Rod Dreher's Blog, page 159

Gollum’s Coronavirus Lesson

Can you stand one more bit about how Christians ought to be reasoning through this pandemic crisis? I hope so, because at Mere Orthodoxy, Brad Littlejohn, a political theory professor, has written the best thing I’ve yet seen about that topic. Excerpts:

The current crisis, in fact, affords Christians an unprecedented opportunity to persuasively articulate our defense of life to a culture that might at last be ready to listen. For the first time in decades, our materialistic society has been put on pause, and people are looking around and asking themselves, “What is this all for? What is the value of human life? Am I willing to sacrifice my freedom to protect my neighbor? Can I sacrifice some comfort to protect life?” As Christians, we can use this opportunity to seize the megaphone and remind those around us of the transcendent value of human life and the frivolity of the kind of “freedom” that our culture so values. Or, we can squander this moment and go down in history as those who stood callously by and said that a few hundred thousand more American deaths is a small price to pay for maintaining our standard of living.

Littlejohn, who is responding to Rusty Reno’s essays objecting to social distancing as a surrender to “death’s dominion,” talks about clearly defining the moral issue in front of us. Here, Littlejohn articulates with great clarity something I’ve been trying to say, but with my usual logorrheic indulgence:

The first thing we must do is get clear on what question exactly is being asked of us. Reno seeks to frame the issue in terms of the Christian duty to be fearless in the face of death, but this, I think, rather misses the point. The call to social distancing is an appeal first and foremost not to self-love, but to love of neighbor. Even if you are young and healthy and more than happy to endanger your life by going about your daily routine, that does not give you a right to endanger others, which is precisely what an invisible, often asymptomatic virus may cause you to do. Christians are called to faith and hope, to be sure, but also to love. Traditionally, Christians have taught that the sixth commandment imposes on us not merely an obligation not to kill but to do whatever we reasonably can to preserve life: “The duties required in the sixth commandment are, all careful studies, and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves and others…” (Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 135). So the proper framing of this question is: “is it more loving to our neighbor to increase the number of people who will get sick and die in the near term, or to decrease our economic well-being in the near-term (thus, presumably, increasing sickness and death in the long run)?”

Littlejohn says that it’s not at all wrong to think about this in terms of tradeoffs — indeed, that’s what moral reasoning is. We really do have to think about how far we should go to try to preserve life, and what the costs of those measures might be to life. Littlejohn offers a powerful way of conceiving the tradeoff:

This is the kind of moral question that social distancing poses. Indeed, to put it in the most concrete possible terms, imagine that you have an older friend who is depressed and suicidal. You can drive over to their house, comfort them, give them a hug, and risk possibly infecting them with Covid-19. Or, you can keep your distance, leave them alone, and risk letting their depression take its dark course? This is in effect the question we are being asked to answer on a society-wide level (and the answer may look very different on that level than when considering an individual friendship): do we choose isolation so as to avoid endangering others here and now? Or do we try and choose normalcy, so as to avoid imperiling livelihoods now—and thus more lives in the long term?

The heart of the essay — I’m not going to quote it here because I want you to read it — is how Littlejohn navigates between “sentimentalism” (the idea that we have to save every life, no matter what the cost) and “utilitarianism,” the idea that human lives can be reduced to figures on a spreadsheet. You’ll want to read his thinking, in part because it involves Gollum. I’m serious.

In his conclusion, Littlejohn makes in a few sharp lines the same point I made meanderingly in my “Of Poverty And Crooked Hearts” post earlier today: that for many of us, our anxiety over fear that economic pain from an extended shutdown might be worse than the disease itself is really fear of losing our way of life. He writes:

Behind the anguished cry, “But the economy!” I suspect, is a futile grasping after the mirage of freedom that is now fast slipping away—the idea that we can and should be free to make our own decisions about our lives without regard to the effects of these decisions on those around us, that you’re welcome to give me advice about when it’s safe to leave my home, but how dare you give me a command? Such freedom—the freedom to live independent from natural constraint, independent from coercive authority, and independent of considerations of the public good—may be the freedom that Olympian gods aspired to, but it was never Christian freedom or a viable political reality.

Christian freedom means love of neighbor, and this begins with the Sixth Commandment.

Read the whole thing. To learn more about Brad Littlejohn, see here. 

I’m afraid that so far, many of the familiar Christian leaders have failed to distinguish themselves in their commentary and actions in the face of this unprecedented crisis. One thing that I hope this crisis does will be to bring to national prominence new voices, like Brad Littlejohn’s. We are in a new era now, though most Christians don’t realize it yet. They will.

Brad Littlejohn

The post Gollum’s Coronavirus Lesson appeared first on The American Conservative.

Miss Clophine, Witness

Here’s a story I tell in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. I had forgotten about it till I found my way back to the manuscript this afternoon, looking for a quote.

Clophine Toney — “Miss Clophine” to us growing up — was very poor. She was a dear Cajun woman who lived near us out in the country, and who was friends with my mother. She didn’t have an education. She had a heart. When she died, they buried her in a new suit of pajamas. I don’t know, I think the witness of her son, James, a country preacher, might be important to all of us in this time of national trial:

Miss Clophine Toney died in hospice care that spring. She was 82. On the day of her burial, I picked Mam and Paw up and we drove to the funeral home in Zachary. James, her son and my childhood peewee baseball teammate, eulogized his mother. I knew my old friend had become a part-time evangelist, but I had never heard him preach. He stayed up all night praying for the right words to say. He stood behind the lectern next to his mother’s open casket, flexed his arms under his gray suit and black shirt, then turned the Spirit loose on the 40 or so mourners in the room.

“During Christmastime, my mother would go out and pick up pecans,” he began, in his husky voice. “She wasn’t very well educated. Today they tryin’ to educate us in everything. Gotta stay with the next game, gotta make sure we go to college. We can’t get too far behind, because we might not make enough money, and that would make our lives miserable. My God, we gettin’ educated in everything, but we not gettin’ educated in morals. We not gettin’ educated in sacrifice.”

James said his mother was poor and uneducated, but during the fall pecan season, she worked hard gathering pecans from under every tree she could find.

“She was carryin’ a cross,” he said. “Because let me tell you something, if you don’t sacrifice for your brother, if you don’t sacrifice for your neighbor, you not carrying your cross.”

Miss Clophine took the money she made selling pecans and went to the dollar store in St. Francisville, where, despite her own great need, she spent it on presents for friends and family.

“Aunt Grace told me the other day that of all the presents she got from everybody, those meant the most,” James said. “Why? Because there was so much sacrifice. She sacrificed everything she made, just to give.”

James pointed to Mam and Paw, sitting in the congregation.

