Rod Dreher's Blog, page 153

College In The Pandemic

A friend of mine’s granddaughter, a committed Evangelical Christian, is planning to go to college this fall. Before the pandemic, she had her eyes on several small Evangelical liberal arts schools. Now, she will, with regret, almost certainly end up at one of the colleges in her state. That’s all her family feels that they can afford in these times. When my friend told me about it, I said to her that even if her granddaughter had the money to afford one of those Evangelical colleges, it would be a risky proposition, because there is no telling whether or not those colleges will still be around for the next four years.

People have been wondering what was going to burst the higher education bubble. Now we know.

The New York Times writes this morning:

Across the country, students like Ms. McCarville are rethinking their choices in a world altered by the pandemic. And universities, concerned about the potential for shrinking enrollment and lost revenue, are making a wave of decisions in response that could profoundly alter the landscape of higher education for years to come.

Lucrative spring sports seasons have been canceled, room and board payments have been refunded, and students at some schools are demanding hefty tuition discounts for what they see as a lost spring term. Other revenue sources like study abroad programs and campus bookstores have dried up, and federal research funding is threatened.

Already, colleges have seen their endowments weakened, and worry that fund-raising efforts will founder even as many families need more financial aid. They also expect to lose international students, especially from Asia, because of travel restrictions and concerns about studying abroad. Foreign students, usually paying full tuition, represent a significant revenue source everywhere, from the Ivy League to community colleges.

Some institutions are projecting $100 million losses for the spring, and many are now bracing for an even bigger financial hit in the fall, when some are planning for the possibility of having to continue remote classes.

More:

In mid-March, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the outlook for higher education from stable to negative, predicting that institutions with strong endowments and cash flow, like Harvard or Stanford, would weather the virus, while smaller ones would not.

And:

Ms. McCarville, the student in Phoenix, said the coronavirus had made her more sensitive to price over marquee names, and to the value of being close to her family. Although her dream schools, Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, offered her scholarships, tuition at Arizona State was cheaper, and the overall package was better.

In the past, that might not have mattered to her. But after the coronavirus, it does.

“I would rather go to the least expensive school possible,” Ms. McCarville said, “just so I minimize my debt when I enter the work force, and I’m not in over my head in a very uncertain situation.”

Read the whole thing. 

In my house, I’m concerned about my son going back to LSU in the fall. Will it be safe for anybody to go to class then? He’s been doing online instruction, hastily assembled by the university when the lockdown happened, and let’s just say that it’s … not the fullest expression of the grape, and that we have learned through direct experience that there is no substitute for the classroom. But the university has no control over the pandemic, and there’s only so much it can do to make students, professors, and staff safe.

I cannot even imagine what fall in south Louisiana will be like if there is no LSU football, especially coming off our national championship season. You thought cancelling mass on Sunday was a blow to people here? Just you wait.

More broadly, what kind of LSU will there be after this is over? The university has been eviscerated over the past two decades by budget cuts. Louisiana has a strange state college system in which there are an unusual number of public colleges scattered around the state. We have something like twice the number of state colleges that Florida has, with only a fraction of Florida’s population. The reasonable thing to have done would have been to make the hard decision to close some of these smaller state schools, and concentrate scarce resources in the flagship, LSU in Baton Rouge, and in one or two other, stronger state schools elsewhere (like ULL in Lafayette, and Louisiana Tech in Ruston). But that wasn’t politically possible, because no legislator wants to be the one to tell a town that it’s losing its university. So for a long time, the state has been slow-bleeding the entire system to keep from having to close any of its colleges.

This pandemic is bound to force change. Aside from the pandemic itself, the knock-on effects of murdering Louisiana’s tourism industry (a pillar of the economy), concomitant with the Saudi-Russia oil war, which has sent oil prices into the basement, devastating another pillar of the state’s economy, puts some extremely hard decisions before the legislature and the governor. Worse, the state’s weird constitution has firewalled so many programs from budget cuts that just about the only thing legislators can cut when they need to make up a shortfall is health care and higher education.

Anyway, that’s what it looks like from the point of view of parents of one Louisiana public university student.

I’d like to ask you readers — academics, students, and parents of students — what the higher education during the pandemic situation looks like from where you sit. The academic job market was pretty bad anyway, but now? What justification is there for anybody to plan for an academic career when colleges are going to be closing en masse? What is your college doing to ready itself for what’s coming? What is your student doing? What are you doing?

UPDATE: A college professor friend writes:

We’re only beginning to understand the long-term impacts of the pandemic, and they will primarily express themselves through the economic impact, I believe (the developing world situation, for example, is apocalyptic: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/28/coronavirus-biggest-emerging-markets-crisis-ever/)

This is going to burst the higher ed bubble. Only question is whether it is a big burst or a small one, and what this does to the politics of higher ed. The first question entirely hinges on how things look by the end of the summer. If the pandemic still looms…we’re going to see an extinction event for colleges/universities. Most colleges already had somewhat precarious finances in terms of revenue and endowment, with many being entirely dependent on international students for net revenue. Moreover, there is this quiet load-balancing that goes on in higher ed (see here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/college-admissions-paul-tough.html).

Schools use advanced econometric models to offer financial aid packages priced to produce a certain amount of tuition revenue while keeping the college’s other priorities of diversity in mind. This model pre-supposes a distribution of students by talent and parental income (and therefore ability to pay full-price). But it also pre-supposes the kind of waterfall structure of higher-ed. A few schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton) have the pick of the litter, but are also rich enough to reject plenty of people who can pay full-price – this enables the second tier (Dartmouth, UChicago, Georgetown, Duke, etc.) to make their picks, and so on. The loss of international students and economic downturn suggests many schools are going to set their algorithms for maximum revenue…and there is not enough money for all of higher ed. Expect to see poor financial aid packages and a banner year for admissions if you’re a mediocre white student who can pay full freight. This will still happen if we do go back to school in the fall, it may just be a slower and multi-year process, as this dip leads directly into declining US domestic enrollments for demographic reasons starting around 2024. Many schools have been planning for that, but this is going to be a double whammy.

That leads to the question of public universities. Many state legislatures have already been interesting in cutting or re-shaping higher ed. The pandemic may finally give them the political capital to do so. There is also the question of how this is going to transform university bureaucracies. This could be the thing that turns the tide against administrators…but I’m not sure I’d bet on it. I think there will be some staff cuts, but they seem better placed to preserve their positions than teachers, for the simple reason that there are a lot of ways university administrations can veto or shoot down tenure track hiring, and there is going to be a strong oversupply of desperate academics. It would take regulatory pressure in the other direction to reverse this trend.

There will be lots of other impacts but one “positive” one may be this: an acceleration of folks with PhDs teaching in (usually private) secondary ed. In some specialties this was already the trend, but many folks coming off of PhD programs in the humanities may just decide the job market is so beyond prohibitive that they move straight into teaching in high schools, where they may find they enjoy the experience more anyways. If you’re looking to start a classical school with really top-notch humanities talent, there has never been a better time.

UPDATE.2: Another college professor writes:

My university (public) is exceedingly wealthy, its endowment reaching into the double-digit billions. As far as public institutions go, therefore, we are built to weather even severe economic storms. Yet the dire socio-economic outlook is causing severe unease even here. The administration is dropping hints of unspecified salary cuts for faculty and has informed the university community that it is committed to paying full-time salaries for hourly workers (janitors, maintenance, secretaries, etc.) only through the end of April. There will be a significant reduction in paid hours thereafter since there is no need to retain full staffing when there is little for many to do remotely. Students are simultaneously circulating a petition demanding some amount of refund for this essentially lost semester. As an instructional faculty member, I know my colleagues are doing their level best to instruct under poor conditions. Still, I cannot blame students for wanting a discount on what is, admittedly, a shoddy offering on our part.

For our community, the major concerns are the following: although we must offer courses online for the Spring and Summer terms, a fully digital Fall semester will necessarily result in severe bloodletting. This because many international students and locals will simply refuse to take another online semester and will withdraw temporarily, thus dramatically reducing the tuition income we depend upon for operations. Again, though, I would hardly blame them. Further, we will suffer from reduced state appropriations, especially since this state is already distressed economically. This will be a perfect storm and drive into unemployment or reduced employment a vast number of people in the economic heart of an otherwise troubled area.

Side note: I feel badly for our student workers, several of whom I employ. I must release them on April 30 (by order of my superiors) yet they depend upon the income they earn to pay rent, buy groceries, etc. (only needy students tend to take the sort of dull research-assistantships I offer).

I say all this because there has been some crowing on the front page of TAC about the coming collapse of the whole absurd edifice of contemporary academia. Believe me, no one will be happier than I if we have to cut the salaries or the positions of many of our university’s diversity apparatchiks. They, however, are generally very well compensated and will either ride out the storm or simply return to well remunerated faculty positions. But what about an untenured assistant professor like me, with a young family, in a department the administration already regards as double the size it ought to be? I’m in the crosshairs. What about untenured lecturers, who in our department do a significant amount of extremely important teaching? What about our small cadre of underpaid but highly dedicated office workers who certainly don’t pull down $400K per year to “promote inclusion” but rather make sure our department keeps running? All of these folks will be the first to feel the pain of austerity measures, the diversicrats the last (and remember, they have significant financial resources to cushion their fall). The decimation of a university like this will also take a massive number of non-university people down with it, i.e the restaurant workers, hoteliers, and all manner of local businesses that serve the university community. So maybe let’s remind TAC readers not get too excited about the academic apocalypse just yet. Those who might, to the conservative mind, “have it coming” are those most ready and able to endure.

UPDATE.3: Another reader:

I saw the thing about the Higher Ed bubble bursting (or as I call it, Higher Ed Inc.) and it has been a surreal experience. I knew for years that colleges were on an unsustainable path with constantly rising tuition and empirically-demonstrated deterioration of quality. Major universities such as the one I am affiliated with receive feedback from the various industries who hire our graduates and I can tell you that they complain constantly about our graduates (at a major public Tier 1 Research University) not being capable of writing a coherent paragraph nor having much in the way of reading comprehension. The industries I am thinking of are not what you would call ‘white collar’ either. It is one thing if a major publisher in New York criticizes the reading comprehension ability of your alums and doesn’t want to hire them, but it is another thing when, say, Dow Chemical thinks your university needs a center for college kids who can’t read good.

Colleges are doing a terrible, terrible job at their primary function–educating citizens–and are becoming more and more expensive. Its a racket that produces nothing but credentialing services–that low income and even middle class students go into debt for. College finances are a joke, using debt to finance frivolous building projects, constantly raising tuition, cutting tenure lines, and paying worthless administrators exorbitant salaries. At a major university, your deans are making between 200-450k. Easily, And there are way more deans now than in the past. There are Associate Deans, Assistant Deans, (Assistant to the Dean

Pandemic Diaries 28

How about that! Nora just brought that loaf of homemade bread straight from the oven. It’s still warm. She said, “Knowing how to make bread gives me superpowers.” It does: the power to make people insanely happy.

I was going to have to illustrate tonight’s Pandemic Diaries post with this miserable image of my late Lenten lunch: black beans and cauliflower rice. I was planning to say that when Jesus descends into death to harrow Hell, he is going to fling this glop at the Devil:

 

Honestly, it tastes good — but I’ve had so much of it these past few weeks, and am ready for grilled meats again.

No news here today, as ever. It was a surprisingly cool day. There was mononucleotic slumber in it. I learned that our dog likes to chew on stale chunks of defrosted rye bread, and to bury some chunks in the back yard. Nora baked bread. I’m going to dress my slice with apricot preserves given to me by the Slovak nuns who made them. There shall be rejoicing. Doug Wilson said that even as we suffer deprivation, we should be thanking God for the small things. He’s right about that, so I thank God for homemade bread, apricot preserves, sweet Slovak sisters, and a daughter whose superpower is bread-baking.

Wait, I wish to amend that statement. Here is the best thing that happened to me today. After writing those paragraphs, I checked Pandemic Diaries e-mail, and found this from a reader in Baton Rouge. It wasn’t submitted at a Pandemic Diary, but it was the brightest spot in my day, so here it is:

We exchanged emails about a month ago after I thanked you for helping me prepare for the coronavirus pandemic.

I’m sorry that you’re having to deal with the Epstein Barr flareup on top of everything else going on right now and am just checking in to see if there’s anything I can do for you or your family. I don’t get out and have been ordering my groceries online, but I’ve decided to venture out to Trader Joe’s in the morning (with mask and gloves) for their “senior” hours between nine and ten and will be happy to pick up something and drop it off at your door.

I’m not a health care professional, but I’m trying to serve Christ in the best ways I can, so I’ve been cooking and baking and will be happy to bring you anything you need.

I hope that you start to feel better soon.

Isn’t that great? I told her that we’re fine over here, but the offer itself was a gift greater than anything they sell at the grocery store.

From Los Angeles:

As I’ve mentioned before, my wife and I are regulars at a Pakistani market not too far from our home. (They just have a genuinely good selection of bread, tea, and spices, and Halal cuts of meat tend to be better than what you get at your average supermarket. Plus, they carry goat, a real weakness of mine.) During this pandemic, they’ve also been extremely prepared and well run, and as a result, have not suffered the shortages we’ve seen at big chain supermarkets.

As stores are limiting how many people can enter at once, in order to encourage social distancing, my wife has been going solo to the markets where we used to like to go shopping together. This past week, the Pakistani market had surgical masks available for purchase, a new development, but were limiting one per customer. When my wife approached the counter to pay for our groceries, the man behind the counter said, “Normally you are two!”, and handed her a second mask, free of charge, so I could have one, too.

It’s strange when something as simple as a small piece of cloth can make one feel moved, can remind us of our common humanity, and make one feel like they’re part of a true community, but these are strange times, are they not?

From Pennsylvania:

Here in our Pennsylvania diocese, Catholic churches are still open several hours each day for private prayer. My husband and I took advantage of this frequently during lent. We made plans to visit church on Easter morning. I was regretting that we wouldn’t be singing our favorite Easter hymns in church this year. Then it occurred to me that we could just sing them anyway when we visited, and hopefully anyone else in church at the same time wouldn’t mind, and might even want to join us.   As holy week went on, our plan to sing “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” and the beautiful chant “Vicitmae Paschali Laudes” snowballed into a mini-service that included the three scripture readings of Easter morning mass, the Creed, and Prayer of the Faithful, the Lord’s Prayer, and the spiritual communion prayer that Catholics have become very familiar with during this crisis.

So that’s what we did. There were about twenty other people in church when we got there. (our big old gothic church is cavernous–social distancing is easy)  I announced what we were going to do, and told everyone where to find things in the missal if they wished to follow along. Well, you know that Catholics don’t have a reputation for enthusiastic congregational singing, but this little group really belted  out that first hymn.   I asked a friend who was there to do the readings, and it was a joy to hear them proclaimed out loud in our own church again.  Same with the other prayers. The whole thing took less than 20 minutes, but as we walked away to the parking lot, several people called out behind me how much they appreciated it–that now it felt a little more like Easter.   I don’t pretend for a second that this is anywhere near as good as the mass. But if fulfills a need we have to raise our voices in prayer and song in our churches. So I’d like to suggest that anyone whose Christian tradition is liturgical–and whose churches are not locked up–give it a try. Pray and sing out loud in your church with some elements of your church’s liturgical service.  It feels wonderful.

From Washington state:

I’m writing from Western Washington, not far from Seattle. In terms of the pandemic itself, things seem to be at least no longer getting worse. Infections, and possibly deaths as well, are not really increasing, but  not decreasing either. We seem to have a plateau rather than an apex, like NYC, but much much lower volume. Our medical system is not past capacity as far as I know. In fact, we’ve sent away an Army field hospital that had no patients so other states can have it. I don’t like Governor Inslee, but I think he’s done a fine job in the crisis. We shut down early because we were the epicenter for a while, and now the curve may be about to flatten.

I’m 24, but also in a high-risk group. I have Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy, so already have a bad heart and bad lungs. I’d have a pretty good chance of death if I came down with bad symptoms. I live at home with my parents, who both still have jobs: Dad works in the grocery business and Mom at the elementary school and is working from home. Dad does very well with precautions, sanitizing, changing clothes, face mask at work. So we’re free to request wanted groceries on a whim, since he’s at different stores every day already. Sister’s home from college taking classes online. She’s a softball player and was crushed when the season was canceled. I was unemployed already before all this so no change there. As of yesterday, I had not left the house in a month. I’m a homebody anyway, but it’s starting to get to me. It’s hard to maintain a decent sleep schedule.

