tacking on several exclamation marks.)   Forget about recession; a second Great Depression is looming on the horizon, one far worse than the downturn of the 1930’s. So we’ll not only die; we’ll die standing six feet apart in soup lines.  Oddly, the same news people who are so earnestly documenting our titanic downfall are big admirers of Franklin Roosevelt who memorably said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.  Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”  Interesting.

Watch out! Don’t turn on the news unless you’re prepared for The End!

And we should also make mention of the haters, that subset of humankind who are always on the lookout for an excuse to vent their personal prejudices.  The haters are out there now, taking misguided actions against Chinese people (or anyone who looks Asian to them) in the sick belief that they’re all diabolical saboteurs plotting our destruction through germ warfare.  What can one say to such sickos?  There’s no response more eloquent than Rod Serling’s concluding narrative from “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is…that these things cannot be confined to…The Twilight Zone.”

The search for a scapegoat

Fortunately, most people are responding to COVID-19 with the belief that “we are going to get through this.”  Whether they’re floating through it, partying through it, or just trying to work through it, they are staying calm in the assurance that our country and the world will inevitably turn the corner on all this.  But whatever we’re doing, we should try to do more than merely wait it out or work it out.  We should also try to connect with what this trial has to teach us.  Not just about policies and procedures for the future, but about ourselves.  What does this trial show us about the kind of people we are?  For now, one lesson we can learn is that there are  viruses among us other than COVID.