“She used to give Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy presents. And I’ll say this about Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy Dreher, they were so close to my mother and my father. They sacrificed every year, whether my mother and father have enough to give them a gift of not. They gave. We talkin’ about sacrifice. We talkin’ about whether you’re carryin’ your cross today.”

As a child, James said, he would cross the river into Cajun country to stay with his Grandma Mose, Clophine’s mother. There he would eat a traditional dish called couche-couche, an old-timey Cajun version of fried cornmeal mush. Grandma Mose served couche-couche and milk nearly every morning, and little James loved it.

“But every now and then,” he continued, stretching his words for effect, “we wouldn’t eat couche-couche and milk. We’d eat something called bouille.”

Bouille, pronounced “boo-yee,” is cornmeal porridge, what the poorest of the Cajun poor ate.

“I didn’t like bouille. I frowned up. Mama made me that bouille sometime. Bouille tasted bad. It wasn’t good,” he said. “But let me tell you something: you may have family members, and you may have friends, that will feed you some bouille. It may not be food. They may not be treating you the way you think you ought to be treated. They may be doing this or doing that. You may be giving them a frown. But we may be talking about real sacrifice.”

James’s voice rose, and his arms began flying. This man was under conviction. He told the congregation that if a man lives long enough, he’s going to see his family, friends, and neighbors die, and no matter what their sins and failings, the day will come when we wish we had them back, flaws and all.

The preacher turned to his mother’s body, lying in the open casket on his left, and his voice began to crack.

“If my mama could give me that bouille one more time. If she could give me that bouille one more time. I wouldn’t frown up. I wouldn’t frown up. I would eat that bouille just like I ate that couche-couche. I would sacrifice my feelings. I would sacrifice my pride, if she could just give me that bouille one more time.”

I glanced at Mam, who was crying. Paw grimaced and held on to his cane.

“Let me tell you, you got family members and friends who ain’t treating you right,” James said, pointing at the congregation, his voice rising. “Listen to me! Sacrifice! Sacrifice! — when they givin’ you that bouille. Eat that bouille with a smile. Take what they givin’ you with a smile. That’s what Jesus did. He took that bouille when they was throwing it at him, when they was spittin’ at him, he took it. He sacrificed.

“My mother didn’t have much education, but she knew how to sacrifice. She knew that in the middle of the sacrifice, you smile. You smile.”

The evangelist looked once more at his mother’s body, and said, in a voice filled with the sweetest yearning, “Mama, I wish you could give me that bouille one more time.”

James stepped away, yielding the lectern to the hospice chaplain, who gave a more theologically learned sermon. Truth to tell, I didn’t listen closely. The power and the depth of what I had just heard from that Starhill country preacher, James Toney, and the lesson his mother’s life left to those who knew her, stunned me. And it made me thing of Ruthie, who lived and died as Miss Clophine had done: taking the bouille and giving, and smiling, all for love, as Jesus had done.

This was true religion. James showed me that. I tell you, the greatest preacher who ever stood in the pulpit at Chartres could not have spoken the Gospel any more purely.

The funeral director invited the congregation to come forward and say our last goodbyes to Miss Clophine before driving out to the cemetery. I walked forward with my arm around Mam’s shoulder. We stood together at Miss Clo’s side. Her body was scrawny and withered, and it was clad in white pajamas, a new set, with pink stripes. I felt Mam tremble beneath my arm. She drew her fingers to her lips, kissed them, and touched them to Miss Clophine’s forehead. In that moment, I thought of the Virgin Mary’s song, from the Gospel of Luke:

He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat,

And hath exalted the humble.

He hath filled the hungry with good things,

And the rich he hath sent empty away.

What a gift James Toney gave us then. What does it mean to eat the bouille in this time of testing? What does it mean for you?

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Of Poverty And Crooked Hearts

My friend Andrew T. Walker tweets:

Caring about the economy does not make someone an Ayn Rand acolyte. A proper understanding of economic health understands its intrinsic connection to public health. The “economy versus life” argument is contrived.

“The economy” is your neighbor’s ability to feed his family.

— Andrew T. Walker (@andrewtwalk) March 27, 2020

On that front, here are a couple of e-mails from readers:

I’m a pilot. Lost my job in 2008, spent most of the next four years unemployed. I had relatives to stay with but I still went through all my savings, getting dental work, going to futile job interviews, and other unavoidable expenses.

I’m unemployed again. I may get back to work after months, years, possibly never, probably at a much reduced income. I now have a wife and a small child with special needs. I have replenished my savings and have a small inheritance so I won’t be homeless or starve, but any kind of security or retirement may well be gone.

Likely solution is we all move to my wife’s home country after some months and live with the in-laws. People are murdered there for their cell phones every day. Or maybe they will go and I’ll live here in my car and try to get work.

And the really funny thing is, I’m better off than many, many people. Many millions who don’t have savings, don’t have relatives to go to, and will not be making rent next month. (April 1 is less than a week away, we will see things start to get real then.)

All the good people seem to agree it’s rough, but yes will will need to stay in quarantine for six months or so. Absolutely necessary to save lives! Only a monster would disagree! Well maybe April will be containable, but May? The small amount of relief will barely pay rent, and many people won’t get it.

Other countries seem to be able to manage without the shutdowns. We have been told ridiculous, bald-faced lies, that masks don’t work, that travel bans don’t work, it’s just the flu, don’t give in to fear, go out and enjoy life. Most of this did not come from Trump, but as long as they can blame Trump, they have emotional comfort. Trump wants a quick resolution, but so do Cuomo and other liberals, because I think they too realize this can’t go on too long.

Telling people after three months in their cramped apartments (if they haven’t been evicted and are homeless) that they want to murder your grandmother because they want to go back to work and not be destitute isn’t going to work.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

Another e-mail:

Regarding the growing debate on when to “move on” (for lack of a better phrase) with the economy, it is certainly possible that we may survive the pandemic only to succumb to the poverty of another Great Recession (the second in a generation).

If we learned anything from the opioid crisis and the oft-reported “deaths of despair”, we might have learned that poverty of the sort created and exacerbated by the Great Recession kills.

If we look at overdose deaths alone over the past couple of decades, we see that we lost many, many more of our fellow human beings to deaths induced by economic despair than we stand to lose from coronavirus; even by the most dire projections.

We also know poverty’s impact on the birthrate, which further reduces the headcount. The entire political system of modern western social democracies depends on a birthrate that is at least at replacement level. The Great Recession demonstrably lowered the birthrates of many western nations as adults deferred (or outright declined) having children.