I’m a Catholic convert. As hard as it is to be away from the Mass and the Eucharist, I agree that the cancellation of public Masses is a necessary step to save lives. I watch an online Mass every Sunday. I approached all this as Lenten penance and a call to silence and repentance, our homes our monastic cells. This made the anticipation of Easter even more intense. I was abuzz with excitement during the Vigil during the readings waiting for the Gloria to be sung at last and the dark church to fill with light. Even this crisis is nothing in the face of the Resurrection. Now Easter is a strange mix of joyful penance and penitential joy. I hope we can carry this silence and rest in God forward, even beyond this crisis; and have a new appreciation, reverence, and awe for the Mass and the Eucharist. I just wish more parishes were finding creative ways to offer Confession. I’m also outraged at hearing about priests being unable to administer Last Rites, which is terrifying for me when I consider the chance I contract COVID. In terms of some Catholics’ anger towards Bishops, I don’t like it one bit. Obedience applies to decisions one likes AND doesn’t like. I just think about it like “above my pay grade. Nothing I can do and it doesn’t matter whether I like it or not.” And the cancellation takes a weight off of those who would struggle in making the decision of whether it would be right to stay home, myself included. Sometimes obedience offers its own consolations.

Thanks for doing these Pandemic Diaries. Also, just want to say that I love your blog and your approach to it. I enjoy the way you use it as a place to think through things, allowing us to see it in real time. I know this is long but it was quite cathartic to write it all out.

Also: I would appreciate if you would offer a prayer for my grandfather who just went into emergency surgery for a perforated colon. I will pray for you and your family and all your intentions.

Thank you!

He is risen! God bless!

From Jamaica, an earlier diarist sends this update:

I hope you and your readers are interested in an update on the situation in Jamaica. As of April 14, we have 73 cases and 4 deaths (on March 21 we had 19 cases, 1 death – Pandemic Diaries #6).  The government is providing grants to many: the equivalent of US$130.00 per month for April, May and June if you earn less than US$ 11,000 per annum (which is most folks). It’s not enough, of course…

Social distancing is just not really an option for most people in a poor country; extensive contact tracing is an attempt to assert some control over the situation and keep numbers of the infected as low as possible. The country is still closed – hotels are empty, no cruise ships arrive…the estimate is roughly 250,000 jobs lost in the tourism sector alone (in a national working age population of just about 1.7 million).

With talk of a global depression, Jamaica is screwed – and I worry about the potential for social unrest as well as the complete loss of all the developmental gains made since Independence.

In the Caribbean generally there are 6071 cases confirmed (April 13, 2020); the Dom Rep, Cuba and Puerto Rico account for 4790 of the cases.

Meanwhile, the US is not winning friends and influencing people in the region…

Cuba: US embargo blocks coronavirus aid shipment from Asia

AP 14:27 EDT, 3 April 2020

https://apnews.com/2858fbaa2dd5460fa2988b888fc53748

At least 5 countries — including a small Caribbean island — are accusing the US of blocking or taking medical equipment they need to fight the coronavirus

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-us-accused-of-diverting-medical-equipment-from-countries-2020-4

US seizes medical supplies bound for Cayman (4/8/2020)

https://caymannewsservice.com/2020/04/us-seizes-medical-supplies-bound-for-cayman/

At the same time, the Caribbean and Latin America is said to be receiving assistance from Jack Ma and the Alibaba Foundation (in China). Whether this turns out to be minimal help or not, the optics look bad. In the case of Cayman we are talking about 8 ventilators and 50,000 face masks – bought and paid for – which would have no real impact on the supply of equipment for domestic US use.

Stay safe and well.

From Cape Ann, Massachusetts:

We live on the water, our quiet street being an understandably popular walking and jogging route.  I simply cannot get accustomed to the sight of an increasing number of folks wearing masks on their walks, especially when the wind is blowing, as it often is.  I keep telling my wife that I await with dread Wear Yellow Days, when Gov. Charlie Baker will issue an edict dictating which days of the week the citizenry must wear yellow.  Based on what I’m seeing today, the Gov. will have little trouble getting his way.  The coronavirus has given me far greater empathy for the “idiosyncratic” souls who live off the grid on the Idaho panhandle.

From Kansas:

I wanted to drop you another note for your pandemic diaries. It might not fit-in with your greater view of things, but what my wife and I experience is certainly part of the mosaic of stories.

We are both millennials working in education. My wife is a teacher. She is recording lessons and uploading them via Google classroom. Kids still have to submit assignments that are graded, and they have

to check-in with their teachers on a regular basis. Initially therewas concern about whether all kids would have internet access, but the schools really moved heaven and earth to get this done. For all the

faults of education in this country (and there are many) they are lavishly equipped with technology relative to what I had in the 1990s and early 2000s.

I work in administration. Our central office is closed, and only one or two people are allowed in at a time to check the mail and fax machines. I read somewhere that this experience makes people realize

and appreciate how much work can be done from home. This is especially true for people who work in areas like finance, although I wonder about the integrity of our networks and what hackers might do.

We both wonder what happens when schools open back up. At a minimum, kids will have five months of no real structure. Given we already had serious student behavior issues, I’m genuinely scared. We’ve had at least 30 years of parents outsourcing much of their role to teachers.

The public schools have actually started a hotline to advise parents how to handle their kids’ behavior. At first I was stunned, but then it made sense. Schools have been raising kids for a while, not parents. One silver lining to this pandemic is it forces parents to do their jobs again, and it’s kind of like the shock therapy that happened when Eastern Europe switched to free markets in the 1980s.

We used to go to church every Sunday morning and spend time with our Boomer-aged family members afterwards. No more. All of them are in their late-60s/early-70s and we take social distancing seriously. We’ve certainly lost something by socially isolating ourselves, however. Social media and streaming video and even a good book–these are all an ersatz substitute compared to genuine community.

Here’s where I start to complain:

My grandfather is in his 90s and in a nursing home. I send him postcards, and my mom talks to him once or twice a day. Residents are kept in their rooms 24 hours and their food is brought to them. It’s literally a more-comfortably solitary confinement, but then I see where 42 residents in a Virginia nursing home died and see what the alternative is. It’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative, but

it’s not something you would choose in normal times.

Both of my parents have been laid off. They lost their house in the Great Recession and have rented ever since. They are Boomers with very little savings. We have talked about them moving in with our family before, but it was within the parameters of them having serious health problems. Now that their jobs have disappeared it’s a closer reality.

My brother works overseas in a poorer country. He is supposed to come home in May, but the government suspended all international air travel and has the army patrolling the streets. He works online and things could be much worse, but it’s still not the kind of thing you want a family member in.

My wife and I are lucky Millennials in that we have substantial savings, and we also own our own home. I’m lucky to complain about not being able to fly to the beach this summer.

But our Millennial neighbors aren’t as lucky: the sales rep across the street with a wife and two little kids got laid off. His wife works at a hospital, and during this time he can stay home with the kids

while she works insane shifts. He says he wanted to switch careers anyway, yet a career switch isn’t something hardly anyone wants…. The neighbor who rents a duplex behind us is a bartender; her job is gone.Same for another neighbor who worked in aerospace and depended on the Boeing 737 for his work.

Did you see this article from the Atlantic about Millennials and the pandemic? Here’s your money quote:

“…Millennials are, for now, disproportionate holders of the kind of positions disappearing the fastest: This is a jobs crisis of the young, the diverse, and the contingent, meaning disproportionately of

the Millennials. They make up a majority of bartenders, half of restaurant workers, and a large share of retail workers. They are also heavily dependent on gig and contract work, which is evaporating as

the consumer economy grinds to a halt. It’s a cruel economic version of that old Catskill resort joke: These are terrible jobs, and now all the young people holding them are getting fired.”

What we’re seeing now is social contract theory writ large. It really is a hell of an ask: after getting saddled with debt, giving up on the career of your dreams, putting home ownership and having a family in a hard-to-reach position…then on top of that taking away the menial jobs you got out of it…well, in other times that was a recipe for violence.

Ross Douthat was right in that social media allows us to play-act 1968 (or 1917, or 1793). I wonder how long that lasts, though.

From London:

The light is clearer, the birdsong and the silences more intense, but in some sense much remains the same here in London: trees, clouds, river. Are we returning to an elemental state or does this point to an awareness that the fundamental things that underlie the goodness of our lives are constant?

Much speculation on economic, political and institutional futures.Interesting and necessary but also, perhaps, a distraction. Social solidarity or a surveillance state? Ultimately, I marvel at the human spirit that imagines continuity and a ‘north of the future’. But another part of me-a deeper part?- dimly recognises all the interruptions that have gone up to make my life. Isn’t life itself this broken circle, a song of joy and sorrow?

So, to think too much about the future seems both impossible and something of a false consolation. The past, too. February nostalgia, a Bardo-like hankering for the simple pleasures we once enjoyed but took for granted: coffee, scrambled eggs, conversation…

For me this has been a time to reflect on what’s really important in my life (that makes it sound too self-referential for in reality there is no life without others). If we are what we love, then who am I?

I zig-zag up the street, trying to avoid people. If someone gives me way I nod my head in an exaggerated fashion or, in an old eastern gesture that people in London are calling ‘the Turkish, I move my hand to my heart in gratitude. Maybe something of the old gestures will remain or maybe we’ll learn to recognise smiles by the sparkling of someone’s eyes.

So, in the time that remains it seems important to not think too much about the future or the past but, instead, about what Rosenzweig called ‘the demands of the day’. Time is given to us and is not ours. If that was *truly* believed, I think to myself, there would be less anxiety.

Personally speaking, I’m not there. But I am grateful for all the beauty, friendship and love that have come my way (“Which of my favours will you deny?”, asks God in the Qur’an). All the striving of the ego seem hollow and shallow- more so than usual. I’m haunted by what Merton once wrote: “I want to be somebody that nobody knows”.

When everything appears to be in lockdown it is important to recall, as Rumi said, that freedom is the ability to thank the Almighty for his Beneficence. Now, right now, more so than ever.

From Kirkland, Washington:

I’m writing from Kirkland, Washington, specifically zip code 98034. The assisted living center that infamously kicked off the epidemic in my state is about a mile away. We have a higher mortality rate in my zip code (58.8 per 100,000) than Italy (33.86 per 100,000). That said, people here are of two minds. There are those who follow the guidelines, venturing out infrequently for supplies, taking the sunshine in their own backyards, keeping in touch with their loved ones electronically, etc. Then there are those who are treating our state’s stay home order like an extended snow day. As soon as the earth began to tilt toward summer and the sun returned they flocked to the parks and trails, even if that meant parking along the highway because the lots were closed or jostling for space on bike paths overcrowded with the like minded. Judging from the ratio of mask wearing faces to naked ones in the grocery stores, the unserious minds are winning out. Still, our state has supposedly “flattened the curve”, I guess time will tell.

Speaking of minds, I personally am having a hard time wrapping my own around the situation. My life has not changed much, as I am a homebody, my children are grown, and my shopping habits have not been affected at all. Yet, somehow everything has changed. It’s like having a dream that seems benign but you later realize is really a nightmare. I feel in my bones that everything is different now, but can’t point to anything tangible. I dread the effects of not only the virus, but the shutdown itself. So much misery yet my own life continues unchanged except for wiping down door knobs and car door handles with the wipes I made from Everclear and baby wipes and spraying down packages with the bleach solution made from the CDC website instructions. It’s all so dreary and banal.

So I sew masks. I try unsuccessfully to read books to enrich the part of my mind that isn’t obsessing over the uncertain future. I pray. I read the Bible. I attend virtual church. I read an editorial in the newspaper about how we could be seen to be experiencing a global Lent. I think maybe that’s true. We’re simplifying, doing without, focussing on what’s vital. My faith is strengthening.

On Easter Sunday my daughter and I watched the mass from our church on YouTube. I did my hair and makeup and dressed in the clothes I would have worn to actual church. Our Priest is brilliant and an excellent homilist. He’s an ex-professor of history who studied with that really famous homilist guy, can’t remember his name (Googled it – it’s Bishop Barron). Rod, you may be interested to know that his homily was about the Benedictines in Norcia. I can’t really do it justice here now, but basically he said that we can look at this virus as God’s way of tearing things down, just as he tore down that beautiful church in Norcia, so we can focus on what is really important. Apparently the leader of those Benedictines considered the destruction of the church something of a blessing because it enabled them to return to their initial mission, something that had been hampered by caring for the church itself and its location in the middle of a bustling town. Because they were forced to move to tents in a rural location they were better able to focus on a simple life of prayer and devotion.

And that’s true. This virus is tearing things down, our conceits most of all. We think because we are young, or rich, or smart, or careful or whatever, it won’t affect us, it can’t happen to us, but it can. There isn’t really an escape because even if we won’t die from it someone we love might. Nothing can save us from it. True, nothing can, but does that matter? As Saint Augustine said, “in the daily casualties of life every man is, as it were, threatened with numberless deaths, so long as it remains uncertain which of them is his fate, I would ask whether it is not better to suffer one and die, than to live in fear of all?”

We must soldier on, but the good news is that He has risen! There is no need to live in fear.

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Here’s Why We Social-Distance

The New York Times has a pretty convincing interactive feature illustrating why we need to do social distancing. It shows how far droplets of virus-infected spittle travel from a cough or a sneeze. This is one of those things that once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. But you need to see it.

I cannot believe that we ever took seriously WHO’s directive that wearing masks is not especially effective.

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Deplatforming Douglas Wilson

Readers who have been with this blog for a while may recall a dust-up I had with Pastor Douglas Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, over the way he and his church handled an instance of sexual misconduct and abuse. It is more than fair to say that Wilson’s bomb-throwing Calvinism is not my jam. In fact, that’s a massive understatement. But I’ve got to stand up for Wilson and his church’s associate pastor, Toby Sumpter, in a matter of great importance to all religious people, both conservative and progressive, and to anybody who stands far outside the mainstream making radical critiques.

Here’s the story:

With coronavirus restrictions forcing the closure of church gatherings worldwide, and authorities threatening to punish those who continue to attend public worship, the Christian church has become more dependent on the internet than ever.

Churches are now employing popular social media and video sharing platforms to conduct their services and broadcast their sermons. But how will the tech giants and social media outlets respond, especially considering their tendency to censor unapproved messages?

Well, it would appear straight-up banning churches isn’t off the table for some platforms, as a church in Moscow, Idaho discovered last week.

On Friday, Google suspended Christ Church’s app from the Google Play store after accusing the pastors of a lack of sensitivity and/or capitalizing on the current coronavirus pandemic.

The church received a notice from the platform, stating: “We don’t allow apps that lack reasonable sensitivity towards or capitalize on a natural disaster, atrocity, conflict, death, or other tragic event.

“Your app has been suspended and removed due to this policy issue,” the notice added.

Here’s what the church posted on Twitter in response:

.@GooglePlay suspended our app today.

We presume they’re talking about Pastor @douglaswils‘ short lessons on responding faithfully to the COVID-19 crisis. Or maybe Pastor @TJSumpter‘s sermon calling God’s people to humble repentance.

Regardless – What gives, @Google? pic.twitter.com/oco0DDSKnW

— Christ Church (@Christ_Kirk) April 10, 2020

The story I link to above lists three sermons — two by Wilson, and one by Sumpter — as possibly at fault. I don’t have time to listen to all three, but I did spend over an hour listening to the Sumpter one, and the second Wilson one, and taking notes.

Here’s the Sumpter sermon, titled, “A Message On Plagues”:

The sermon is a standard one for traditional Christianity. Preaching on verses from the Old Testament book of Joel, Sumpter says that Christians should regard the coronavirus as a call to repentance. He says that Joel tells us that the greatest punishment of this plague is that God’s people are not allowed to gather for worship (Sumpter is preaching to a congregation watching by livestream). He’s not calling on Christians to defy the authorities, but is saying that God is sending us a message about the way we were living prior to the plague.

The fact that we are all stuck at home, and not able to gather for worship, is a sign of God’s judgment “because we have not used the gifts of God to praise Him.”

“Does it break your heart that you can’t worship God, that you can’t gather with his people — or not?” asks Sumpter. He adds that this plague is a test of faith. God is testing us to see if we will praise him in hard times as well as in good.

He says if you’re not giving God thanks for all He has given us — mac and cheese, paper towels — then you are failing. He’s asking us if we will praise him even in times of suffering.

Like I said, this is standard Christianity. A church that does not read this plague as a call to repentance is a church that doesn’t know how to read the Bible. This isn’t a Calvinism thing; this is straightforward Christianity.

