All of America has been in lockdown. The streets of major cities and small towns have been empty for weeks. Meetings have been held via Skype and Zoom. The Pope was saying private masses and giving virtual, disembodied blessings via television screens in St. Peter's Square. Churches were empty for Easter services. Elbow bumps have replaced hand shakes. Smiles acknowledge, at a distance, that they will have to suffice for embraces.
Cancellations have filled the calendar for months. Hand washing and alcohol wipes have become as much a part of daily routines as cell phones. "Beware everything you touch" is the new mantra.
March 2020 may eventually go down as the month that turned our world on its head, slowed it to a crawl, or, at least made us, more than usual, think about the precariousness of the ordinary and the power of the unseen.
The Coronavirus leapt from a Chinese seafood and poultry market in late 2019 to become a "global health emergency."
Can we use this moment to see beyond the threat as our country begins to reopen?
Trials, we know from our history and sacred texts, can bring clarity and deeper understanding.
The frightening clarity revealed in the United States is that shredding the truth and denigrating scientists and other experts has consequences when crisis strikes.
If the tragedy of this administration's assaults on truth and competence are painfully revealed, also bared is our long descent as a culture into a kind of socialized cruelty.
The roller coaster stock market reaction to the Coronavirus is worrisome to a certain level of American society. At the other end of the spectrum, however, people have entered survival mode in terror of contracting the disease for a host of reasons, not least that getting to a low-wage job each day is essential to putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads.
It is no small irony that in a moment when we most need the assurance and support of community, we are advised to avoid others. We have been able to use this down time to consider - with gratitude - those who labor when there is no crisis - in hidden and unheralded ways - to keep us safe.
Perhaps our brush with uncertainty can also serve as an entryway to solidarity with those who live regularly in uncertain and precarious circumstances. Some of us may have to contend with closed schools, altered worship services, cancelled conferences and vacations, and working from home. Consider those who, even when there is no crisis, live on the edge, in the low-wage sector, without voice and dependent on what business might think is best for them.
At a time when the common good becomes paramount and the only entity large enough to accommodate that good is government, we are left to the bumbling of an administration committed to crude diminishment of institutions and to demeaning the role of government. The contrasts and the deficiencies which might nag around the edges in normal times become glaring in a crisis.
I am no seer.
I cannot see around corners.
No one will ever mistake me for a visionary.
But, I know that, despite the dire predictions we are hearing, our lives will return to normal one day. Our children will return to their classrooms and their playgrounds. Bars and restaurants will fill up again. Our retirement accounts will eventually recover. We will resume our invasion of one another's personal space.
Human nature is an immutable thing.
You say Coronavirus will bring us together in the belated realization that all of humanity is inextricably linked? Yes, we will see some of that. But we will also see more people fighting over rolls of toilet paper and racists attacking people who look Asian. We humans are a complex species, capable of the very best behaviors and also, unfortunately, the very worst.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there were some sweeping prophecies about lasting social changes. Time magazine's Roger Rosenblatt penned a famous essay, declaring an end to what he called "The age of irony": "The good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed or taken seriously," he wrote. "With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes - our columnists and pop culture makers - declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life."
That piece has been much mocked over the past few years since 9/11. Irony, after all, is not a fad. It is a coping strategy, a survival technique. When the most corrupt president in recent American history wins on a promise to "drain the swamp," there is no question that irony is immortal.
As for the pop culture makers - the late-night TV hosts, for example - the irony is more lethal than ever. David Letterman's frivolous "Top Ten" list has long since given way to the biting sensibility of "The Daily Show," and its progeny: "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver," Samantha Bee's "Full Frontal," "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert."
Four years after 9/11, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina pulled back the curtain on an inept federal government's devastating lack of emergency preparedness. After that shameful moment, it was said, everything was going to change - for the better.
"This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina," promised then-president George W. Bush. "We are going to review every action and make necessary changes so that we are better prepared for any challenge of nature, or act of evil men, that would threaten our people."
In 2008, we elected our first black president, an extraordinary achievement for a nation built on slavery. Many of us wanted to believe we had turned the corner on our racist past, even that we had become a post-racial society altogether. Instead, we got the election of Donald Trump, a man who is descended from the racism inherent in the Ku Klux Klan and describes white nationalists as "Very fine people."
A single, momentous event can certainly nudge American culture, but the changes can be subtle and ease as time passes, rather than producing the kind of grand transformations so many are predicting today with phrases like "No more physical classrooms!" and "No more business conferences!" Our behaviors may change dramatically for a time, but our natures will not.
Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, who has written about critical moments in United States history, including Hurricane Katrina, made some predictions on whether the Coronavirus might change us in lasting ways, and if so, how.
He predicts we will become more "sanitation-minded." People will probably continue to stockpile, he said, as "a little bit of survivalist mentality has struck the land."
The fact that the richest country in the world was caught flat-footed on the new Coronavirus, however, is hard to fathom. "We are in the 21st century, and the tech age. It is embarrassing."
"The question I am not sure about," he said, "is whether this is a one-off, 100-year event, or is a wave, due to planetary dislocation of the natural world and the destruction of ecosystems. Ask anybody who studies wildlife biology - you rip down ecosystems and strange viruses will emerge frequently. Plagues will come."
Brinkley is working on a book, Silent Spring Revolution, about presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon and the 1960s environmental movement that led to the creation of Environmental Protection Agency, the clean air and water acts and the cleanup of the Great Lakes and rivers. "The country galvanized for a decade - a blinking moment - and said we have to do better with the Earth."
Whether there will be real, lasting changes from the Coronavirus crisis depends a lot on the coming presidential election, he said. Brinkley hopes that a new president will take office, and that the United States will take on "the big problems" - climate change, pandemics and health care for all.
No matter who wins the election, though, he believes there will be a bipartisan effort to fund Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and perhaps Army Corps of Engineers will turn away from damming rivers toward building hospitals.
"We are not going to be caught short again without masks, gowns and ventilators," Brinkley predicted.
But who knows how long those efforts, and those changes will last?
Memories are very short.
And history often repeats itself.
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