Lastly, we know that poor countries and poor areas of wealthier countries are among the worst polluters. Poverty induces the cutting of corners in order to cut prices and keep expenses as low as possible. Polluted areas also frequently result in medical maladies and shortened lifespans of people living there.

So yes, coronavirus kills. Poverty kills, too. And unlike naturally occurring viruses, poverty is the result of human decision-making. We have much more control over the latter than the former. One can recognize this and still refrain from putting money above all else.

It is neither improper nor unseemly to make decisions concerning mitigation of coronavirus with an eye towards the fallout from the poverty being created by same. Such an analysis could arguably determine that flattening the coronavirus curve creates a poverty curve with its own mortality rate. It’s not unlike a half-filled water balloon. Clamping down on one part causes the other part to rise.

I don’t see this as an issue where one is obliged to defend their pro-life bona fides. “You only care about the unborn and not the elderly!” is a non starter. I refuse to be baited into appearing insufficiently pro-life.

There is absolutely no apples to apples comparison to be made between deliberately terminating a pregnancy by human intervention and someone succumbing to a naturally occurring virus despite all reasonable efforts made to save them.

As with so many other issues in our hyper-partisan age, the answer likely lies somewhere between “Not one more life lost” and “Not one more dollar lost.”

That’s true. It is hard to know what the cumulative effect of lives lost from economic depression will be. Nobody can predict that. What we have to be clear about is how much our concern for lives lost to poverty is really a cover for fear of poverty for ourselves. After all, there were a lot of poor and desperate people in this country prior to the arrival of coronavirus. Were we all that concerned about them then?

I’m not trying to troll people; I’m just trying to make sure we’re honest with ourselves. I’m talking to myself too. I’m watching the retirement security that my wife and I have carefully built over the past 16 years of careful investing blown to bits. None of us can count on our jobs being here through this. I don’t have any marketable skills that don’t involve writing. I have a mortgage, and kids. Poverty, and all the insecurity that comes with it, frightens me too. I’m old enough to remember my father’s stories about his rural Depression childhood. I’m not that far removed from poverty, historically.

I’m thinking right now about my sister Ruthie, who died of cancer in 2011. You longtime readers know the story, which I told on this blog first, and then in my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. For those who don’t know the story, Ruthie was two years younger than I, and did all the right things, according to the code of my family. She married her high school sweetheart, she lived in our hometown (as opposed to her brother, who went out into the world), she built a house in the country across the gravel road from our folks, and raised her three daughters there. She was a schoolteacher who was active in the community, and physically healthy. Never smoked. One day, she started coughing. By the time they discovered the lung cancer, it was too late to save her.

From the book:

Sitting on my front porch on Fidelity Street one warm winter’s day, I asked Tim Lindsey, Ruthie’s physician, what the biggest lesson of her life was.

“That the American dream is a lie,” Tim said. “The pursuit of happiness doesn’t create happiness. You can’t work hard enough to defeat cancer. You can’t make enough money to save your own life. When you understand that life is really about understanding what our true condition is – how much we need other people, and need a Savior — then you’ll be wise.”

When you’re young, nobody tells you about limits. If you live long enough, you see suffering. It comes close to you. It shatters the illusion, so dear to us modern Americans, of self-sufficiency, of autonomy, of control. Look, a 42-year-old woman, a wife and mother and schoolteacher in good health and in the prime of her life, dying from cancer. It doesn’t just happen to other people. It happens to your family. What do you do then?

The book came out in 2013. I’ve done a lot of thinking about Ruthie and my family since then. One thing that’s in the book, but which didn’t stand out so clearly to me at the time I wrote it, is the death-grip that denial had on my sister and my family. On the night before she died, Ruthie, by then reduced to skin and bones, conceded to her best friend that maybe it was time for her and her husband to have a talk about how she might not survive. This, after 19 months of chemotherapy. The next morning, she had some kind of embolism, and died on the floor of her living room. None of her family was prepared for it. They — including most of all Ruthie — had all been living in a kind of spell, thinking that what was happening to her, right in front of her eyes — that she was wasting away with incurable cancer — wasn’t really happening. So they didn’t prepare themselves, psychologically or otherwise. I don’t say this as a judgment on them at all. It was a testimony, though, to the all-too-human capacity for denial.

Every one of us is subject to this. It’s in our nature. As the years have gone by, I’ve been able to appreciate better how the myth that my Louisiana family lived by — that nothing really bad would happen to us if we stayed there on the ridge in Starhill and lived by the code — was shattered by my sister’s untimely cancer death. It was the kind of thing that Auden talked about in his great poem “As I Walked Out One Evening”, in this verse, which speaks to how death upends all our plans of perfect harmony:

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

And Jill goes down on her back.

Auden counsels the newly enlightened:

‘O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

I’m thinking about my dead sister, and my Louisiana family, because in what happened to us I see the danger in fear of poverty, which is really a fear of death. My family was not rich by any stretch, but the deeper poverty of having my sister, in the prime of her life, taken from them was unthinkable. The people of the town offered resilience, but in the end, my sister’s death shattered a myth. Our inability as a family to find resilience after the shattering of that myth doomed us. We did not love our crooked neighbor, with our crooked heart. But that’s a story for another day.

My point is this: there is a greater poverty than being materially poor, and that poverty is death. If we Americans believe that living in middle-class comfort is the same thing as life itself, then a lot of things we love are not going to survive our impoverishment. Today Peter Leithart writes about this current apocalypse:

When God comes near, he strips away the fig leaves, our defenses and delusions, and brings hidden things to light. In the United States and Europe, the pandemic may reveal many things: The fragility of our sense of invincible security; the frivolity of our entertainments; the risks of globalization and the risks of insurmountable national boundaries; the frayed condition of our social relations. Our confidence in science may be shaken—whether because the experts’ modeling drastically overshoots or because science can’t save us. Coronavirus may put a nail in the coffin of libertarianism, convincing everyone that only massive collective action can protect us in times of mortal danger. It may, on the other hand, be a blow to statism, if the massive collective action backfires.

The main thing exposed by any apocalypse is the state of the heart. God tested Israel with manna to “know what was on your hearts” (Deut. 6), and his word cuts through to expose the thoughts and intents of the heart (Heb. 4:12–13). We will come through this, and that reprieve will be as critical a test as the crisis has been.

We have to learn to love our crooked neighbors, with our crooked hearts. What else is there? If we don’t, we are going to miss the opportunities to defend and renew life in the ruins of the temples of our idols. Every single one of us will be put to the test — indeed, are now being put to the test. Me, I’m a weak person, a hobbit to the fingertips, and that means someone who loves comfort. I’m a middle-aged version of the child Flannery O’Connor talked about in her short story “Temple Of The Holy Ghost”:

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

She could stand to be shot but not to be burned in oil.