As I said, I listened to one of the two Wilson sermons. Doug Wilson is the kind of pastor who preaches and writes as if he believes that pugnacity is next to godliness. He is a powerful rhetorician, and can be quite funny — but humility is not his strong suit. One his blog, which is how I know his work, he comes across as someone who is more interested in owning the libs heretics than in converting hearts and minds. I tell you this up front to let you know that I am the sort of Christian who, though a conservative, is not favorably disposed to listen to a message from Doug Wilson.

Here is the sermon I listened to. It’s from late March:



This sermon has a lot more pepper than Sumpter’s, and is probably what triggered Google. Still, it is a standard message in traditional Christianity. Wilson’s basic argument is that the plague is a call to repentance — and he warns that we don’t want to acknowledge that. He points out that in the Exodus story, the plagues God sent against Egypt to compel Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go only hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Wilson says that all of us should be looking into our own hearts now, to root out the corruption we find there. And part of that corruption is idolatry.

“We need to stop having faith in the things we once thought were so secure,” Wilson says. “God is shaking everything so that we would have faith in Him.”

How is that not true? It’s certainly true — and all of us need to hear that.

So what probably got Wilson in trouble? In this sermon, he condemns, and condemns in strong language, abortion and gay marriage as sins that require repentance. Now, I wish he had listed sins that are more likely to be committed by people in Moscow, Idaho, and in the rest of Red America. God is no doubt angry over the widespread use of pornography in our country. Think of all the pridefulness, the selfishness, the hardness of heart towards our neighbor — all things that you find in Red America too. Think of all the disordered heterosexual lust. And the warmaking this country has fostered on innocent people. I don’t disagree with Wilson about abortion and homosexuality, and I am sure that he would agree with me about these other things, or most of these things, being sinful. I wish, though, that he would have called out us conservatives too. This is not a time for us to fall prey to self-righteousness.

Here’s where I think Wilson’s sermon was radical, in a powerful and prophetic way. Toward the end, after talking about hardness of heart, he mentions that the Japanese did not surrender after seeing one of their cities (Hiroshima) vaporized. It took a second city being obliterated (Nagasaki) before they gave up. Wilson says that we Christians ought not to be praying for relief from the plague, but rather, “We should be asking God to do what it takes” to bring us to repentance.

“Don’t pray that God will let up. Don’t pray that God will lighten up,” he says. “Pray that God will press through and do what it takes to get us to sign the surrender papers.”

He goes on to say that all of this suffering will have been for nothing if we only return to how we were living before. If the churches are full at Easter, he says (remember, this sermon was given before the holy day), that will be a disaster. If people are “going to church for the same reason they’re going to Costco,” then “we’re simply waiting for Nagasaki.”

He goes on to say that “if breaking the United States of America, in her pride and insolence” is the way to get rid of gay marriage, then Christians should welcome it. Says Wilson, of abortion, “I would rather live in a poor broken country that didn’t kill babies than in a rich, insolent once that does.”

That’s a great line. He also says that the problem is not that our elected representatives fail to represent us. “The problem is they represent us well,” he says. “And that should be part of our repentance.”

Now look: you can fault Wilson for focusing on this sermon on gay marriage and abortion, or you can fault him (as I do) for focusing on these sins and not naming others that strike closer to home among his congregation, and those outside his congregation who look to him for leadership. But the idea that America has to repent is powerful and true. Had a progressive pastor spoken of the sins of greed and violence, for example, it would have been just as true, and just as necessary to hear — though it would also have been preferable had that progressive pastor spoken to the sins that are closer to the hearts and lives of progressive people, and not just called out those who are unlike his congregation.

My point is this: whatever my conflicts, theological and otherwise, with Doug Wilson and his circle, I profited from hearing these sermons. I was challenged by them, in a good way. Did I agree 100 percent with them? No I did not. Do I believe that these sermons ought to be freely available on Google’s platform for people to hear? Absolutely.

We don’t know precisely why Google booted Wilson’s church’s app, but listening to Wilson’s sermon (more than Sumpter’s), it’s not hard to guess why. So, even though it probably makes him cringe to have Rod Dreher stand up for him, and believe me, it makes Rod Dreher cringe to do it … I’m going to stand up for him.

First, if Google really did boot Christ Church over Wilson’s comments connecting abortion and gay marriage to the judgment of God, then they may well kick off the platform any number of Christian churches for holding those views. Few Christian churches are led by a pastor who is as combative as Doug Wilson, but if Doug Wilson has lost his platform over this, no traditional Christian church is safe.

This, by the way, is not the state’s doing; it’s Google’s, which, as a private company, has a right to decide who it wants on its platform. But dissident Christians, and political dissidents of all kinds, should be aware that this is an incredible amount of power to wield. Those who control access to Internet platforms control what can and can’t be said on there.

Which leads me to my second point, one meant not only for right-of-center Christians. We should want to protect unpopular speakers and unpopular speech in the public square. It hardly needs saying that people in the Bay Area who censor Google’s platform are bound to be more eager to silence right-wing radicals than left-wing radicals. But what if those right-wing radicals happen to say something true and important? Something that only they can see, and say? (The same is true of left-wing radicals.) It is true that a time of national crisis does call on us to be more prudent about what we say, and it certainly gives the state more power to control what is said in the public square. There’s no getting around that. To cite an extreme example, Britain in World War II could not have allowed Nazi propagandists to operate freely. Speech that is a direct threat to public safety and order may legitimately be suppressed.

But this is not that! Is this offensive speech? To many, yes. Doug Wilson has a special gift for making enemies, and he can be incredibly obnoxious. But at the risk of sounding like a fundamentalist liberal, what makes America great is that we have a political order that protects offensive speech. This is not pornography. This is theological, and maybe political, discourse. You don’t have to like it to defend its right to exist, and to be heard.

Again, a time of national crisis is a time when we need to protect the contrarians and the wild-eyed prophets more than ever. In 1918, the US Government threw the socialist Eugene V. Debs into prison on sedition charges for a speech he gave opposing military conscription. It was wrong of the state to treat Debs that way. That’s not exactly the same thing as privately-owned Google deplatforming a bunch of hardcore Calvinists in Idaho, but you see the parallel. Google is using this crisis to exercise its immense power to silence voices it doesn’t like.

What constitutes “reasonable sensitivity”? If you only follow a Bay Area secularist’s idea of “reasonable sensitivity,” then you’d better throw out the entire Bible, which is not a warm and fuzzy self-help book. What does it mean to “capitalize on a natural disaster [or] tragic event”? Is drawing conclusions, even conclusions that offend some, the same as capitalizing? What if a speaker said that the pandemic crisis reveals the need for a communist revolution — would that violate Google’s standards?

It could be that Google deplatformed Team Wilson for reasons that are not apparent in these two sermons. But if these sermons are the cause of Google’s act, then I read it as a clear warning to traditional Christians about how Big Tech is going to treat us in the future. Don’t think for one second that disapproving of Doug Wilson and his radical church’s teachings is going to protect you, either.

UPDATE: Guys! I am not defending Doug Wilson’s teaching or his behavior as leader of the Kirk. As I said at the top of this post, I got into a big online argument with him a few years ago when I criticized him for the way he handled sexual abuse within his community. I am only defending here his right to be heard, and in so doing, point out that even someone with whom I strongly disagree on many things can teach me something.

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No Way Out Of New Depression

To no one’s surprise:

The International Monetary Fund issued a stark warning about economic damage from the coronavirus, saying on Tuesday that the global economy faces its worst downturn since the Great Depression as shuttered factories, quarantines and national lockdowns cause economic output around the world to collapse.

The grim forecast underscored the magnitude of the economic shock that the pandemic has inflicted on both advanced and developing economies and the daunting task that policymakers face in containing the fallout. With countries already hoarding medical supplies and international travel curtailed, the I.M.F. warned that the crisis threatens to reverse decades of gains from globalization.

In its World Economic Outlook, the I.M.F. projected that the global economy will contract by 3 percent in 2020, an extraordinary reversal from earlier this year, when the fund forecast that the world economy would outpace 2019 and grow by 3.3 percent.

This year’s fall in output would be far more severe than the last recession, when the world economy contracted by less than 1 percent between 2008 and 2009. A 3 percent decline in global output would be the worst since the Great Depression, the I.M.F. said.

How could it be otherwise? There is scarcely any commerce anywhere.

Politically, this is almost certainly unsustainable. The problem is, if everybody goes back to work, then more people get sick and die. The virus doesn’t recognize that we’re fed up with lockdown, and want it to give us all a time out so we can recover economically. This is the thing that drives me the craziest about virus denialists and minimizers: they act like we can make the monster go away if we deny by act of will that it is what it is. This works for children who think there’s a monster under their bed — because there are not monsters under their bed. There actually is a deadly virus moving among us. It is spread by close personal contact. That is a scientific fact. All the magical thinking in the world won’t change it.

I learned last night that a close family friend has been tested for the virus. She’s really, really sick, with all the symptoms. I have to think that a lot of people who are so het up on denying that this is a big deal must not know anybody who has suffered from coronavirus. It’s horrible.

There was a sharp, clear, helpful debate in the Catholic Herald last week about the economy and the virus, between Helen Andrews and Pascal-Emanuel Gobry, both conservatives. Here’s a link to it. Excerpts:

[PEG:] As I write, the French government is requisitioning refrigerated food storage warehouses to use as morgues. Spain is storing bodies in ice-skating rinks. Before it went into lockdown, Iran dug mass graves for virus victims so big they could be seen from space.

I note this not to be macabre or to play on emotions, but because when quarantine skeptics question the numbers (and they are imperfect), my instinctive response is a version of Dr Johnson’s “I refute it thus.” Who knows if people are dying at a higher rate than in past years? Well, have you looked at all the overflowing morgues?

That said, the numbers do tell a very clear story. If, as you suggest, we look at overall deaths, the conclusion is that we are almost certainly undercounting coronavirus deaths rather than overcounting them, since people also die without being tested. This is true in Spain, Italy, and France. In Northern Italy, excess mortality is up to twice the official virus death toll. Now, you might say, aren’t figures less bad in the rest of Italy? Yes –because they went into lockdown.

Then there is the issue of ICU beds. Coronavirus is undoubtedly killing a lot more people than the flu, but it’s giving many times more people pneumonia of the kind that requires intensive care to survive – hence the notorious “flatten the curve” strategy. People have drowned in their own mucus awaiting treatment in Madrid’s most modern hospitals. Italy and Spain have already implemented battlefield triage rules. ICUs in Paris have been running at occupancy rates hovering around 200%, despite the Air Force evacuating people around the clock to less-affected regions; in hardest-hit Vosges, the number is a staggering 425% (and this is weeks into lockdown). This is very, very real.

A pandemic will cause economic mayhem in any world, but there is simply no doubt in my mind that a laissez-faire approach causes an unacceptable risk of collapse of the health care system and of avoidable mass casualties. I spent February raging at Macron’s establishmentarian pusillanimity in the face of an insidious foreign threat, at establishment media saying “It’s only the flu and if you disagree you’re a racist,” but at least this sort of liberal deathwish I understand. I wish I could understand that of my fellow conservatives, particularly those who, as I know you do, care more about the common good than economic figures or libertarian shibboleths.

Helen Andrews answers:

You can’t credit the lockdown with reducing the figures for at least two weeks, given the incubation period of the virus. In that interim in Italy, before the benefits of their lockdown could possibly have been felt, death totals were still comparable to 2016-17. Things were bad, but not unprecedentedly bad.

Unprecedentedly bad is 6.6 million people filing for unemployment in a single week in the United States. The week before it was 3.3 million. The previous record was 695,000. Don’t expect the new record to last for long.

Do you know what 30 per cent unemployment looks like? I’m terrified we are going to find out. Restaurants and retail shops are just the beginning. Small businesses of all kinds are dying, and they won’t all spring back to life when the lockdown ends. I’m staggered by people who think the government can treat the economy like a computer on the fritz: unplug it and plug it back in again. It doesn’t work like that.

And most of the people whose lives we are ruining are those to whom the coronavirus poses virtually no threat at all. Unlike the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed the young and healthy by the millions, this is a disease that, everywhere it has struck, has killed almost exclusively the very old and already seriously ill.

One friend who got laid off is pregnant. She needed these next few months of work to save up a little fund for cribs and strollers. She would qualify for unemployment benefits if she could get them on the phone, but of course the lines are jammed. I don’t know what will happen to her savings now. Probably go to her landlord.

The number of coronavirus deaths in DC stands at 12. More than a month ago, we had multiple confirmed cases wandering around CPAC and AIPAC (never mind the acronyms, two of the biggest conferences in town), infecting, one would have thought, dozens if not hundreds of people in those enclosed conference spaces, who then would have infected thousands more in the weeks before the city shut down. The horrible crisis for which we are putting an entire city under house arrest, ruining people’s futures and finances, and forcing my friend to embark on her first year of motherhood with a bank account at zero – is this it?

Read the whole thing. It’s a good exchange, because both writers have good points. PEG, in the end, says it best: whichever strategy we settle on (and it will probably be a mixture of the two), it is going to be economically devastating for us all, because we cannot have a normal economy with a bunch of people dying from a virus. One way or another, we are in for a terrible time, no matter what we do.

Think forward to this fall. Scientists predict that we may see a lull in infections over the summer, but they will come roaring back in the autumn. Think about the schools. Everybody will be eager to put their kids back in school. Kids have been the most resilient and resistant to coronavirus of all demographics. But they can carry the virus without showing symptoms. Their teachers will be much more susceptible to serious illness than they will — and so will the school’s support staff, administrators, lunch ladies, janitors, and so forth. Do we want to ask adults to put themselves at that kind of risk? This is very real to me: my wife is a classroom teacher. I am her immunocompromised husband.

What about older employees at every business? Or the immunocompromised? We might have to go back to work, because the economic devastation more than most people are willing to tolerate, but if we make that call as a society, let’s do so in full knowledge of what we are accepting.

Personally, I was glad that the bishops of my church decided to put liturgies on hold for now, in terms of public access. The older people at my church, and the immunocompromised (like me), would have had to struggle with our consciences over whether or not to risk it. I know these people, and I know myself; all of us would have pressured ourselves to go to church, out of fear that we were letting down the Lord. In truth, I believe God would have been merciful, and would not expect people who are at serious risk of catching this deadly virus to go to church. But people are not God, and I am sure we would all have been less merciful with ourselves than God would have been. And that could cost us our lives.

Let’s say we all had been permitted to go to church during this period, and one or more of our congregation had caught coronavirus and died. Talk about guilt! It would have been hard to have lived with myself had I reason to believe that one of us in the congregation exposed others there to the virus, leading to the demise of one or more parishioners. This is the kind of thing you don’t get to do over again.

This is why I have been chill about the temporary stop in church services: because it’s something that I can give up to protect the health and lives of the weaker among our congregation. After my wife’s phone conversation with our suffering friend (who is not an old person, by the way) last night, my wife told me what our friend’s symptoms were. Really horrible stuff — so bad that I actually had a nightmare last night about it happening to me. This is not abstract when it happens to someone you know, and she tells you about how hard it is to breathe. 

When the question is poverty or life, well, as I said at the beginning of this crisis, you can’t get any poorer than dead. But the truth is, for a lot of younger, healthier people, they risk of dying from this virus is smaller. So do we let them go back to work? I could see agreeing to that — but we have to remember too that these young people are not islands. They will not be able to visit with their older relatives, for example. If my college-student son goes back this fall — as I’m sure he will — he will not be able to visit us the entire semester, because of this virus. He will be living across town, but will not be able to come home, unless we take some extraordinary precautions. (I’m thinking even know as I write this about how we could make this work.)

The point I’m making here is that there is no way out. We are all going to be in a world of hurt until there is a vaccine, which could take 18 months. It is an illusion to think that we can restore the economy without a vaccine. How many of us will end up living much as we did under lockdown, simply because it’s too dangerous to do otherwise? That will have big economic effects, even if all of us are at liberty to live as we choose.

A friend texted last night to say that he feels that we as a society are getting to the end of what people are willing to do in terms of lockdown. He’s probably right about that. Something is going to have to change. We have to have a talk about that. But I hope we can talk about that without false bravado, and without the voices of those who deny that one way or another, the choice we will have to make as a society is a tragic one that will involve terrible suffering. Again: there is no way out. 

We are so accustomed in the West to thinking that there is some sort of solution that will enable us to avoid bad things. In this awful case, nature reminds us that our powers are limited. We have to figure out how to endure.

UPDATE: Jonathan Rauch tweets:

Week 6 of Covid-19 crisis: one citizen’s assessment of where we stand. Spoiler: what needs to be happening isn’t happening, and the president isn’t even talking about it. We need a Lincoln but have a Buchanan. OK, here goes.

Lockdown/isolation are temporarily effective but brutally costly and unsustainable. Lockdown costs trillions and causes huge human disruption. Must be lifted before long. Every day needs to be spent building for post-lockdown.

Lifting lockdown with current testing and tracing capability would cause viral resurgence. Also costs trillions with potentially even huger human disruption.

That leaves option No. 3. VASTLY increase testing capacity, by one or two orders of magnitude, and build MAJOR infrastructure for contact tracing. Do it now, before lockdown is lifted.  Testing and tracing together can get ahead of the virus by shutting down asymptomatic spread. Nothing else works, and both are needed.

NB, testing is a big job but tracing is even bigger. Requires major logistics and coordination. Build, test, deploy apps; decide privacy safeguards; coordinate state health services; get Cong’l authorizations; inform and prepare the public; etc.

Important new study from Microsoft researchers shows that testing and tracing need to be an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is currently talking about… (7/11) ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-f…

…but that is still one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than the status quo or an under-prepared reopening. ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-f…

In short: there’s really only one thing to do, and we’re not doing it. Or even really talking about doing it. POTUS should be leading a whole-of-government test/trace mobilization RIGHT NOW. Should be reporting every day on progress. Should be focused like a laser.

Instead he’s berating the press, claiming his brain is the strategy, and “hoping to God.” It’s the greatest presidential failure of leadership in my lifetime (and I lived through Vietnam). Maybe since Buchanan.

Final tweet:

Meanwhile, the rollout of testing is *slowing*. This is not good. See @bradstuartmd today. https://t.co/0ZPiSbsFyA (11/11)

— Jonathan Rauch (@jon_rauch) April 14, 2020

Read it all on Twitter — and follow Jon Rauch, who is always interesting.

The post No Way Out Of New Depression appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pandemic Diaries 27

No news from me today. Coffee and rye toast for a late breakfast, black beans and cauliflower rice for lunch, a long mono sleep this afternoon, and the rest of the black beans and cauliflower rice for dinner. Such, such are the joys.

From London:

I am writing from London, where away from the front lines in the hospitals, yesterday’s unimaginable has already become surprisingly routine. Our lockdown started three weeks ago and has no firm date for when it will be over. However, it is a very British lockdown – we queue outside supermarkets, respectfully follow the spirit if not always the letter of the law, and carry on. Taking my one hour of permitted exercise today by walking along the Thames, I was struck by how lockdown London looked so much the same, and yet so changed, like a favourite afternoon view seen at twilight for the first time. Families and dog walkers are everywhere, but there are no groups larger than a household, and many people wear masks. Stopping at a supermarket on the way home, I had to queue outside for five minutes (one out, one in policies are in place), but the shelves were full. If I could not get to the shops, deliveries are working as normal. Our milk man continues to deliver three times a week.

I am adjusting to the new life of working from home (I work as a management consultant). I had never realised how much of my work day, or at least the moments that make it enjoyable, is made up of spontaneous chats with colleagues. Now we video call most days. It is something at least, and one wonders how we would have coped with this situation even ten years ago. We are being asked to take 8 weeks of unpaid leave over the next 6 months as our firm tries to avoid redundancies. Not ideal, but hardly the end of the world for a well-paid young employee.

Working from home has freed up some time, but it’s the weekends which now seem to stretch on. New hobbies, such as yoga, have taken up some of the time. There are virtual activities too: poker last week, pub quizzes here and there, basic video chats. Walking back from tennis yesterday, my partner and I saw a block of flats all leaning out of their windows, doing a pub quiz together. I am reading a lot more now, and am able to tackle some introductions to topics which need serious chunks of focused time, rather than being squeezed onto Tube journeys. And of course, there are the omnipresent streaming services: Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, BBC iPlayer, YouTube – I flick across them all. In lockdown, when you are healthy and economically stable, boredom is the enemy.

Nationally we are of course going through uncertain times economically, and there is massive strain on the health and social services. Economically, an unprecedented government emergency financial package is in action but may just be plastering cracks in the dam. Debenhams, a high street retailer founded in 1813, filed for bankruptcy this week. A large group of households, who entered the pandemic with low pay, unstable jobs, high debt, and facing high housing costs are being pushed over the precipice. In terms of health services, the NHS is stretched each winter just coping with annual influenza cases. The government has called back 20,000 retired health workers, final year medical students are being rushed to hospitals, and over 750,000 Britons volunteered in answer to a national call for help. Yet the PPE, large scale testing regimes, and intensive care infrastructure is astonishingly slow to mobilise.

I wonder when this will end and how its mark will be felt in the years to come. No one can know for sure, but I do have three suspicions.

First, 2020 could yet prove to be the high watermark for globalisation. To take my own views as an example, I would say that I was a beneficiary and fainthearted supporter of globalisation. It has drawbacks, but on balance I would have told you it was an engine of prosperity. Now, there are some basic questions about the global system we live in and the drawbacks of hyper-interconnectivity. Why can someone eating a dodgy bat bring down economies around the world? Do our supply chains need to be as extended as they are? If we include the downside risk and social costs, in addition to the economic factors, are too many of our basic supplies reliant on other countries?

Second, the size and expense of the government machine becomes harder to justify. We fund a monolithic government structure that enjoys massive power under a veneer of democratic accountability. We ask for competence in return. Given the problems with the government response to the crisis, will we continue to make that bargain? Alternatively, some aspects of the response have been so dynamic that they suggest the existing institutions were bloated and slow, serving themselves more than their taxpayers.

Third, and more positively, there is huge potential for structural change. Pre-Covid 19 we may have been living in a local maximum — a social system that did a ‘good enough’ job and is hard to change to something better without significant upheaval. The resurgence in local community spirit could be the start of a movement away from centralised government ‘cradle to grave’ reliance. Pandemics bring family and friends into focus; squeezing out the last ounce of economic growth blurs into our background concerns. As underpaid doctors, nurses, teachers, retail workers, and logistics personnel in the UK lead the response while higher paid City financial workers are classed without hesitation as non-essential, we may see some income convergence.

 

From Ohio:

Spring is finally here in Ohio.  The forsythia and the daffodils are blooming, the birds are chirping, and the weather seems to be finally making a turn toward consistently warmer.  But to most of us I think spring has had no effect on our moods, since quarantine continues.

Gov. DeWine announced the school closures on March 12, to take effect at the end of the day March 16.  The vast majority of schools closed at the end of the day Friday, March 13.  That means it’s been an entire month since my children have been in school, and an entire month since I’ve been able to work.  I am supposed to work at home, but I find that impossible to do much of with the children home and my spouse an essential worker on third shift.  My employer has been understanding so far, but for how much longer?

And then there’s church.  I can’t fully describe my feelings yesterday, celebrating Easter without attending Mass.  We watched a livestreamed Mass, but it wasn’t the same at all.  My youngest child was misbehaving terribly during it, saying that “this isn’t really Mass, we’re not at church.”  In my heart, that’s basically how I feel.  This quarantine has really brought home the importance of physicality to rituals.  Think of Good Friday, for instance.  In the Catholic Church, this day is physically different than all other days – statues veiled, altar stripped, tabernacle empty, the priest entering in silence.  And yet if you’re watching on TV or the computer, those differences aren’t as profoundly noticeable.

Our bishop didn’t prohibit confessions when he cancelled public Masses, but pretty much all parishes cancelled confessions too.  I understand that many of our priests are elderly or have health conditions that make it unwise for them to hear confessions, but I couldn’t find anywhere that was still holding confessions with appropriate health precautions.  I finally found one parish during Holy Week and was able to go to confession, the first time I had been in several years.  I doubt I’m the only one who’s been away from the sacrament of reconciliation for years who felt prompted to confess during this quarantine.  How many of those would-be penitents who feel the Holy Spirit leading them back to the Church during this crisis have found that they cannot go to confession because both Masses and confessions are cancelled?

I have taken this health crisis seriously, but I am disappointed in the Church.  If I, an ordinary layperson, can think of several ways to make confessions available to at least some laypeople while taking health precautions, why can’t our bishops at least try?  My friend had been in RCIA and was supposed to enter the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil.  With all Masses being cancelled, candidates and catechumens find their entrance to the Catholic Church delayed indefinitely.  I’m not sure my friend will end up joining the Church in the end because of how disheartened he is with the bishops and what he calls their lack of courage in this crisis.  If people can still go to a fast food drive-through, why can’t they attend a drive-in Mass without receiving communion, or go to a socially-distanced confession to be absolved of their sins?  And my heart breaks to think of the Catholics who have died from this virus without receiving last rites.

We’re now in the octave of Easter, but it feels like an unending Lent.

From central Kentucky:

Here the biggest Covid-19 controversy is over Gov. Beshear’s announcement that Kentucky State Police officers would be taking down the license plate numbers of any one who attended an in- person worship service yesterday. These people would then be notified by mail of a directive to self- quarantine themselves for 14 days. It appears from media reports that only one church, Marysville Baptist Church, actually had any plates taken down.

KSP responded to citizen complaints on some other congregations, but those were found to be in compliance. Drive- in services are still allowed and encouraged, as are on- line services of course. From my social media feeds, you’d think that Christians are only a couple of days away from being rounded up and sent to the camps. The only word for it is crazy.

I do not agree that the restrictions on method of church service attendance in Kentucky as expressed at the state level rise to a constitutional violation. The Constitution is not a suicide pact and no right is unlimited. The principle of exigent circumstances has long been recognized for just this reason. If a global pandemic doesn’t meet the definition of “exigency,” I don’t know what could. .

No one is being ordered to renounce their faith. You are still permitted to worship publicly and as a (modified) group through drive- in services if you and your church think that some form of “congregating” is necessary. Go ask Chinese Christians or Christians in Muslim or Hindu dominated areas of the world what religious persecution looks like. This ain’t it.

The mayor of Louisville tried at the local level to ban drive- in worship services. He was (correctly) slapped down by the courts. That’s not what’s been directed at the state level. The governor gives daily press briefings at five. If he’s said it once, he said it a thousand times: drive- in services are okay with a few guidelines. (Everybody stays in their own car, you can’t pass things from car to car, stuff like that.)

The duration of personal contact and the ability to adequately engage in social distancing in a church is different compared to maintaining it in a store setting. Given the wide disparity in the number of congregants and the physical sizes of church buildings, as a practical matter it would be impossible to come up with a single social distancing plan that works for all congregations. Walmarts, Costcos, and Home Depots are all built to roughly the same dimensions so they can easily put in place a policy that limits occupants to X number of customers per 1,000 square feet. When it comes to churches, the policy is “outside in your cars or online.” It’s the only practical directive that can work

The Marysville Baptist congregation, specifically the pastor, insisted that they were going to meet in person anyway, although they did set up loudspeakers so people could listen in the parking lot if they didn’t want to come in. Gov. Beshear outlined his options in his briefing yesterday or the day before when it became apparent that no amount of negotiation or explanation with these churches was going to convince them to move to online or drive- in services only. He could have done nothing. He could have arrested the pastor. (There is an appropriate misdemeanor charge for this.) He could have had the church closed by the health department and padlocked the doors.

What he decided to do seems to me like the least invasive way that he could handle it while still trying to protect the community at large. It also ensures that it upset everybody and probably won’t help. The services went on, but the people who attended are being told to quarantine for 14 days. The next step will be to see how far he goes in enforcing it when they inevitably defy the order to self- quarantine. At this point, if Covid- 19 is as contagious as believed, it’s too late. Bullitt County KY will see a spike of cases in the next 10- 14 days.

One thing to note that ties back into a column you wrote a few days ago about how churches like this one that insisted on holding in person services might be resented by society at large as the pandemic wears on and more people are found to have been infected by members of those churches is that somebody threw buckets of nails across the entrances to the Marysville Baptist parking lots sometime on Saturday night. They were discovered and cleaned up before the congregation started to arrive, but somebody in that community has already decided to escalate the situation. We’re only a few days away from the first one of these churches getting a Molotov cocktail through a window..

I actually have a little bit more of a personal stake in this than you know. My father, who is 71, pastors a small congregation in [town]. It’s a dying church, to be honest, made up almost entirely of the elderly members of two or three families. There are no young families with kids or a youth group. The building is old and small, in a seedier part of town. Attendance on Sunday morning is 30 or less.

My dad sees his role at this point of shepherding the flock until enough of the congregation finally passes away that the few who are left move to other churches. He visits them when they’re sick, performs the funerals, and keeps it going for as long as it can.

When Gov. Beshear first declared the state of emergency, he didn’t try to close in person worship the first week or maybe two. I went to my dad and told him he needed to cancel services anyway. I had been following the outbreak from before at Raconteur Report and other blogs since the beginning of the year.

He couldn’t do it. At the time, he and my mom were refusing to believe how dangerous it could be, but he also said that the congregation wouldn’t agree. These people are all elderly. Every one of them is sick or diagnosed with something. My parents are actually some of the youngest people there on Sunday. If Covid-19 got loose in that congregation, it would kill them all.

The next week Beshear canceled in- person services and I was grateful, because it meant that my 71 year- old father and 73 year- old mother were relieved of the burden of what would have been the equivalent of a suicide mission. My folks are in okay shape for their age, but mom’s had some heart issues and dad’s a (well- managed) diabetic. If they catch it, it will be no better than a 50- 50 proposition that they’d make it. For the vast majority of their congregation, the odds are significantly worse.

It is somewhat ridiculous that responding to a disease has become a Red vs. Blue political issue, with all of the attendant virtue- signaling on both sides, but here we are. It’s almost to the point that if you’re a “real” conservative or Christian, you have to deny that the disease is even a real thing.

At the end of the day, all I know is Gov. Beshear’s willingness to take the political hit and cancel in- person services made it so my dad could cancel his services without blowback from his congregation, removing the greatest chance he and my mother had to catch this thing and potentially die alone. I’m 44 years old, did 23 years as a cop, have a grown child of my own, and I’ve recently realized that I’m not ready to lose my mommy and daddy. So, ultimately, I am grateful to the governor for taking the hit.

Am I grateful enough to vote to re- elect him in 2023? Probably not. As my wife said the other day when we were watching one of his briefings, “He seems like a good guy and he’s doing a good job, but then I remember that he kills babies.” And she’s right. Abortion is a sacrament to him. That was true when he was the Attorney General and fought the previous governor’s attempts to shut down abortion clinics and it’s true now during the pandemic as abortion clinics remain essential medical services while all other types of elective medical procedures are banned, something that keeps being brought up by the most outraged people in my social media feeds.

So that’s one view from Central Kentucky. Personally, we’re healthy, well- provisioned, and financially secure for the moment. I pray that you, yours, and all the other reg’lar readers of your blog remain well.

From California:

To understand how things are now, here is how things were until two weeks ago. My four year old son has a diagnosis of autism. Where we live (California) that means he gets special education preschool, in-home behavior therapy, and we get four hours of babysitting once a week so we have some time to get out and relax a little. All these things have helped him improve a lot and our hope has been to get him in a regular classroom for kindergarten.

My wife and I have a difficult relationship. She is volatile and has a bad temper. I manage the best I can. With my job I had time away from home which helped me relax a little. If not for our child we would probably have a frank discussion about whether to stay together, but that would not be good for anyone, so we soldier on.

Now all that is gone. We are at home all day. My wife is terrified of the virus and doesn’t want to go out. I go out every few days for groceries. Our son has some online behavior therapy, but this isn’t the same. The school program coming out is mostly YouTube videos. He needs structure and contact with other people, and his behavior has been getting worse. This sets off my wife, which makes his behavior worse, which sets her off more. I go outside with him around the apartment complex for a little time each day, but that’s it for relief. There is no end in sight.

Again, we are much better off than many others. We have resources and maybe more self-control. Adults need work, and children need school for structure and a sense of purpose.

However I think the lockdown will continue for months. There are skeptics (Alex Berenson most notably) but they are dismissed out of hand. The social and economic costs are dismissed out of hand. The blue state governors and mayors were resistant to locking down, but now that they have they are enjoying the power, and so are the police. The economy will be destroyed, and the pieces bought up by billionaires with free money from the Fed (see Matt Stoller).

I hope I’m wrong……..

Stay healthy and stay sane.