I think I could live bravely and with stability through the death of my wife from cancer. But the catastrophic reduction of my family into poverty, and the radical instability that comes with it, because of this virus? I don’t know. I hope I can do my duty, but the impoverishment of the American middle class is something I’ve never had to think about. Look, I rail at so many fellow middle-class Christians who remain defiantly self-blinded in the face of evidence that the faith is disappearing in America, criticizing them because their rejection of the Benedict Option thesis is not based on logical argument, but on a desperate conviction that this catastrophe cannot happen to people like us. But I have a bad feeling that I’m the same way about the prospect of being poor.

This post has gone into a place I didn’t foresee when I started writing it. I feel the need to say that I’m not at all making light of poverty, and the deaths of despair that will surely come if the virus pushes large numbers of Americans into poverty. Intellectuals, especially Christian intellectuals, have to guard against thinking of poverty as an aesthetic mode. (Me, at 23: “Maybe I should go to Prague and be poor and bohemian and have an interesting life!” Thank God I didn’t do it.) There is nothing romantic about it. And, as Andrew T. Walker rightly says, people who are feeling morally high and mighty about those who fear poverty ought to understand that for most people, we’re not talking about not being able to pay for lacrosse lessons for the kids, and a junior year abroad. We’re talking about being able to pay rent and put food on the table.

But notice something important. In the sociological analysis of deaths of despair, we have seen that this phenomenon falls disproportionately on white people. Blacks and Hispanics are much more psychologically resilient in the face of poverty and limitation. Why? No doubt because they have had to build their lives around the reality of limits, and to learn to find joy in things that cannot be purchased. I would love to know if black and Hispanic people are freaking out right now as bad as white people are, by the prospect of being poor. I bet they aren’t.

There is a reason why Jesus speaks of the poor as blessed. It cannot be because he was sentimental about poverty. Growing up in the rural South, I saw a fair amount of poverty, and can tell you that poverty can make people bad and crazy. One blessing of poverty, though, at least from a spiritual point of view, is that you are under no illusion about your ability to control your world. It is all too easy for that to degenerate into a self-destructive fatalism (that is, the belief that you can do nothing to improve your prospects), but it can also be an opportunity for Christian virtue — recognizing that there are more important things in life than material gain and comfort, and that the right way to live is to trust in God and to do your best to love your neighbor and to relieve their suffering — and when you can’t take their suffering away, then to suffer with (com + passio) them.

Wednesday we observed the Feast of the Annunciation. Do you remember what the Virgin Mary said to the Archangel Gabriel when he told her that she was going to bear the Messiah?

My soul magnifies the Lord

And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;

Because He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid;

For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed;

Because He who is mighty has done great things for me,

and holy is His name;

And His mercy is from generation to generation

on those who fear Him.

He has shown might with His arm,

He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.

He has put down the mighty from their thrones,

and has exalted the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich He has sent away empty.

He has given help to Israel, his servant, mindful of His mercy

Even as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.

Can we be sure that the virus is not God scattering us, the proud, in the conceit of our hearts? That it is not God’s way of putting down the might from our thrones? I’m not talking about the Donald Trumps and the Bill de Blasios; I’m talking about you and me, middle-class Americans who, because of that fact, are among the wealthiest people who ever lived.

There is a certain kind of conservative Christian who likes to quip that maybe persecution would be good for us, because it would make us stronger Christians. Nobody who has read accounts of modern persecution, or spent any time (as I have done this past year) with those once viciously persecuted for their faith, could say such a thing. We shouldn’t welcome persecution, but if it’s coming, we should be prepared to meet it as Christian men and women. Similarly with poverty and disease. Now is a time to repent of the comfortable Christianity that made sense as a helpmeet of middle-class stability. It will not tell us what to do when we are sick and poor. It is a myth that will not survive the shattering. Instead, we need a Christianity of solidarity, one that will help us to love our crooked neighbors, with our crooked hearts. Don’t doubt for a second that it could go the other way. We know what mass poverty and instability did to the people of Germany in the period between the wars. It could happen here too, if we aren’t careful.

How do we get to where we need to be? How do we get to the point where we can see the suffering of the unemployed pilot with a special-needs child, and reach out to help him through this crisis, as the people of my town reached out to help my late sister and her family through her cancer? I’m not sure. I’m cloistered in my hobbit hole, groping my way along the same path with the rest of you. Part of our repentance is, and must be, a deep self-interrogation of our fear of poverty, and the limits it imposes. This is how most of the world must live today. This is how most of our ancestors lived. It is we who live within the illusion of control, given to us by our wealth and technological prowess. That is being taken away from us now. We can’t control that, but we can control how we react to it. If you are looking for something to read right now, in this strangely cloistered Lent, read Chris Arnade’s book Dignity, which is about being poor in America.

It’s a confusing time of apocalypse. I’m looking into my own heart in light of the unveiling, and I don’t like a lot of what I see. I am trying to repent as well, trying to use the Gospel to light the way through the enveloping darkness, so I don’t lose the straight path, and so that I can build the strength to keep going on it, come what may. Forgive me, a foolish, lazy sinner who thinks he might be able to be poor, as long as they don’t turn off the air conditioning.

 

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Covid-19 Denial Diarist

In Rusty Reno’s March 26 “Coronavirus Diary,” he writes:

Rod Dreher, like many of my friends, has adopted the view that pro-life Christians are obligated to preserve life at any cost. This requires one to hold, as a matter of principle, that physical death is the greatest evil, since preventing death is the highest good. No ancient philosophers held such a view. Nor did the Old Testament prophets. Jesus certainly didn’t.

Levin observes that the view that death is the greatest evil was first articulated by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, and Bacon. Their materialist view—physical suffering and death are the gravest threats—has a compassionate side. We devote ourselves to preventing death, which is of course often fitting and sometimes obligatory. My concern is that the well-intended rhetoric of compassion, amplified by denunciations of any who dissent from the present “at any cost” mentality, will contribute to the reduction of public life to purely materialist considerations.

But that’s not true. That’s not what I said in the blog post to which he is responding. This is what I actually wrote:

Furthermore, there really are some things worth dying for, but going about one’s business as a man about town in Manhattan is not one of them. Nobody is asking Reno or anyone else to deny Christ; they’re just asking him to deny himself the pleasure of others’ company for a period, for the sake of saving lives.

And:

We cannot have it all. We cannot save both lives and our economy. Nature, in the form of a deadly virus, forces this choice on us. We have to hope that our leaders will do their best to save lives and limit economic destruction, but when hard decisions have to be made — and they are having to be made daily by those in authority — we have to take risks on the side of life. As I wrote yesterday, quoting Flannery O’Connor, “You can’t be any poorer than dead.”