From New Jersey:

I came across this link to a remarkable eBook, that music can and must be formative in social bonding and communal resilience. Please post it on your blog. I am starting to read this and illuminating…..curious to hear feedback from musicians in your blog….

Our priest Fr. Michael who is co-suffering with his wife at Saint Anthony Antiochian Orthodox Church in Bergenfield New Jersey is today slowly in recuperation from the coronavirus. This morning we had a virtual third hour morning prayer a communal ingathering through Zoom. This way a wakeup call for my soul to read via Zoom aloud psalm 16 to set the tone of life during those early Holy Week days when we mediate on the haunting naming of the followers of Christ as the sons of the Bridegroom….awaiting the Coming One at midnight.

It’s a book about Renaissance music written in response to plague. The author is Remi Chiu. The reader points to this Google books version, but if you want to read the whole thing, you should get it on Kindle. The book sounds like a fantastic Mars Hill Audio Journal interview.

From rural Virginia:

My pandemic life is one of contradictions. While work in DC for the federal government, I live in rural Va in the Blue Ridge Mountains on a small livestock farm. During this past month when I have been teleworking full time, the pandemic has been an unexpected blessing. I have gotten back the 5 hours per day that I am no longer commuting. Instead, I have used those 5 hours to get more sleep, spend more time with my family, do more cooking, spend more time on the farm and more time helping my daughters do distance learning.

We are blessed to live in multi-generational housing with my parents, my wife and our 2 daughters. Fortunately this farmhouse has plenty of space, including 4 deep freezers that were full of meat and other frozen foodstuffs. It was just part of our upbringing to have months of all kinds of supplies (food, household, etc) on hand at all times.

Rural rhythms revolve around the seasons, even with a pandemic raging. Calves are still be born, pigs are still eating, grass is growing. So far, livestock supplies are available. Though prices for livestock are dropping as slaughter plants close down across the country due to sick workers. The market for bulls (we are a seedstock farm that sells purebred bulls to cow-calf farms) has dried up as the market for calves has declined. We have sold some bulls on credit to long time customers.

I have repented for many of my pre-pandemic thoughts. As an example, we had a new, younger pastor start at our Southern Baptist Church. He wanted to upgrade the church’s sound system and set up a robust website to allow sermons to be viewed. I personally thought this was a waste of money when he put it in last fall. Now, I believe that he was doing God’s will to prepare our church to care for his flock during the pandemic. He has seamlessly been able to care for his flock even when we can no longer meet in person.

This pandemic has reinforced the importance of broadband internet. We have a weak DSL connection. Fortunately we are close to one of the few cell towers in our county, so we have been able to set up mobile hotspots so our daughters can do their video conferences with their teachers while I continue teleworking. Most of the people in our county are not so fortunate. Previously many people opposed cell towers because they did not like the way they looked. So the library parking lot or other church parking lots are popular places are popular places as students sit in their cars in order to connect online.

What really makes me scared about the pandemic is that my wife is a health care professional. She is still seeing patients, but has little personal protective equipment.

Easter was similar yet vitally different than years past. We had a church service, though online. We had a family meal with lamb, though with fewer family members. We cared for the livestock on the farm. We prayed for and felt the suffering of so many people around the world. This Easter may have been the best one I can recall because my daughters are learning and asking questions about our risen lord. By taking away many of the commercial trappings, we were able to more clearly focus on the mercy and justice of the cross and the hope and love of the empty tomb.

From suburban Michigan:

On the home front:

I live in a modest two bedroom condo with my wife and two young children. It’s crowded. My wife works in health care, but thank God is able to do all her work remotely right now. I’m always proud of her, but all the more so these days. My younger child (2) is the least phased by it all, but will sometimes will talk about friends and teachers from daycare. My older one (6) is having a rougher time, and that puts a lot of demand on us as parents. He needs us at our best right now, and frankly it is hard to do that while trying to keep my flexible but still full time job as well. Nearly all attempts to keep up with what the wonderful public school sends home (via an app) are failing, so we’re just focusing on some simple math (baking is great for this), reading, some writing and drawing, and above all bike riding. The reduced traffic has made this last activity so much easier and less scary.

That said, trying to keep two people working full time while raising two children in little space with no child care, school, library, playground, playdates, or grandparents is not actually possible. I don’t know any parent with young kids that is okay right now. I lack the capacity to fully describe what this is like, the intensity of it all. I suppose I should be grateful for the fact that I am not lonely or bored. But this is much too much to ask of nuclear families on their own. We’re certainly getting into more of a rhythm as this goes on, but I am not sure how sustainable this is if we end up bouncing in and out of lockdowns for a bit as now seems likely.

In my community:

I am so lucky to know my neighbors, to have a community here. In little, unexpected ways this community keeps helping us. A friend offered to go to the grocery store for us, we happened to have some old clothes a younger child needed which prevented one more trip to a store, etc. This sort of horizontal or mutual aid is priceless, but is is also not enough, as the long lines as food banks and crashing state unemployment insurance websites indicate. I’ve seen some older kids in the neighborhood running around together, and it both bothers me because we all need to do our part right now but at the same time I’m trying to leave some room for a bit of understanding and grace too. Who knows what goes on in those homes? Many are no doubt lovely and loving, but not all of them are. I worry about children trapped in houses with abusive parents, with addicts. Maybe they need to run through the park right next to their closest friend because the immediate alternative is worse, is riskier.

But there are others that I know personally, some close friends, who continue to flout the rules in substantive ways that I judge harshly. They have shown me exactly who they are, and when this moment of crisis has passed I fear I won’t be able to look them in the eye. I am not a judgmental person by disposition, but this is different. Our duty to one another is clear, and those who chose to fail in their duty will be remembered. Thankfully, the area I live in is apparently “crushing” the curve based on cell phone tower data.

Our bishop took the prudent step of closing church buildings weeks ago. I am so grateful for her leadership, and for her weekly sermons during this time. We are Episcopalians (or Anglicans for your non-US readers), and one of the great treasures of the Anglican tradition is something called the Book of Common Prayer which was, among other things, a Reformation era attempt to make some of the rhythms of monastic life available to the laity. You have written before about the Orthodox view of the home as a sort of little monastery, and that deeply resonates with Episcopalian/Anglican sensibilities. We have regular zoom based services with our extended family, and did what we could at home during Holy Week–which turned out to be quite a lot! None of it is in any way a satisfactory substitution of receiving the sacraments or for corporate worship, but Jesus rose from the dead two millennia ago and nothing we do or fail to do will change that fact.

Broader sociopolitical concerns:

As the federal government continues to deny the state I live in much needed aid to confront this virus, I keep thinking about that famous passage from the end of After Virtue:

“A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.”

To hell with the Empire. What good is an Empire that can fly F-35s over my head but tells me to make a mask out of scraps of cloth to fight a pandemic? What loyalty do I owe a government that, through neglect, tries to kill me and my neighbors while continuing to enrich the most powerful simply because my governor did not bow and scrape sufficiently before Dear Leader? This is just absolute madness and further confirms my most cynical assumptions about the world. How many people in North America today find themselves turning aside from the task of shoring up the current imperium without even realizing it?

And yet, through all that worry and fear about the broader social and economic implications, I get to spend a lot of time with the people in this world that I most want to spend time with. I know not everyone can say that during this pandemic, and truly I am grateful.

From New Jersey:

The atmosphere here has been building in intensity. Two weeks ago I went grocery shopping for my own family, and one week ago I went back to the same store for my mother in law. In the space of that one week, things seemed to have changed drastically — on my first trip, I felt things were safe, clean, and well-controlled (lots of sanitizing, social distancing, etc.), but it all felt relatively normal, and people were cheerful. On the second trip, everyone was kept 10 feet apart in line, waiting to enter the store; almost everyone had a mask on; the cashiers were protected by a plastic shield surrounding the check out booth. In general, the atmosphere in the store was much less friendly and far more tense.

Yesterday, Easter Sunday, was a strange and beautiful day. All of Holy Week, and most of Lent, felt extremely heavy. Although the quarantine has not changed my daily life drastically, as I am a homeschooling mother with four young children, the question of what to do about Easter hung like a cloud over the past few weeks. Every year, we celebrate Easter in the exact same way: we attend a high Tridentine Mass (one we have attended for 20 years) with my parents and siblings, and then spend the rest of the day celebrating at their house. One of my children spent weeks in extra anticipation, because his birthday fell on Easter Sunday this year, and he was delighted at the idea of a double celebration with the whole family.

Holding the space and trying to create a reverent atmosphere for small children during streamed services and prayer at home through the second half of Lent and Holy Week was very challenging, and the prospect of creating both Easter and birthday festivity under the circumstances seemed daunting. Tears from two of the children over not being able to attend Mass and visit grandparents added to the stress, and pushed back bedtimes, and the last minute decorating and preparation kept me up till after midnight on Holy Saturday. When I finally collapsed on the sofa with the baby, I was full of doubts about whether I had done enough, and somewhat dreading the following day.

But as soon as small feet hit the stairs at daybreak, it was Easter! And nothing — not a virus, nor social distancing, nor “principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come” could change that. The two oldest tumbled into the living room, full of excitement and anticipation, but with no idea what to expect, only sure that it was going to be wonderful.

And it was. Everything was. We dressed up, despite being at home all day; we did our best to participate in our streamed Mass, despite my dislike of combining religion and technology; we enjoyed each other’s company, and homemade treats, and a simple but special dinner. The children played cheerfully all day, and we spent some time outside in the sunshine. In a lot of ways it was no different than many of our other days for the past month, except that the joy was just so palpable — and it was not because of anything we had done — it just was, because Easter had come, and Christ is risen, and none of that depends on our own feeble efforts. Although none of us would ever have chosen to have this experience, it feels a bit like a gift, to have had the opportunity to realize the essential holiness and beauty of the day, to celebrate a mostly interior Easter.

From Slovakia:

I am writing from a village in Slovakia, population around 800. I myself am Estonian, but married to a Slovak and have lived here for about 15 years.

I have been reading your blog since Trump’s election and have found it very thought-provoking, including the excellent comments section. Thank you for giving space for the pandemic diary, it makes the whole situation seem more real – there are real people out there, living their lives in this strange new situation, it’s not just about numbers – infected, dead – and graphs.

The situation here in Slovakia is not so bad, at least for now. It is amazing how quickly most people were able to accept the fact that life had to change. It has been a month now since schools were closed and everything else non-essential. The measures were taken when Slovakia had just a few cases. As of today, there are 769 people infected, 2 dead. Everyone has to wear a mask when leaving home. A month ago it was impossible to buy surgical masks, so people got out their sewing machines. Very soon you were not allowed into supermarkets without masks. I still haven’t been able to get my hands on any disinfectant gel or antibacterial soap, that’s vanished. The same goes for gloves…

The corona crisis flared up right after elections here. Now we have a new prime minister, the very opposite of an elder statesman… I don’t envy the situation he has found himself in. His slightly hysterical and urgent eagerness is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, especially when he decided to ban all travel (except for work, groceries and a few other reasons) from the Wednesday of Holy Week until Easter Tuesday. The first day of the ban saw people sitting in traffic jams, filling out forms… That was not popular. But the next days were better, as the police stopped checking each car. The reason for the ban was that for Slovaks, Easter is very much a family affair, with Good Friday and Easter Monday both public holidays, and people move all across the country to go visit parents and other relatives. But not this year, everyone stayed at home…

Of course no church on Easter either. The last time I went to Mass was March 8… I am glad we made it to confession as a family that first week of March. It makes sense to me that public Masses cannot take place at this point. But confession… Surely it could be arranged in some responsible and safe way? Some priests are hearing confessions, were hearing them from morning till evening before Easter (people are used to going to confession before Christmas and Easter, but also on first Fridays), others are not… I get a little rebellious now and then. But this leaves me anxious and irritable. So I make an effort, again and again, to accept the situation as it is. Christianity is so much more than just going to church, God is not limited by the sacraments. This is surely an opportunity to be cured from all entitlement and consumerist attitudes towards our faith. The stories you shared about the Slovak, Russian, Romanian Christians suffering in Communist prisons meant so much to me, it was like a ray of light in the darkness of my interior grumblings.

In fact, I do see the current situation very much as a time of grace. I am a mother of five children, ages 12 to 1. I have been at home for 13 years and the life of a stay-at-home mother does not change that much even in quarantine. But nevertheless there has been a change, what with the older children being home from school and my husband working from home. We start the day as a family with Lauds and actually have lunch together (it’s the main meal here in Slovakia). And my husband does not have to spend 2 hours travelling to and from work, so he has finally time to think through the way we are raising our 4 sons. All of a sudden they have been put to work!

Easter was by no means sad, even though our own family version of the Easter vigil did not quite reach the heights of jubilation that we had been used to experiencing. It is strange to live without the Eucharist. But even without the sacraments, Christ is still risen. The joy we experienced was more interior, more intimate and simpler.

Spring is here, it has been warm and sunny. The hills are bursting into blossoms now, even though there is still snow on the mountains. What a blessing to live in a place where one can walk in any direction to find natural beauty and plenty of space (for social distancing, that is). It is almost as if there were no troubles in the world… But my mother in Estonia has started chemotherapy. The situation is worse there and I know we can be struck by this pandemics as so many other families in the world have been struck… And what comes after the virus?

A second entry from a diarist in British Columbia:

i pray that the healing hand of God rest upon you, and in that healing you experience the gracious love of God.

since my last post to you, not much has happened. small projects have been completed. Maunday Thursday, Good Friday and Easter have come and gone. like a low grade fever, boredom and restlessness have settled in as companions. I watch seedlings grow and feed sparrows.

i am a Mennonite. I belong to a progressive wing called Mennonite Church Canada which since 2017 has embraced doctrinal plurality — acceptance of gay marriage, as well as several other social ethical stances that i find deeply disconcerting. I have sought to ponder why it is that i have found myself out of step with my denomination.

I am a graduate of our denominational seminary, and just prior to the onset of pandemic i met with the current president of our bi-national Seminary to discuss with him returning my Masters of Divinity degree. My disillusionment is that serious.

In 1992 i graduated, and then 1993 i went to work for a Mennonite Humanitarian aid agency in the former Soviet Union. There i had the opportunity to rub shoulders with men and women who had suffered deeply for their faith. That experience of listening to their witness, breaking bread with them, being interrogated by them when i was new led to a long, intermittent re-evaluation of the philosophical underpinnings of my faith-theology.

And i saw, up close, evil.

in college i had read paolo freire, jose miranda,– all the liberation theologians and drank deeply from those wells. Some years later, when in Russia, i sat with the children of those who had suffered for their faith, and was largely (but not completely) deaf to their conversations about truth, refusing to live in the lie– confessing Christ.

Later, over time i sat with my mother (born in Ukraine under Stalin) and listened more attentively to her stories and began to see a pattern. Judas stories, and sinner on Golgotha stories, stories in my family that somehow paralleled biblical themes.

And i read.

One of the criticisms of my faith tradition is that it tends toward pelagianism (self-salvation) and i found myself seeing the truth of that concern. Too much emphasis on self-willed do-gooderism, and not enough seeking to wait and obey the Spirit of Christ.

There is something profoundly wrong with a faith tradition that ignores its confessors and martyrs.

When i have shared these concerns, i have been chided–too traditional, too creedal. “God is bringing forth a new Pentecost.” In my confession (national organization) right living supersedes in every way creedal affirmation. I found myself pondering the early church fathers (i am a rank amateur) and sensing that creedal orthodoxy is not a by-line, but a foundation stone. compassion can not, ought not, will not do away with the foundation of a universal and holy Truth.

Solzhenitsyn’s insight that if a lie is your principle, violence must be your method. The opposite is true. If Truth is your principle, love is your method: has troubled me for years. Troubled as in i have thought about it, questioned the truthfulness of my denominations’ remembering.

so in these days of pandemic my theological isolation within my national communion feels somehow accentuated. One pastor has called for a one time tax on the rich, to give to the poor — a kind of secular jubilee. i observe that a secular jubilee has justice without reverence for the sovereignty of God, and that the goal of Christian charity is not the giving or receiving of a good, in the first instance, but each (giver and recipient) coming close to God. The gift, given or received is a token of the Spiritual reality–intimacy with God. It seems that my brothers and sisters are proclaiming a gospel without Christ, that Engels and Marx would have agreed to….

i am sorry not to have a story of greater spiritual depth to share. I sense somehow that the flaws in my faith tradition are being laid bare that we might repent: only to find my brothers and sisters persisting in a pelagian path that will lead to exhaustion. My spiritual dullness perhaps a testament to my, and of my faith tradition.

A recent article on scripture seems like a veneer of piety that will hide a justification of social justice agenda, rather than a deeper obedience and mystical union with God. We cannot save ourselves, the atonement of Jesus Christ is an act and mystery of God. And the apprehension in part, of that mystery is also a grace.

Lord Jesus Christ. Son of God. Have mercy on me, a sinner. strengthen your servant to walk in a deeper obedience to the mystery of your unfailing love, through Jesus Christ, my risen Lord..

From Texas:

My son’s wedding was scheduled for Saturday, March 21.

What a week.

Both families have significant out of town relatives —on our side a sizeable NOLA contingent, while the bride’s mom, from Long Island, had oodles of family coming.

Our celebrant was traveling from Paris, my cousin Père David.

I’m trying to remember which day it was — Wednesday March 11? When Trump delivered a prime time address announcing a travel ban with Europe, to go into effect midnight Friday March 13. My son flew into action, calling Fr. David to see if he could/would leave earlier.

I had another French uncle already here for the wedding. He came March 10 to visit friends in Philadelphia, Washington and Boston before coming to us.

That weekend began the great unraveling: first, the drip-drip-drip of out of town guests/relatives cancelling.

Father David, who loves an adventure, landed at JFK two hours before the travel ban went into effect.

I will never forget the feeling of peace and joy that washed over me when I saw him alight from Ian’s car— I knew then everything would be okay. We would have a wedding, even if it was in my living room with 10 people.

So began our unforgettable week, our only extended family being represented by the far flung French branch. Mass at home on Sunday followed by brunch with both families— some 15 of us— was very moving.

Day by day, as another piece of our wedding plan collapsed, we threw ourselves into improvising some new solution— only to have that collapse a few hours later. Honeymoon to South Africa: cancelled Tuesday; Substitute Hawaii honeymoon collapsed Thursday.

Rehearsal dinner shrank from 80 people to 25. Then the restaurant closed. So…let’s have it at our house. Then a friend offered her house. Oh thank God.

Friday morning March 20. My Uncle and I are moving furniture out of my friend’s living room to set up tables for 30. My husband is mixing a giant batch of margaritas. By midday, we get news from my parish pastor that as of midnight Friday, a new guideline goes into effect, limiting gatherings to 10 people (the current one, for which we have already made Herculean adjustments, allowing for 50).

By 2 pm Friday I get word that the wedding will take place that night at 8:30, after the church is closed.

We all dressed in our finery, had a scaled down procession, with musicians and a sprinkling of loved ones. Every other pew was roped off with yellow caution tape. The maid of honor had a boom box at the ready after the ceremony, so that the couple could take their first dance together, “Into the Mystic,” Van Morrison.

Then we all departed for what became the wedding banquet.

Nothing went as planned, but it was a beautiful week and wedding. We didn’t have family, but we had our Frenchmen with us at the house. I had put up in the freezer quite a few casseroles to provide for out of town guests, so I just pulled out one thing after another to keep us fed. It was like having a dinner party every single night.

We didn’t have a wedding reception but we had a banquet. My friend Ana’s tres leches cake, made for our rehearsal dinner, became the wedding cake.

All was improvised. Yet, we were all cognizant Of the greater plan at work. They had chosen, as their wedding gospel, Matthew 7:21, 24-29…the rains came, the wind blew, but the house was set on firm foundation.

Father David’s homily was sublime. He referred to our Joy as a survivor of this catastrophe.

My mom offered her house in Cashiers, North Carolina for a honeymoon. The bride and groom spent their day-after gathering all they would need for a week without leaving the house, and off they went, for a much needed break from the craziness.

Our Frenchmen returned home.

My heart was full to bursting after all of it.

We are all well and recovered…may you recharge and recuperate as well.

He is Risen!

What a day of fascinating diary entries. Thank you all! Please, readers, let me hear from you. I’m at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line. Don’t forget to say where you’re from. As a rule, I don’t care for political argumentation in these entries, but I will be tolerant if it comes across as simply expressing frustration, not as trying to start an argument. I am pleased to host actual political arguments on this blog, but Pandemic Diaries is not the place for that.

The post Pandemic Diaries 27 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Manchester & Mississippi

Caroline Langston’s essay recalling her years attending Manchester, a segregation academy in her hometown of Yazoo City, Miss., is a perfect piece of writing about the South, and a real emotional touchstone for someone like me, of our generation (born in 1968, she is one year younger than I am). Manchester was a private, whites-only school built in 1969, when it became obvious that Mississippi schools were going to integrate. Langston’s family stuck with public schools, for reasons that had nothing to do with political liberalism. But after she was paddled by a (white) PE teacher, her mother decided that was enough, and sent her to Manchester.

Excerpt:

After the yelling and the lining up and the drudgery of the public schools, it was fun to be at Manchester, with its jokes and parties and a perpetual atmosphere of festival. It was neither harder nor easier than the public schools had been, but at Manchester, at least, they would let me just go to the library and read when I got bored. I became a Christian, and started going to youth group.

I felt loved there. It saved my life, I believe even now.

And yet. All that celebration, the festival of identity, of being in the charmed circle at last, strikes me now as notable for what we were not discussing. Ninety percent of the time, daily life inside the walls of Manchester functioned as though black people simply. . . did not exist. Or if they were mentioned, we parroted the way we heard adults around us talk about them, not as independent souls with agency who might have their own needs and desires, but rather, as exasperating children who kept demanding things. Who might, if unconstrained, simply take over. And “taking over” was the thing, of all things, that must be prevented.

Boy, was that ever a jolt to me. “Taking over.” I hadn’t thought about those words, in this context, in decades. They were on the lips of lots of us white people in my town in those years too. I spent the first two years of my schooling at a private, all-white academy in a nearby parish. My parents sent me there because I was gifted, and they thought that I would get a better education there. At some point in the second half of my second-grade year, the school sent home a letter telling parents that our teacher had some sort of problems, and had not taught us much of anything. They had dismissed her, and hired a new teacher who, the school said, was going to have to assign extra work to get us all up to grade level. That infuriated my parents, who realized that the “better education” they were paying for was a sham, at least for me. They put me in my town’s integrated public school the next year.

But even though public school was integrated, and like the parish, just over half of each class was black, the worlds of black and white were functionally separate. Black kids and white kids did not play together on the playground. Nor did we sit together in the lunchroom. In the summertime, we retreated to our fully segregated worlds. I recall being in fourth grade when someone came into the classroom to hand out registration forms for the Dixie Youth boys’ summer baseball league. None of the black boys in my class got one. I recall being embarrassed by that, but I still would not have questioned it, not really.

There was a pool in town, called — surprise! — the Town Pool. It was a privately owned pool to which you could buy a membership, if you were white. It wasn’t a rich kids’ pool; there weren’t any rich kids in town. But it was a white pool. Every day in the summer, our moms would sit on the covered bleachers smoking and gossiping, while we white kids would splash around, shouting “Marco?” “POH-LOH!” to each other, diving for coins on the bottom of the pool, our pale skin turning strawberry in the scorching summer sun, while the black kids on the other side of the chain-link fence could only watch us. I remember what it felt like to climb out of the pool and walk over to the nearby Piggly Wiggly for a Coke, a wet beach towel draped around your shoulders. If you were me, you didn’t want to catch the eye of one of the town black kids, not because they would have done anything, but because you — well, I — knew that it wasn’t fair that those kids didn’t get to swim, because they were black.

Please don’t think that I was any sort of closet liberal. What would that have even meant? As a white kid in the 1970s small-town South, it never seriously occurred to you that the system was wrong. It just was. I hadn’t thought about it since forever, but when Caroline Langston mentions the fear of blacks “taking over,” well, yes, that was what white people were terrified of. I remember listening to older white people complaining at election time about local blacks “bloc-voting,” and how mindless and threatening that was to the right order of things. I knew what they meant by that, but it took years for me to grasp that they were blaming black people for doing exactly what they were doing: voting for a candidate solely on the basis of race. They were afraid that blacks — who constituted a raw majority in the parish, but who weren’t all registered to vote — were going to take over.

And, like Langston’s classmates, so were we white kids in our town. It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there — people like my wife, who is eight years younger than I, and who grew up in the big city — but there was so much latent fear that the right order of the world depended on white people staying in control. Anybody who lived in our rural parish could see plainly how blacks lived: mostly in poverty and squalor. We were a fairly poor agricultural area; any black folks who earned an education got the hell out of town if they wanted a shot at a life doing anything other than working in the fields. The result was that a black middle class scarcely existed. As far as any of us white kids could see, being black meant being poor and ignorant. There were poor and ignorant white people around too, but imagine a place where almost all the black people lived that way, and aside from occasionally on television, you never saw anybody different?

Now, think of what it would be like to have grown up in that kind of social order. You would probably have thought like the rest of us 1970s white kids did: that this was the way of the world. (Similarly, had you grown up in that as a black kid, you might have assimilated the same poisonous vision.) But if you were white, you also would have known that there was a danger of all this being upended, if the blacks took over — the thing that was always possible, if we let down our vigilance. If that happened, maybe we would all be poor and living in shacks. Maybe there would even be black kids in the Town Pool. Caroline Langston writes about the time as a junior in high school she questioned some dodgy strategy to get all the eligible voters from the Manchester student body to register to vote in the upcoming election. That seems like cheating, she remarked:

The moment I said it, though, one of the other kids who was standing on the stairs with me, a girl with a strawberry blonde ponytail, wheeled around. Her face was red as she stared at me with angry eyes and spat out, “What are you talking about? Do you want Yazoo City to end up like Tchula?”

Tchula was a little town up the road in the Delta, and it was indeed one of those places, adults said, where blacks had just taken over. They’d elected a black mayor, and now the stores were closing down, and it was some place “you just couldn’t go to any more.”

I stood back, stunned. There was so much I still did not understand, and some things I would not understand for decades—like when it finally occurred to me that the “good old days” adults always talked about were effectively made possible by a local police state, and when that had gone, all the infrastructure and sense of a public square had dissipated with it.

Oh man, that rings so true. Except for a couple of things. The neighboring parish with the segregation academy my parents sent me to for first and second grade? It continues to have a de facto segregated school system. The integrated school system in West Feliciana, my home parish, became one of the best in the entire state. People credit the strong public school system as one source of the parish’s relative prosperity. I went through a period of my life, in my late teens and twenties, when I could do nothing but make fun of the racial hypocrisies of the older townspeople. Look at them, thinking we were integrated, but the classes in our integrated school were mostly segregated by race! And look, we have white prom and black prom! Et cetera.

It wasn’t until I had gotten older, and seen more of the world, than I was able to appreciate the accomplishment of the white and black leaders of that generation. Given the legacy of slavery, and then of Jim Crow, integration of the schools could have gone very badly. There were so many flaws in the execution, but the thing is, it worked. Reading Langston’s essay brought back all the fear that white people of that era had of blacks. A few years back, when I was living for a few years in my hometown, I went to a series of meetings about changing the parish’s form of government. I was really surprised how, after all these years, many of the black residents who spoke out against the proposed form of government were so paranoid-sounding. They were sure that whites were conspiring to take away what gains blacks had made. I wrote on this blog about some of those meetings, and I still think the objections those black residents had were largely groundless, and based on irrational fear. But I had to recognize that within living memory, the older black members of the community had been born into segregation, and lived in terror of the KKK. And I came to understand that the fact that we never, ever talked in any serious way about the civil rights struggle in school — that what I now know was recent local history — was almost certainly the price we all paid for making school integration work in our parish. We kids (the white ones, anyway) really didn’t know what was happening. That was just the world as we found it.

I hope you will read all of Langston’s essay. She ended up in boarding school in the Washington DC area, and was both naturally ashamed of coming from Mississippi, and made to feel ashamed of it. The way she ends the piece rings powerfully true to many white Southerners who grew up like she and I did. I don’t want to spoil it, but let’s say that just as she resists the lie that the “good old days” of white domination were all that good, she also resists the progressive lie that would require her to denounce everything about the world of Manchester, which is the world that nurtured her and, as she puts it, saved her life and helped her endure ghastly suffering at home.

What our white ancestors did to black people was unspeakably cruel, and with Caroline Langston, I am glad those structures and ways of life are gone, or mostly gone. Note well, though, that the end of formal legal segregation did not produce a world of racial harmony and equality, a sad fact that tells us something about the profound legacy of white supremacy, but also probably tells us something too about the mysterious intersection of free will, human nature, and the way society both forms our character, and in which our character proves resistant to social pressure. The older I get, the more mystified I am by race, class, and culture. This past year, reading about Russia, serfdom, and the intractable problems of class and culture, which not even a totalitarian state could destroy, the more understanding I became of what America has struggled with. I say “understanding” not in the sense of approving of the world that was — again, I am grateful that it no longer exists — but rather to say that I have a greater appreciation for the fragility of civilization and its achievements. When I was younger, I used to be angry at the world for not being better (for not being perfect, if I’m honest); now I find myself more likely to be grateful for what our ancestors managed to hand on to us, despite their sins and failings. No kidding, reading about the viciousness of late imperial Russia, and the far worse viciousness that the Bolshevik revolutionaries imposed on the Russian people, shook me to the core. As awful as conditions might be, never, ever forget that they could get much worse.

Please don’t misunderstand me: God knows I am not defending the world that produced the Manchester Academies of the desegregating South. That was a world of cruelty and injustice. But that’s not all there was to that world, nor, as Langston writes, to Manchester. And I have to say that it is a different kind of cruelty, of inhumanity, that demands, as proof of your moral decency, that you renounce and declare your shame over the people who carried little bitty you safely through this crooked world, with hearts made crooked by the circumstances into which they were thrown. Caroline Langston understands that. Maybe only Southerners can. It takes extraordinary grace and humility to learn how to hate evil without hating the people possessed by its glamour. Martin Luther King managed to do it. The rest of us — even the righteous latter-day progressives among us — not so much.

Anyway, again, read the whole thing. It appears on a website called The Academy Stories — remembrances of men and women who attended Southern segregation academies, reflecting on the meaning of that experience. It’s really fascinating to read these essays. They’re not all equally good. There’s one by a writer who had a miserable experience at her segregation academy, and who can’t disentangle the destructiveness of that from the school’s racial ideology. (Note to that writer: I had a similarly miserable experience at my 100 percent integrated public school; high school is full of cliques and bullies and mean girls.) But all the ones I’ve read so far, even when I disagree with this or that conclusion the author makes, all feel very raw and honest to me, as a white Southerner of a certain generation. It’s hard to talk about this stuff honestly, even among ourselves, because nobody wants to defend the bad old days, but a lot of people understandably cannot stand the crusading white person who discharges his or her racial anxieties and latent feeling of guilt, and curry favor with outsiders, by damning everybody they grew up with as simply and irredeemably wicked. I confess that I get my back up about all this too, over white people not remembering in the “correct” way. I know that’s not right, but like I said, this stuff is all in the past, but it’s still raw.

Here’s the thing: when are you being honest about human frailty and sin, and one’s complicity with it … and when are you putting on moral airs and betraying your family and your people? How can you know? Can you ever know?

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‘Contact Tracing’ Of Dissidents

Over the weekend I received in e-mail from my editor the marked-up manuscript for Live Not By Lies, my next book. I will be making the revisions she suggests, and we will finally be done with it. Publication is set for September.

I turned the original manuscript in earlier this year, before the coronavirus pandemic. In that manuscript, I talk at length about the Chinese surveillance system, including social credit, and I speak about how we are slowly, steadily, and imperceptibly accustoming ourselves here in the West to the same kind of thing. I write about what Shoshanna Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”: her name for the informal system of data harvesting from everyone’s smartphones, online activity, and suchlike. We have created a system of commerce in which it is very difficult to conduct daily life without handing over a lot of data to third parties. I spoke by phone the other day to a Christian friend who works in the tech division of a major global corporation. She told me that most people have no idea at all how much of their personal data are being taken all the time, with their unwitting consent.  This is not conspiracy theory; this is simply the truth.

We are told that privacy laws protect us, but as Edward Snowden’s revelations made plain, these don’t mean much. They’re better than what Chinese citizens have, but the fact is, the state has access to any data it wants. In the manuscript of my book, I talk about how in China, the state’s elaborate surveillance system can track people, and know automatically, via GPS data and facial recognition, if a person is going into a place where he is not supposed to be, e.g., a church. And the state docks your social credit score if you interact with people of whom the state disapproves, meaning that if you are connected online, or visit in person, someone who is on the government’s blacklist, the system automatically tracks that, and curtails your social privileges.