Reno is moving the goalposts here. I plainly didn’t say that Christians are obligated to “preserve life at any cost.” And, his first column, the March 23 one that provoked all the controversy, made a good point about how we cannot save every life, and turned it into a weird lament over the moral and religious cowardice of social distancing policies, claiming that they amount to “an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death” and a cowardly surrender to “death’s dominion.”

He wrote:

We, by contrast, are collectively required to cower in fear—fear that we’ll die redoubled by the fear that we’ll cause others to die. We are stripped of whatever courage we might be capable of. Were I to host a small dinner party tonight, wanting to resist the paranoia and hysteria, I would be denounced. Yesterday, Governor Cuomo saw young people playing basketball in a New York City park. “It has to stop and it has to stop now,” he commanded. Everyone must live under death’s dominion.

Look at what’s happening to New York City’s hospitals now, and try to maintain with a straight face that being told you can’t have a small dinner party amounts to the state making geldings of magazine editors. It’s just perverse.

Reno is trying to turn a basic public health measure, based on biology (this is a highly infectious virus) and the fact that New York City hospitals are engaged in a heroic struggle to save lives, even as the peak of the epidemic is likely three weeks off, into a moral and philosophical problem. In today’s diary, Reno writes:

We devote ourselves to preventing death, which is of course often fitting and sometimes obligatory. My concern is that the well-intended rhetoric of compassion, amplified by denunciations of any who dissent from the present “at any cost” mentality, will contribute to the reduction of public life to purely materialist considerations.

That’s a total straw man: attributing extreme statements to all his critics, things that we have not said. Recall that in his original post, Reno wrote:

Everything for the sake of physical life? What about justice, beauty, and honor? There are many things more precious than life.

And he accuses his critics of “disastrous sentimentalism”!

One hundred people died yesterday of coronavirus in New York City alone — and the number of COVID hospitalizations increased by 40 percent. But hey, “Won’t somebody please think of the justice, beauty, and honor?!”

Nobody is asked to deny Christ here. They’re only asked to deny themselves temporarily for the sake of saving lives, and the common good. Somebody said something about justice…

I’ll slightly agree with Rusty here, though:

As a society, we are acting on the technocratic assumption that a total mobilization of society can significantly reduce the death toll. This frames nearly every death from the coronavirus as “preventable.” From the outset, I’ve had deep misgivings about this approach. My concerns have not been epidemiological (an area of expertise in which I have no right to an opinion). They have been political, social, and spiritual. By emphasizing the technological promise and the rhetoric of preventable death, often amped up to extremes with “at any cost” moralism, we are ensuring that this crisis will go on and on, reverberating in society for a long while to come. This will bring many unforeseen changes—as well as recriminations, reparations, and reprisals.

I agree with him on the point that the virus is devastating the technocratic assumption that we can control Nature with the right application of money, technology, and willpower. But Rusty’s claim goes far beyond that. He is ignoring epidemiological facts to serve a “political, social, and spiritual” narrative that he prefers. I’m not an epidemiological expert either, but this chart, tracking 1918 flu deaths in Philadelphia and St. Louis, demolished Rusty’s argument. St. Louis imposed social distancing on its population; Philadelphia did not. Look what happened:

Rusty may wish to argue that all those lives saved were not worth the “political, social, and spiritual” costs of the lockdown. If that really is his point, I’d say that is a decadent one — the same kind of argument that we heard from some gay rights advocates at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, when they argued that closing the bathhouses would impose an unacceptable cost to the liberty of gay men.

If that is not his point, I hope he will clarify the difference is between his logic and the logic of the 1980s “don’t close the bathhouses” advocates.

(I shouldn’t have to say this, but because some people have a habit of assuming that people arguing online means that they are enemies, let me reiterate that Rusty is my friend, and I have a lot of respect for him. And, I have a soft spot for contrarians, always. I just think he is very seriously wrong on this question.)

The post Covid-19 Denial Diarist appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump: Let Them Breathe Cake

Tonight on Sean Hannity’s show, President Trump said (just past the 25:40 point) that people are exaggerating the number of ventilators needed in this crisis. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” said the president.

From The New York Times on Thursday:

What is really needed, a number of public health experts and former government officials say, is for Washington to take control of the nation’s existing ventilator supply. Because peak coronavirus infections will hit cities and regions at different times in the coming months, a centralized federal effort could send unused machines to hospitals that need them most.

“This is a national crisis,” said Frank Kendall, who served as under secretary of defense for acquisition and logistics in the Obama administration. “In a time of scarcity, you can’t leave it up to companies and governors to manage it themselves.”

Mr. Kendall said that only the federal government had the authority to take over the allocation of ventilators, both from manufacturers who are in the business of selling devices to the highest bidder, and state leaders unlikely to voluntarily let go of machines they fear they might need in the future.

“As the states become more desperate, someone has to referee the situation,” he said. “The marketplace isn’t set up to do that.”

The United States currently has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators, but could need up to a million machines over the course of the outbreak, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine. In New York, the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., hospitals are already on the verge of running out, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said this week.

More:

Mr. Trump’s solution has been to push the private sector to voluntarily address the shortage. In a Twitter post on Sunday, he encouraged the big car companies to jump in to help make ventilators, and General Motors and Ford responded with announcements that they would partner with medical device companies to produce the machines.

But military experts say Mr. Trump could also tap the logistical prowess of the Pentagon and the legion of defense contractors primed to quickly solve complex challenges. The federal government could address problems in the global supply chain that are depriving ventilator companies of the components they need to increase production.

Read it all. 

Gov. Cuomo said this week that New York alone would need 30,000 ventilators in the next few weeks to cope with the crisis. But Trump said on Hannity tonight that he didn’t believe that. Naturally, lickspittle Hannity didn’t challenge him.

A lot of people are going to die because of what Donald Trump believes. Earlier this week, Gov. Cuomo exhorted the president to invoke the Defense Procurement Act to compel businesses to manufacture ventilators. Cuomo explained that businesses are ready and willing to do this, but the need the start-up capital that only the federal government can provide — and would provide under the Act. In an emotional conclusion, he said that thousands and thousands would die from a lack of ventilators. Watch this:

Why isn’t Trump using the DPA to speed the production of ventilators? From a NYT story the other day:

Administration officials, asked why they have been reluctant to use the full force of the Defense Production Act to press industry into action, say the country is not in such dire straits. There is plenty of volunteer cooperation, they say, and there is always the implicit threat of ordering mandatory measures if they do not. Mr. Trump, at the news briefing, suggested an ideological concern as well. “We’re a country not based on nationalizing our business,” he said.

More:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the heads of major corporations have lobbied the administration against using the act. They say the move could prove counterproductive, imposing red tape on companies precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories.

Mr. Trump and the director of his national economic council, Larry Kudlow, as well as Mr. Kushner, were persuaded by those arguments, administration officials said.

To be clear, Trump is not making an argument that the DPA would be counterproductive. Tonight on Hannity, Trump said that he doesn’t believe there’s a need for all those ventilators!

On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said that the state could run out of ventilators as early as next week. A lot of people here in Louisiana are going to die from lack of ventilators. The machines that the President of the United States, in all his wisdom, says we don’t need.

To be clear, there is no way to get enough ventilators — complex machines — manufactured in time to meet the need. But Trump is not even willing to use the powers of his office to initiate the attempt. He’s not even making an argument for why it would be pointless to try to manufacture them. He’s just saying that he doesn’t think they’re needed. Maybe he was talking about New York alone with that figure. Even if so, again, doctors and governors are saying that nationwide, we have a staggering shortage of ventilators — a shortage that only government intervention under the DPA can begin to alleviate. We may not be able to get them manufactured quickly enough to save many people in crisis now, and over the next few weeks, but as Dr. Fauci and others have said, we’re going to have a second wave of coronavirus cases this fall and winter.

From The Hill:

Governors are also urging the Trump administration to play a larger role.

“We would really like some help, because, otherwise, you’re left to just beg, borrow and steal from wherever you can get these things,” Edwards, the Louisiana governor, said on PBS Wednesday night. He said the state has requested 5,000 ventilators from the federal stockpile but has not heard back yet on the request.

“And so we are asking the federal government to have a bigger role in this,” he added. “Because I don’t know that it gets sorted out in the short term any other way.”

What is wrong with this man, Donald Trump? I listened to that entire Hannity interview on Thursday night, and it was mostly self-praise by Trump regarding his crisis response, and bitching about how unfair the media are, and how unpleasant the governors of Washington and Michigan are to him. We are living through nemesis.

UPDATE:

[Note: Took down the Andy Slavitt tweets, after he retracted them]

Meanwhile, the Times reports:

The White House had been preparing to reveal on Wednesday a joint venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators to respond to an escalating pandemic when word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.

The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology.

More:

At the center of the discussion about how to ramp up the production of ventilators is Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House aide, who has told people that he was called in two weeks ago by Vice President Mike Pence to produce more coronavirus test kits and who has now turned his attention to ventilators.

He has been directing officials at FEMA in the effort. Two officials said the suggestion to wait on the General Motors offer came from Col. Patrick Work, who is working at FEMA. Some government officials expressed concern about the possibility of ordering too many ventilators, leaving them with an expensive surplus.

They’re afraid they’ll build too many? This is what they’re worried about in this crisis?!

UPDATE.2: A Michigan news station reports:

After President Donald Trump issued scathing comments about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, saying she’s “not stepping up,” and “doesn’t know what’s going on,” she told WWJ 950 the state is having trouble getting the equipment they need to fight the novel coronavirus.

“What I’ve gotten back is that vendors with whom we’ve procured contracts — They’re being told not to send stuff to Michigan,” Whitmer said live on air. “It’s really concerning, I reached out to the White House last night and asked for a phone call with the president, ironically at the time this stuff was going on.”

The other stuff was Trump speaking with Sean Hannity on FOX News about Whitmer, a Democrat who has said very pointed things about the federal government’s lack of coordinated response to the coronavirus crisis. Trump said of Whitmer, “She is a new governor, and it’s not been pleasant … “We’ve had a big problem with the young — a woman governor. You know who I’m talking about — from Michigan. We don’t like to see the complaints.”

If true, that is beyond disgusting — POTUS not sending medical supplies to Michigan because its governor won’t kiss his rear end.

Former NYT reporter Alex Berenson lays into the Times for the “we need a million ventilators” story. Here’s the whole thread. Excerpts:

Here’s a link to the actual SCCM paper. 

OK, so we don’t need a million new ventilators. But would it kill us to put 100,000 on order, and start training extra personnel to get ready for the fall and winter spike?

UPDATE.3: Oh Lord have mercy:

General Motors MUST immediately open their stupidly abandoned Lordstown plant in Ohio, or some other plant, and START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!! FORD, GET GOING ON VENTILATORS, FAST!!!!!! @GeneralMotors @Ford

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 27, 2020

The post Trump: Let Them Breathe Cake appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump: ‘Let Them Breathe Cake’

Tonight on Sean Hannity’s show, President Trump said (just past the 25:40 point) that people are exaggerating the number of ventilators needed in this crisis. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” said the president.

From The New York Times on Thursday:

What is really needed, a number of public health experts and former government officials say, is for Washington to take control of the nation’s existing ventilator supply. Because peak coronavirus infections will hit cities and regions at different times in the coming months, a centralized federal effort could send unused machines to hospitals that need them most.

“This is a national crisis,” said Frank Kendall, who served as under secretary of defense for acquisition and logistics in the Obama administration. “In a time of scarcity, you can’t leave it up to companies and governors to manage it themselves.”

Mr. Kendall said that only the federal government had the authority to take over the allocation of ventilators, both from manufacturers who are in the business of selling devices to the highest bidder, and state leaders unlikely to voluntarily let go of machines they fear they might need in the future.

“As the states become more desperate, someone has to referee the situation,” he said. “The marketplace isn’t set up to do that.”

The United States currently has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators, but could need up to a million machines over the course of the outbreak, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine. In New York, the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., hospitals are already on the verge of running out, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said this week.

More:

Mr. Trump’s solution has been to push the private sector to voluntarily address the shortage. In a Twitter post on Sunday, he encouraged the big car companies to jump in to help make ventilators, and General Motors and Ford responded with announcements that they would partner with medical device companies to produce the machines.

But military experts say Mr. Trump could also tap the logistical prowess of the Pentagon and the legion of defense contractors primed to quickly solve complex challenges. The federal government could address problems in the global supply chain that are depriving ventilator companies of the components they need to increase production.

Read it all. 

Gov. Cuomo said this week that New York alone would need 30,000 ventilators in the next few weeks to cope with the crisis. But Trump said on Hannity tonight that he didn’t believe that. Naturally, lickspittle Hannity didn’t challenge him.