We have the same technological capabilities in the US, but they haven’t been deployed to any great extent. In the manuscript, I talk about my prediction that we will move into a situation in which government and private corporations begin to restrict, sometimes through shadow bans, people whose online activity reveals them to be part of socially “harmful” associations, and connected to ideas that threaten the “health and safety” of the commons. The logic used by progressives to suppress speech and assembly that they don’t like, in the name of protecting the health and safety of the “marginalized,” and “vulnerable minorities,” is clear. In the manuscript, I say that we are moving inexorably toward this in our society. I have expected that it will move in fits and starts. Without a totalitarian government already in place, as in China, it will have to be the sort of thing that sneaks up on us unawares.

The events that have occurred in the two months since I submitted my manuscript — the pandemic, I mean — have clarified things. We found ourselves suddenly living in a world in which most of life has been shut down for the sake of saving lives from a pandemic. We are likely to face rolling lockdowns over the next 18 months, or even longer, if it takes more time to invent a vaccine. The economic destruction is and will be incalculable — and this will cause a great political upheaval. People will accept things they might not have accepted in normal times.

One of those things is “contact tracing.” The NYT reported the other day:

In one of the most far-ranging attempts to halt the spread of the coronavirus, Apple and Google said they were building software into smartphones that would tell people if they were recently in contact with someone who was infected with it.

The technology giants said they were teaming up to release the tool within several months, building it into the operating systems of the billions of iPhones and Android devices around the world. That would enable the smartphones to constantly log other devices they come near, enabling what is known as “contact tracing” of the disease. People would opt in to use the tool and voluntarily report if they became infected.

It’s a brilliant idea, and it will work. We may soon find ourselves in a situation where, in order to re-enter the workforce, one has to accept the app and use it. If the other option is more lockdowns, more shutdowns of the economy, which do you think people will prefer? Apple and Google are saying that this will naturally come with privacy provisions in place. I’m sure they will — and I also expect that they will be worthless.

Here’s the thing, though: data companies already track us now. They’ve been doing it for years. Remember back in late March when that cool story came out in which two data companies demonstrated, using tracking capabilities on people’s cellphones, how Fort Lauderdale spring breakers scattered to the entire eastern half of the country? We already have the technological means to do this kind of thing, and it is already legal. It’s not a big leap to create an app to use coronavirus status to track who has it, and with whom they are associating.

This is how we are going to become accustomed to using data to monitor who is associating with whom, for the health of the body politic. Hear me: I am not saying that this is a bad thing, necessarily, though whether or not I think it’s bad won’t matter to a nation that is suffering from the trauma of poverty, and will accept most anything that will make it easier to get back to work. What I am saying is that this is how social surveillance and control is going to be mainstreamed in our liberal democratic society. Once we have established that it is necessary to track people’s associations systematically for the sake of defeating disease, it will be easier, in the near future, to justify tracking people’s associations systematically for the sake of defeating “bigotry,” which threatens the health and safety of official victims.

In early 20th century Germany, a cult of health arose in popular culture; it was called Lebensreform. In journalism of the late teens and early twenties, people began talking about the German nation as a physical body. To guard the health of the body, Germans were advised to be on guard against unhealthy elements, including parasites. It didn’t take long before people began identifying Jews and others as parasites who threatened the health of the body politic.

Does that mean that it was wrong to care about promoting healthy eating, clean living, and public and personal hygiene? Of course not! Nor is it wrong to promote public health measures in our time and place to limit the spread of this deadly pandemic. To the frustration of some readers, I have supported the efforts by civil and religious authorities to limit religious gatherings temporarily, to fight the pandemic. My point is simply that we should be very, very vigilant about how we talk about health and safety, so that we guard against bad actors making malicious political use of proper concern for health and hygiene.

This pandemic is going to cause tremendous social changes, especially changes in the way we all regard the power of the state, the role of technology in our lives, and the limits of liberty. I am a pessimist. I think the oppression of traditional religious believers and social conservatives is coming, and that “contact tracing” of those carrying “unhealthy” ideas is on its way in America — as it already exists in China. It is unlikely to be stopped, because of the rapidly growing secularization and social liberalization of Millennials and younger generations. I believe we have to fight it when we can, but we should absolutely prepare ourselves to live as dissidents, including living some aspects of our lives underground. That is what my next book is about.

The post ‘Contact Tracing’ Of Dissidents appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Pocket Full Of Copperheads

A reader writes:

I am a young Muslim reader of your column for quite some time now, ever since Mr. Ismail Royer once recommended something you wrote. And, considering the present situation, I’ve have a lot more time to read your articles.

Which is why I was baffled by this stance of yours on Pastor Tony Spell and his church. From your article, “Fanatical Pastor Doesn’t Care If Flock Dies”:

“As a Christian, I hope the sheriff will arrest this man and padlock his church for the duration of the pandemic.”

Really? As a religious traditionalist skeptical of secularism (like me), do you really want to see the secular state assume the power to shutter places of worship at will? I’m no fan of this crazed Reverend from what I’ve read of him, as you say, he seems to have a smug, self-congratulatory showboating manner about him, really basking in the (in)famy he is receiving from the mainstream media. But one does not have to be one of his parishioners to find an element of truth in his speeches.

America is currently undergoing a deep moral self-examination, whether it realizes it or not. All of its businesses, all of its services, all of its institutions, have been divided into two categories: essential vs. non-essential. The consequences of this classification will not fade when the pandemic does. Consider the current spats between the NRA and anti-gun people, pro-choice and pro-lifers, over whether gun stores and abortion clinics should remain open. Do you think this has anything to do with the pandemic or our current situation? Of course not! These people are simply attempting to assert the necessity of their institutions in American life. (For the record, as a culturally conservative Sunni Muslim with some libertarian leanings, I am strongly in favor of the former and against the latter).

And thus comes the question of church/mosque/synagogue as a non-essential service, a question that really strikes at the heart of secularism itself. As Charles Taylor (and others) have elaborated the goal of secularism isn’t so much the abolition of religious faith as much as the abolition of its dominance over everyday life, consigning God to the status of a lifestyle choice, just one option, out of many. From the secular perspective then, keeping churches/mosques/synagogues (as you can see, I’m trying hard to be as ecumenical as possible here) open during a pandemic is an absurdity. Why risk human life (the most sacrosanct quality to a materialist) on your personal hobby or lifestyle choice? And while you obviously write from a Christian perspective, I thought I detected a whiff of this sentiment in your article, PLEASE correct me if I am wrong. Because our perspective is exactly the opposite. There are forces in this universe far beyond and more important than the material world, and it is our duty to Him to worship and give obedience. And that is why I say that we should be keeping our religious institutions open for the same reason we keep the grocery stores and hospitals open: because they are essential to human health and thriving.

Great, eventful moments in history are often unnoticed until after they have passed us by. While this is not the homeland of my people (although it is my homeland), you may find in 20 or so years that it was this pandemic that finally “broke” Western Christianity, and led to even ostensibly conservative American Christians to subconsciously view their faith as a non-essential aspect of their lives. Already, one of my friends in the UK has informed me that some Muslims there are actively collaborating to “snitch” on mosques that have remained open despite the shutdown. Mad world.

I thank the reader for a thoughtful letter. I’ve held it over the weekend to respond on Monday, when more people are reading. Let me add this commentary from Sunday’s Pandemic Diary (#26) I received and posted yesterday:

My misgivings about the extreme measures being taken against Covid-19, dating from the moment the bishops rolled over for the lockdown, continue to intensify. Let me state up front that I am taking the virus seriously. I was the first person in my city wearing a mask to the supermarket. With great grief I have put on indefinite hold plans to visit my mother and other aging relations lest we or our kids inadvertently transmit the virus to them. Yet I feel a cold unease about the eagerness of Christians—including you, of all people! to not only cooperate with the shutdown of churches but loudly support it, and even single out for mockery those unwilling to fall in line.

Rod, the suppression of Christianity you’ve long been warning us about? It’s here. It’s happening right now. And you continue to say it’s necessary and morally righteous for us to cancel our services and stay away from the Eucharist. This I do not understand.

I mentioned in that Pandemic Diary that I would return to this in a later post. Well, this is that post. But first I’ve got to quote a great response to it from reader Jonah R., who begins by quoting the diarist:

“It is not only possible but easy(ish) to celebrate Mass without irresponsible social contact … yet it remains forbidden while not only supermarkets and drugstores are open, but liquor, weed where legal, and unedifying entertainment by the terabyte, including porn, can be freely had by all?!”

I say this as someone who agrees with your correspondent that a “drive-in”-style mass should be allowed: He’s imagining a moral dimension to “social distancing” that doesn’t exist. The orders aren’t in place for our moral and spiritual edification. They’re to stop the spread of a virus, period. “Why can’t we gather in church but you can still get pornography online?” is a juxtaposition that makes no sense in the context of stay-at-home orders. And if he doesn’t understand that people gathering in love and fellowship simply act differently, and more contagiously, than people who pop in and out of liquor stores, drug stores, supermarkets or weed dispensaries (where, at least in my county, the number of people inside at one time is now restricted), I don’t know what to tell him.

He’s also myopic to look at the current restrictions and see deliberate suppression of Christianity. He should ask his neighbors, none of whom can gather either: not Muslims, not Jews, not neighborhood book clubs, not fans of Pink Floyd cover bands, not kids who planned their high school prom, not the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes….this is not about him, his church, or his religion. Look, I found it disappointing and unfulfilling to passively watch Easter mass on the Internet…but can you imagine how quickly people meeting in secret, as he did, would cheat on the rules and spread illness? It took just one infected person at a Christian tent revival to send the entire Navajo Nation into crisis. In Lakewood, N.J., where Orthodox Jews are defying state orders, coronavirus is rampant. How quickly does “secret drive-in church service” morph into something with hugs, handshakes, and other close contact by people who push it a little more, then a little more?

All of this stinks, I dearly miss my family and my neighbors and my friends, and I refuse to let it feel like or become “normal,” but this guy—again, with whom I greatly sympathize—needs to sit tight. At least where I live, social distancing is clearly working.

And this morning, one of my sources for my next book, an immigrant Czech Christian who grew up under communism, writes to say, quoting the diarist:

 “the suppression of Christianity you’ve long been warning us about … to cancel our services and stay away from the Eucharist”

That’s not how one suppresses Christianity. To the contrary, I’d say that if your only expression of Christianity is attending a church and olfactory satisfaction, then there is nothing to suppress to begin with. “It is a collapse.” Nope. It’s the exposure of a collapse.

So what do I think? It won’t surprise you that I side with the Jonah R. and the Czech immigrant. This pandemic is a purification of the Church. Those who won’t return to it after the pandemic is over were fair-weather Christians in the first place. One is never happy to see anybody leave the church, but if a Christian is the sort of follower of Jesus who is only willing to be with Him when times are good, then he’s actually a mere admirer of Jesus, not a real follower. If the state began a persecution of Christians, that sort of churchgoer would run away from the church, and deny that he had ever been part of it.

And with Jonah R., I believe that neither state authorities nor bishops and other religious leaders are temporarily banning, or at least voluntarily stopping, religious gatherings for the sake of punishing believers. They are doing it to save lives. As I’ve said over and over, if the lives people were risking by going to religious gatherings during this crisis were strictly their own, that would be one thing. But that’s not how viral transmission works. Another reader sent in a piece about how Hasidic Jews in New York’s Rockland County are being treated with suspicion and hostility, even anti-Semitism, because so many of them will not observe social distancing rules, and how that county has the highest rate of infection in the entire state. There is never any rationale for bigotry, but as a fact of life, if religious people — Hasidic Jews, Pentecostal Christians, any religious group — becomes associated in the public’s mind with the spread of disease, especially if they are seen by the public as flouting rules put in place to suppress the disease, then you will see angry bigotry result.

I have been so hard on the Rev. Tony Spell and his Pentecostal congregation in my own city in large part because I know that people around the US are watching his reckless behavior and forming judgments about all conservative Christians, and about religious liberty. It’s the same thing with the Hasidim of Rockland County. If some of us religious folks show the public that we use our religious liberty recklessly, in a way that satisfies us but literally puts the community in danger, then we should not be surprised if authorities take some of it away.

One thing I really don’t understand about the way some of my fellow religious believers are thinking in all this is that this crisis, and the lockdowns, are about nothing more than competing narratives. That if we can’t gather for Sunday worship, then the secularists win. As Conor Dugan points out in Catholic World Report, those who do gather defiantly may be handing the forces of anti-Christianity an undeserved victory. Excerpt:

Near the end of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI stated that “faith is an incentive to seek always, never to stop and never to be content in the inexhaustible search for truth and reality.” He averred that the “prejudice of certain modern thinkers, who hold that human reason would be as it were blocked by the dogmas of faith, is false.” My deep fear in watching many of my fellow Catholics—especially priests, parish leaders, and theologians—share falsehoods or half-truths is that they are unwittingly proving true the prejudice of those modern thinkers.

In playing into those prejudices these fellow Catholics are undermining our common mandate of bringing people to know and love Christ and serve him in this world and live with him in the next. They are putting barriers in the path of those who might find the faith attractive and compelling, but for the irrationality they see among her adherents. An irony is that many of those Catholics spreading this disinformation are those most forcefully claiming that our bishops are placing worldly concerns ahead of supernatural concerns in canceling Masses. Yet, in their rush to push a certain narrative about the coronavirus, I fear that these fellow Catholics do far more damage to the spread of the Gospel than the temporary cancellation of public Masses in the face of a pandemic. Indeed, they do no service to Christ and those thirsting for his good news by portraying a vision of the faith that is detached from and contrary to reason and reality.

I believe that worshipers — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever — who, as an act of pious courage, refuse to obey the authorities of the state or of their own religious community, and gather anyway in this pandemic, are like snake handlers. They are tempting the Lord in a way that stands to scandalize. This is not the same thing as the brave believers showing up for Paschal worship despite the cathedral being surrounded by the KGB. The virus is not a political entity. It’s a virus! The snake doesn’t restrict its striking to unbelievers. It’s a snake! The thing is, the coronavirus is like what you would get if the snake-handlers left church with pockets full of copperheads, and let them loose unwittingly on everyone they met in the world.

I admit that the Muslim reader (and Christians on his side) have a point when they say this:

And thus comes the question of church/mosque/synagogue as a non-essential service, a question that really strikes at the heart of secularism itself. As Charles Taylor (and others) have elaborated the goal of secularism isn’t so much the abolition of religious faith as much as the abolition of its dominance over everyday life, consigning God to the status of a lifestyle choice, just one option, out of many.

What they’re worried about is the designation by authorities (including religious authorities) that gathering for religious worship is “non-essential.” At the risk of going around in rhetorical circles, reacting to the virus is not a status competition. Every time any of us goes to the supermarket, we risk exposure to the virus — but life cannot go on without food. I don’t understand why gun stores remain open, because life can go on just fine without them. But that is an argument for closing gun stores, not opening churches. Again, I guess it’s because I’ve been doing so much reading over the past year about Christians suffering in communist prisons, and how they intensified their prayer lives even though they were denied communal liturgical worship, but it’s not at all hard for me to grasp how believers can accommodate themselves to a temporary cessation of worship gatherings to suppress a pandemic. I mean, look: it is true that, as Christ said, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4) — but does that mean that we can only receive the word of God, and the experience of God, by gathering in church? I don’t see it.

If the authorities proposed to make bans on religious gatherings permanent, obviously that would be another issue. But they don’t. It’s temporary. Moreover, as Jonah R. said, these directives are not targeting religious believers, but everybody who gathers in groups. If the state could figure out how to get people groceries without keeping the supermarkets open, they would be justified in doing so. It seems to me that the authorities are reasoning from the point of view of trying to figure out what society absolutely has to have open to survive, and designating that an “essential” service. We can argue over whether or not gun stores or liquor stores are “essential,” but I don’t see a strong case that Sunday worship is essential in this narrow sense. If the state, and/or religious authorities, were banning prayer and Scripture reading at home, that would be an entirely different question. But they’re not.

One more thing. My sense is that people like my Muslim and Christian correspondents are seeing this ban on religious gatherings as like the laïcité laws in France and Quebec that ban clothing that expresses religious identity. Those laws, in my view, really are unjust, because they cannot demonstrate any substantial harm to the common good from religious believers wearing crosses, yarmulkes, or hijab. It is about the secular state asserting its power over the public order in a way that suppresses religious expression for no serious good. In the case of the virus, rather, there is demonstrable public harm from large groups of people gathering during a viral pandemic. I believe that it is the moral responsibility of religious believers to show charity towards others by obeying the legitimate instructions of the civil authorities, to say nothing of their bishops and other leaders.

We live in a time when everybody wants to assert their rights, but nobody wants to accept their duties. As Father T.J. White pointed out in his exceptionally strong essay about these matters, in centuries past, when nobody doubted the role of the Christian religion in the social order, civil authorities shuttered churches during plague times; even St. Charles Borromeo, a cardinal archbishop, closed the churches in Milan during a plague. As Father White observes tartly, “It is one thing to make a martyr of one’s self, and another thing to eradicate a nursing home in the process.” That’s precisely what we are dealing with here.

I am a strong defender of religious liberty — it’s the most important thing I vote on these days — but as a practical political matter, if we religious believers are not going to exercise our religious liberty with prudence and reason, with an eye of charity towards all, we may in the future find ourselves deprived of it unjustly. We all know that there are plenty of people on the anti-religious progressive Left who are looking for any reason at all to justify taking away religious liberty from untamed Christians. For example, Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop is back in court now, being harassed by some transgender anti-Christian bigots. We Christians and other countercultural religious believers should be careful not to give these haters ammunition. We have very, very serious battles ahead of us in the years and decades to come. We need to be smart about this stuff now. When we have to take a strong, costly stand — and believe me, that day is coming — let’s stand on something more defensible than “we demand the right to go to church during a deadly global pandemic.”

I’ll end by repeating what I think is a useful simile: going to church during the pandemic is like participating in an Appalachian snake-handler worship service, because it puts the participant in mortal danger. The virus is the poisonous snake, which may or may not bite you. But the virus differs, in that a person who is exposed to it at church could carry it out into the world, and share it unwittingly with every person he meets thereafter. It’s like leaving snake-handler church with pockets full of copperheads, which slide out in the grocery store, and everywhere else the worshiper goes.

UPDATE: A Christian reader writes, tongue firmly in cheek:

Do you know of any Christian leader who has said that churches, as part of their defiance of quarantines, must be willing to bear all of the costs of medical care for those who have caught this virus because of the church’s bravery? Are the leaders of these brave churches urging their members to volunteer for service to those whose lives have been devastated by this disease, e.g., who have lost family members?

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Pandemic Diaries 26

So, how was your Easter? It was Palm Sunday for us Orthodoxes, and let me tell you, I’ve had better Palm Sundays. Happily, this one began with a surprising video from London. As you will have heard, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been released from the hospital after very nearly dying from coronavirus. Here is his Easter message for the people of Britain. It is striking to see and hear the overwhelming gratitude he has for those who saved his life. I bet this experience will end up making him a better man, and a better national leader — and, I hope, a man of faith. May God bless and strengthen all the hospital personnel who care for the sick and dying in this crisis.

It is hard to find the words to express my debt to the NHS for saving my life.

The efforts of millions of people across this country to stay home are worth it. Together we will overcome this challenge, as we have overcome so many challenges in the past. #StayHomeSaveLives pic.twitter.com/HK7Ch8BMB5

— Boris Johnson #StayHomeSaveLives (@BorisJohnson) April 12, 2020

The mononucleosis was particularly acute today. I woke up at 10:30, exhausted. Drank two cups of coffee, watched Boris, then went back to bed. Slept most of the day, waking up every now and then to pray my prayer rope, before drifting off. Mono is such a weird thing for me. When I’m having an episode, my brain is foggy and my eyes burn. I can’t focus on a book, and it’s hard to watch TV. So I sleep and pray. Believe me, it’s not because I’m pious; it’s because there’s nothing else I can do. There’s probably a point to this enforced prayerfulness.

Anyway, it rained most of the day, which makes for good sleeping weather. When I woke up around 5, we read the Orthodox Typika service aloud as a family. After a while, I flopped on the couch in the TV room and watched the first two episodes of Kieslowski’s Decalogue, which a friend loaned me ages ago, but that I’ve not gotten around to watching.

Ever seen it? It’s one of those things that everybody says is fantastic … and they’re right. It’s a ten-part series made for Polish television in 1988, with each one-hour episode a dramatic illustration of one of the Ten Commandments. Let me tell you, it’s hard to find a more depressing setting than a concrete Warsaw high-rise in the dead of winter, in the final years of communism, but man, what a powerful film. Intensely beautiful storytelling — but not the kind of thing you can take a lot of at once, if your recurrence of mono has made your body feel like a concrete Warsaw high rise in the dead of winter in the final years of communism.

So I watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm as a palate-cleanser afterward. And that was my floppy, rainy Sunday. Let’s hear from you.

From the South:

My misgivings about the extreme measures being taken against Covid-19, dating from the moment the bishops rolled over for the lockdown, continue to intensify. Let me state up front that I am taking the virus seriously. I was the first person in my city wearing a mask to the supermarket. With great grief I have put on indefinite hold plans to visit my mother and other aging relations lest we or our kids inadvertently transmit the virus to them. Yet I feel a cold unease about the eagerness of Christians—including you, of all people! to not only cooperate with the shutdown of churches but loudly support it, and even single out for mockery those unwilling to fall in line.

Rod, the suppression of Christianity you’ve long been warning us about? It’s here. It’s happening right now. And you continue to say it’s necessary and morally righteous for us to cancel our services and stay away from the Eucharist. This I do not understand.

So, my Pandemic Diary. We are in a parish in the South that offers the TLM. Last week our heroic priests gave parking lot confessions. I shared my anguish about the way the Church has slid—no, jumped head-first—into “non-essential” limbo. Father agreed and connected me with a different parish which is still holding outdoor Masses. I got the venue information by email. We were asked not to share it publicly. It was strictly limited to “word of mouth.”

Today, Easter Sunday, we packed all the kids into the car and drove 80 miles one way to a field in the middle of nowhere, where Mass was celebrated for a congregation of people in cars. It was the most American Mass ever—and one of the most beautiful I’ve ever assisted at. The stillness made me think of that old spiritual: “So high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get around it, you must go in at the door.” That high, low, wide thing was there in that field like a wall splitting the world, and the door was on the truck-mounted altar. I’ve seen people on the internet, and some of my own offline friends as well, waxing misty-eyed about the unexpected spiritual consolation of live-streamed liturgies. We did the live-stream thing last week and the week before, and I can now confidently say: To Hell with that. I would give a thousand live-streams for one soft clank of a thurible drifting over a field.

I can already hear the busybodies drawing breath to criticize us for “endangering others.” Their warm concern for our health and safety is misplaced. Social distancing was maintained (all stayed in their cars except the handful of altar servers and the two-woman choir; we didn’t take communion). I was in more danger buying gas along the way. It is not only possible but easy(ish) to celebrate Mass without irresponsible social contact … yet it remains forbidden while not only supermarkets and drugstores are open, but liquor, weed where legal, and unedifying entertainment by the terabyte, including porn, can be freely had by all?! I find it very hard to convince myself that this is an excess of caution, let alone a morally justifiable decision. It is a collapse. How does that saying go? “Gradually, and then all at once”?

One other thought that came to me in that field: “This is the future.”

As you know, this is a serious concern of mine. I’ll write about this in a separate post on Monday.

From Texas:

I am a corporate bankruptcy lawyer working at a large, Amlaw 100 law firm. I thought your readers might want to read a little about the impact that the pandemic appears to be having on the business community in Texas and Louisiana (i.e., the part of the country where I practice).

From what I’ve seen, most business Chapter 11 cases have not spiked (yet). Contrary to media depictions, most business people are understanding and generally gracious about this whole situation. I know of several commercial landlords who have simply given their tenants three months’ or more worth of rent abatements in exchange for adding another three or four months to the end of their leases. Many lenders (even large banks) have been similarly understanding. As far as I’m aware, most are working out forbearance agreements with their borrowers rather than trying to force them into foreclosure or liquidation. Everyone knows that these times are unusual and hope that they will be temporary. The Paycheck Protection Program of the 2020 CAREs Act should also be a real life-line for many small businesses and enable them to pay their rent and their employees and otherwise keep their businesses afloat for now. (Of course, as you might imagine, the Small Business Administration’s implementing regulations for the CAREs Act remain a work in progress.)

Unfortunately, the longer this shutdown lasts, the more difficult it will be to avoid serious, long-term economic consequences for American business. Already, major strains are appearing in the hospitality, restaurant, and energy industries. Hotels are basically shut down. They cannot make their loan payments at 5% room-occupancy rates. That just won’t cut it. Still, lenders aren’t foreclosing yet either because (1) most are decent people and appreciate the situation hotels are in right now and (2) they don’t want to own an empty hotel in today’s uncertain market, which is what would happen if they do foreclose. As for restaurants, they face real trouble. Take-out and delivery services just can’t match regular table service. We may ultimately see many restaurants go out of business before this is all over. I hope not, but I don’t see any way out of it.

Finally, the worst-hit sector may well be energy. The energy industry has experienced a double shock, with both a supply glut and an unprecedented decrease in demand. According to the Houston Business Journal (https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2020/04/10/the-week-in-bankruptcies-houston-area-hits-100.html), the Houston Division of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas—where lots of energy-related cases get filed—had recorded 100 Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 business bankruptcy filings by April 3, 2020, which represented an 82% increase over this same period last year. I have personally talked to people at two different oilfield services companies who will have to file Chapter 11 soon if things don’t change fast. People don’t need drillers or sand-producers when no one is drilling new wells. The same tough situation also faces many independent oil-and-gas exploration and production companies. Exxon should be able to ride this out. Those E&P companies with only a few assets in a few marginal fields won’t. And there are many of those small companies out there.

So, the business community has reason to both hope and fear as this pandemic rolls on. Like everyone else, we hope that things will get better soon, but we fear that they won’t. In my case, I try to remember that the Lord who created the universe and gave his Son for our salvation remains in control. It’s harder to remember that on some days than it is on others, though. Today, on Easter (for most of us), is one of the better days.

From Oregon:

I hail from rural Oregon and the virus has not affected us in a large way here yet.  Nevertheless, we’ve been sheltering at home since March 15, the 3rd Sunday of Lent, when orders to cease congregating came from the state and archbishop.  So it’s now almost a month since we last attended Mass.

Even though the virus hasn’t touched me or my immediate friends in the area, it has affected me deeply.  My dear friend in Cambridge UK nearly died.  She developed severe pneumonia and a pneumothorax, but never went to the hospital as she did not “fit the criteria” being imposed by the NHS.  It has been touch and go for weeks, but she is slowly getting better.  (It makes you wonder how many thousands of people simply die at home without being counted as coronavirus victims.)  I am concerned about long term repercussions, but we still don’t know enough about aftereffects yet.

Thoughts of my “vulnerable” state of being over 65 with previous cancer/chemo and autoimmune disease are also present.  Over the last month or so, I’ve been steadily preparing important documents and items I would want to be found in the event of my death, which I have no illusions about.  I know I’ve already been saved many times from death.  It’s good to face the possibility as it sharpens one’s priorities.

Online Masses have been very helpful to keep a continuity of the liturgical year and to participate in some way, but even that has not always been available.  Rural living is wonderful, but if you have an infestation of burrowing ground squirrels that chew on internet cables underground, it makes internet access dodgy, if not impossible.  The cables have been replaced, but I still find connections wonky and unpredictable.  So even the consolation of online inspiration and general connectivity to the outside world has most of these last 3 weeks been withdrawn.

Therefore, Lent became even more ascetical!  Which led me to a lot of pondering about what we really need and what is really essential.  It has been a time for great self-scrutiny and examination.  That is an ongoing process and reveals much to be desired.  For now, the message is:  humility.  Spiritually, I could embrace this situation like the faithful in Communist countries who were barred, on the point of torture or death, from worship; or like the steadfast Christians in Nagasaki, who retained the faith after generations lived without priest or sacraments.  After all, Jesus is still with us, to the end of the world.

On a purely practical level, I also thought about a doomsday scenario in which internet was also withdrawn – what would we do?  What I do know is that the situation worldwide would be catastrophic.  Beyond that, I can only do what makes sense on a practical level:  Learn and relearn the old skills of living that have withstood the tests of time:  sewing, canning, making do with less, making my own yogurt and bread, thinking of creative ways to use what I have for what I need, etc.

Certainly, the constant barrage of information that spews forth from the internet isn’t good for us.  It can become addictive to know the absolute latest in the news of today.  Once I realized that I was “marooned” physically and connectively, I actually felt relief.   I’ve had some sewing projects on hold for months, and I delved into them.  I recently made 2 linen amices for a priest, which required hand-embroidering crosses on each.  What a lovely thing to do, sitting near a bright window, bending my head over the embroidery hoop in the creation of a little red cross.  Meditation naturally follows, then prayer for all our loved ones, for those who are sick and dying, for those people endangering their lives to serve, and for the world.  The pace slows and things become meaningful again, with each stitch.

I also adopted a 5 year-old rescue dog – a little guy that fits into my life like we were made for each other.  He gets me out regularly to enjoy the beautiful spring days, and he offers unconditional loyal companionship.  Another slowing down.

And gardening, seeing the seeds planted weeks ago beginning to emerge from the ground as signs of hope.  Thinking of how to keep the deer away.  More slowing down.

Last night, I was successful in watching the Easter Vigil Mass online, without interruption, and that was a great gift.  From childhood, I always get deeply sorrowful during Holy Week, building up to Good Friday.  By Holy Saturday, I feel that sorrow vanish, replaced by a slowly growing joy.  By the Vigil, I’m about to explode!  It was wonderful to know that, despite not being in church itself, the Easter story is deeply internalized and will never leave me.  He is risen!  Indeed He is risen.

Thank you all for writing. As ever, I am at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and am eager to read more Pandemic Diaries. Don’t forget to say where you live.

UPDATE:

From Port Hadlock, Washington:

We continue our “distancing” in a beautiful woodsy spot on Puget Sound, grateful every day that we can be outdoors without worrying about the six-feet rule. Today, Easter, was particularly precious, a perfect spring day with the water sparkling in a light breeze, and the two of us (one definitely in the high-risk category) still able to breathe.

At 10:00 am we went online for the virtual Easter service at our home church in Seattle. The Lent/Easter season is a typically a real event at this 500 member, 135-year old Presbyterian church, and it includes many traditions. Maundy Thursday is a solemn and mournful service which includes passing a wooden cross through the congregation, and ends with darkening and stripping of the sanctuary and everyone filing out in dark and silence.  By contrast, Easter morning is a most joyous event. Music is a very important part of our worship, and it covers the spectrum from drums, bass, and guitar contemporary to a much-beloved pipe organ and large choir. All play a role in the service, and the congregation sings, energetically and from the heart.

The congregational prayer in normal times involves anyone in the sanctuary who wishes praying out loud. In the virtual service, this isn’t possible, so people post their prayer matters at the side of the screen in the “chat” function and one of the online leaders prays for them as she reads them in real time. The prayers this Easter had a particular intensity as people typed in the names of loved ones in various kinds of distress, as well as dire issues facing the wider world and ministries we support.

The text for the sermon was from Matthew 28, and the sermon was serious and at the same time hope-inspiring. Our head pastor made a point of the angel’s words that Jesus would be “going ahead of you” into Galilee, and what it means that Jesus is going ahead of us as we move through the uncertainty that currently prevails.

One of the most beloved Easter traditions comes at the end of the service when the congregation is invited to come forward to sing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. This morning, at the end our Director of Worship Ministries came on the screen to talk about it. I paraphrase from memory, because I don’t have a transcript. He said something like, “My first Easter at (our church), I was told that at the end of the Easter service the tradition was to invite everyone who wished up to the chancel to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. I thought, Oh…kay, let’s see how this goes… So at the end of the service, I gave the invitation, It took a long time for everyone to pack into the chancel, about a third of the congregation. The organ gave the intro, and I gave the downbeat, and…oh my goodness! Halfway through the song I wasn’t directing very much because I was crying.” He went on to say that church members had sent him Youtube links to various virtual choirs, and thus inspired, he put in a couple of weeks of work on it. (My wife and I got the invitation with about four days left before deadline, and we struggled mightily with the technology, but we got our little recordings done after many attempts, as did quite a few others). So the Hallelujah Chorus was sung after all, and the tradition was upheld. After the service, it was put up on Youtube and we were sent a link. For those of you who would like to hear it, here it is:  https://youtu.be/Q1Osb5rqPCs.

I’m sure we’ll remember this Easter for the rest of our lives. May God bless and keep you all in humility and health.

 He is risen indeed!

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