A lot of people are going to die because of what Donald Trump believes. Earlier this week, Gov. Cuomo exhorted the president to invoke the Defense Procurement Act to compel businesses to manufacture ventilators. Cuomo explained that businesses are ready and willing to do this, but the need the start-up capital that only the federal government can provide — and would provide under the Act. In an emotional conclusion, he said that thousands and thousands would die from a lack of ventilators. Watch this:

Why isn’t Trump using the DPA to speed the production of ventilators? From a NYT story the other day:

Administration officials, asked why they have been reluctant to use the full force of the Defense Production Act to press industry into action, say the country is not in such dire straits. There is plenty of volunteer cooperation, they say, and there is always the implicit threat of ordering mandatory measures if they do not. Mr. Trump, at the news briefing, suggested an ideological concern as well. “We’re a country not based on nationalizing our business,” he said.

More:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the heads of major corporations have lobbied the administration against using the act. They say the move could prove counterproductive, imposing red tape on companies precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories.

Mr. Trump and the director of his national economic council, Larry Kudlow, as well as Mr. Kushner, were persuaded by those arguments, administration officials said.

To be clear, Trump is not making an argument that the DPA would be counterproductive. Tonight on Hannity, Trump said that he doesn’t believe there’s a need for all those ventilators!

On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said that the state could run out of ventilators as early as next week. A lot of people here in Louisiana are going to die from lack of ventilators. The machines that the President of the United States, in all his wisdom, says we don’t need.

To be clear, there is no way to get enough ventilators — complex machines — manufactured in time to meet the need. But Trump is not even willing to use the powers of his office to initiate the attempt. He’s not even making an argument for why it would be pointless to try to manufacture them. He’s just saying that he doesn’t think they’re needed. Maybe he was talking about New York alone with that figure. Even if so, again, doctors and governors are saying that nationwide, we have a staggering shortage of ventilators — a shortage that only government intervention under the DPA can begin to alleviate. We may not be able to get them manufactured quickly enough to save many people in crisis now, and over the next few weeks, but as Dr. Fauci and others have said, we’re going to have a second wave of coronavirus cases this fall and winter.

From The Hill:

Governors are also urging the Trump administration to play a larger role.

“We would really like some help, because, otherwise, you’re left to just beg, borrow and steal from wherever you can get these things,” Edwards, the Louisiana governor, said on PBS Wednesday night. He said the state has requested 5,000 ventilators from the federal stockpile but has not heard back yet on the request.

“And so we are asking the federal government to have a bigger role in this,” he added. “Because I don’t know that it gets sorted out in the short term any other way.”

What is wrong with this man, Donald Trump? I listened to that entire Hannity interview on Thursday night, and it was mostly self-praise by Trump regarding his crisis response, and bitching about how unfair the media are, and how unpleasant the governors of Washington and Michigan are to him. We are living through nemesis.

UPDATE:

NOW: A major hospital in the Midwest has reached its limit on ventilators minutes ago.

They are handing out forms saying that only those “with the best chance of survival” will get care. Others will be getting pain medication. 1/

— Andy Slavitt @

Pandemic Diaries 11

Photo above is my Pandemic Diary from today. Covey Rise Farms, local farmers from a nearby parish, scheduled a visit to my part of the city today, to deliver sacks of what’s fresh on their farm this week. I was worried about what was going to happen to farmers at the Baton Rouge farmers’ market, given that nobody can go to it. Covey Rise is bringing the farmers’ market to the people. You can’t shop, but you can pay $30 and get the bag of assorted fresh vegetables. They came to a nearby neighborhood from one to three pm today. I drove over and bought one of the sacks, which had all kinds of greens, carrots, onions, parsley, sweet potatoes, and other things. They’ll be back next Thursday, and so will I.

This is an old style of farm-to-table commerce called “CSA” (Covey Rise explains its CSA here). Readers of Crunchy Cons will remember me talking about discovering the CSA in my Brooklyn neighborhood back in 2002. I didn’t know people still did CSAs, but I’m glad to know that there’s one available in my neighborhood. My wife was just in the kitchen washing the greens. The spicy smell of fresh arugula fills the kitchen now, and makes it smell like springtime.

From Wichita, Kansas, Russell Arben Fox writes:

This has been a week of triage for our city. The county commission finally submitted to medical opinion (and political pressure) regarding the need to order many businesses and places of public gathering to close for the sake of minimizing the potential spread of the coronavirus. Now the question becomes the classic one which arises in every emergency, every instance of limited resources: what can be sustained, what can be changed, and what can’t be saved? Like many people in Wichita, toward the end of last week I made time to check in on places of business I was most worried about surviving the loss of commerce which this order–and, let’s be honest, the even stricter ones likely to follow it–is going to entail. But what I worry about the most isn’t the loss of the diverse food my favorite restaurants provided, but rather the spaces they created. And no spaces are more important that Wichita’s bookstores.

Watermark Books & Cafe (full disclosure: my wife worked there for over eight years) has had to cancel all its book clubs, reading groups, and story times. Sarah Bagby and her management staff have had to let their booksellers go, and close their doors, which has been a terrible loss for their College Hill neighborhood–to say nothing of the innumerable elementary and middle schools which Watermark regularly brought authors out to–which the store has become so entwined with over the years. Eighth Day Books, the tiny linchpin of a sprawling spiritual community (the Eighth Day Institute, of which I am a member) that connects together churches and faith groups throughout the whole region, is focusing on online and phone orders, as EDI’s regular gatherings, like the Hall of Men, have had to be suspended, and access to the store limited, with the small, devoted staff of Eighth Day hunkering down to weather the storm. And Prairie Dog Comics, home of some of the best RPG game nights anywhere in the state (and where I buy my daughters copies of Ms. Marvel), has had to pack up its tables and end its evenings of gaming, restricting itself to fulfilling phone and online orders, and only allowing browsers into the store on a strict reservation basis. All of this, and more, doesn’t just threaten businesses–it threatens a by-product of commerce which is far more important that the commercial transactions themselves: namely, people getting together and sharing their literary passions, their spiritual insights, their geeky delights, with those in the same space.

I know we’re lucky in some ways. A New York Times columnist, when mourning the people of NYC being forced to isolate themselves, quoted a psychologist talking about how much easier people in cities adjacent to rural spaces may have it in comparison to folks in really big cities, where coronavirus outbreaks have been most severe. The loss of socially enriching spaces will be felt differently “if you’re able to stroll around your farm and pick the produce you’ve been growing,” as opposed to those who are “living in a one-bedroom apartment with three roommates” whom they have to nonetheless keep separated from. Since it’s still not hard for me to drive a half-hour to nearby farms to get fresh produce and meat, there are ways in which the loss of these essential spaces isn’t weighing down our family too much yet. At the same time, a city like ours, perhaps exactly because common places of complex interaction and community feeling are spread far apart and are relatively few in number (not to mention too easily bought out and torn down by local financial players), when a crisis comes it is that much easier to retreat to our private locales, set aside public concerns, and forget about the ways in which a city could be made more resilient in the face of threats to its urban existence. Perhaps, though, surviving this pandemic will bring about a change.

First we have to survive it, though, and that means helping our essential places survive, even if–maybe especially if–they aren’t considered “essential” in the eyes of the government. Talking with Warren Farha, the owner of Eighth Day Books, this week, he expressed his determination to find a way through this challenge, and get to the other side. People–maybe not all the people, all the time, but enough of them, often enough–want and need to come into a place they know, among people they know, looking for the books and art and insight they know they will love, if they can only find it. “You can’t replace all that with online shopping,” Warren said to me; “the door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something larger than themselves.” Maybe they’re not going to come in for a time, he admits–but that just means the desire will be all the greater afterwards, or so he heops. I think our job, as we sort out our next steps in this unprecedented week we’ve experienced, is therefore to find ways to triage our limited time and dollars, and to deliver them in whatever ways we can to help keep these wonderful places alive, until the community connections they enable are able to fully bless our city once again. I’ve no simple solution as to how any particular Wichitan can or should do that–but I’m pretty we should all think about how.

From Boston, an update from an earlier diarist who has terminal cancer, and was facing the prospect of dying unattended by family in the hospital because of coronavirus. When last we heard from him, he was trying to get into a hospice. He writes today:

Hello Rod, hope all is well with you and your family. I just wanted to update my status and hope for some more prayers

Transfer to hospice took longer than expected as the state/hospital/hospice/someone wanted two negative tests for corona before discharge. Then it was one. We did one; 28 hours, negative! But then they did say they would need that second. We did two; 24 hours later, negative and time to go.

A huge irony happened, the day of my discharge. It was my 37th birthday. So, there I was, in the back of an ambulance, clutching my hospice decision paperwork, having just signed them papers as the birthday boy, as we drove through Boston at 6-7pm with no traffic.

Terrified, here I am. Thanks for listening. And for any prayers you can spare.

Please, everybody, pray for D. On his 37th birthday, headed to hospice to prepare to die.

From Jefferson County, Washington:

We live in Seattle, but we decided almost two weeks ago to make the two hour trip (including ferry) to our little summer cottage in the woods on Puget Sound. Since then we have only seen other people warily avoiding each other during our one grocery trip and on the local trails in the state and national parks. Our church has gone to Zoom online for the duration, and my wife’s school district has also moved online. I have a small retirement business in Seattle that is listed in the “essential” classification. The young staff are struggling to keep it open for now.

I’m deeply grateful to God that we are able to be here. So are my daughters in Seattle, who fear for their “elderly” dad and want us to stay isolated. Here in rural Jefferson County there have only been seven cases so far, in contrast with the 1,400 confirmed in King (Seattle’s) County. The nearest sizable town, Port Townsend, is a postcard Victorian port heavily dependent on tourism, which is of course shut down at the moment. On the brighter side, this is still the off-season, and these businesses are structured to survive the slower times. I think everyone hopes to hang on until restrictions can be eased in time for some vestige of the tourist season.

We watch woodpeckers and hummingbirds at our feeders, read, cook, bake, work a little, split firewood, scan the water for wildlife, walk, cycle…there’s plenty to do and no boredom. The lockdown will eventually end, it’s just a question of how and when. We thank God for every day and ask for another one, if it be His will.

From the Northeast:

Virtual communities are becoming more and more important, without question.

I’m Episcopalian, and I’ve been a member of a number of churches over the years, since I lived in a number of dioceses. I’m on the electronic mailing list for most of the parishes I was a member of, and this has become especially important in the midst of this pandemic.

Prior to this, the newsletters were about updating the parishioners on the latest happenings. But the pandemic has shifted things. I’m finding a richness of resources for worship. The bishops in the dioceses have done a great job at advising the parishes, and a good number of them have virtual services of some type. They were doing this even before a state of emergency was declared in my city and state. So I have all kinds of services I can access, including those at National Cathedral in DC.

I always do Morning Prayer from the Daily Prayers for Individuals and Families section of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. I’m thinking of adding Evening Prayer. An Episcopal priest I follow on Twitter has explained how he is using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for an Evening Prayer service. It’s one I like. I remembered the Anglican Rosary I bought some years ago, and dug it out the other day. I’ll aim to incorporate that as well.

I always went to Sunday services, and I always went to the gym several times per week. But my gym is closed and that is a dramatic turn. So I bought some home exercise equipment. My gym is suspending membership payments, and that bothers me. The gym is staffed by young people I’d see all the time. They are trying to make ends meet the best I can. Some are in school. I have no problem with paying my dues for the duration, if it means they will get paid. I’m willing to make the sacrifice.

I was planning to get my hair done, but with the salons closed, and nowhere to go anyway (smile), I can live without going.

So this is a weird place for me, I used to go out just about every day, at least six times per week: gym, shopping, meetings with friends, appointments. So I’m now going out at most two days per week, and only for necessities.

And yet, being at home isn’t a problem. I’m a writer, and so I was at home alot anyway, notwithstanding the Covid-19 social distancing. Plus, I was always cooking and baking anyway. I hardly ever bought us takeout, and so that’s not an issue now. If anything, I stopped buying take out and eating out prior to this.

From southern California:

I have not been sleeping well. Our son has been running a fever—typical baby stuff, I am sure—but has been wailing for his [physician] mother, who has been sequestered for the past few days working. Yesterday, she took the day off (she is suffering the wages of this today, when she awoke to several hundred emails). She brought him to the local hospital, where his normal pediatrician sees patients, and where they are setting up a triage center in the parking lot. I went to the local grocery, which I was surprised to find empty of people and relatively well provisioned with food. And it was not only the vegan stuff on the shelves, which even here seems to be a food of last resort. I got strawberries, which my son loves.

I was thinking about the Reno piece. I have read First Things for many years and have found his writing to be penetrating. Now it seems to me that the moral law of large numbers—which holds that in sufficiently large numbers, people are not people anymore—has already taken over our reasoning, or at least that of some of us. Reno’s idea of virtue is really virtue’s foil, and he is not at all describing the difference between dying and killing: he is describing two kinds of killing. What is virtuous about letting the sick and weak die, and then burying them in mass graves, or incinerating them collectively (corpses remain infectious after all). This is what is going on in Italy, China, and Iran, and it is ugly. I would ask him what is dignified or courageous about this, or how it advances anything beautiful. I don’t understand how what he—and many others I see—proposes is different from mass euthanasia. Worse, maybe: the descriptions of what this disease feels like reminds me of nothing so much as the descriptions of victims of gas attacks in the First World War.

Consider:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

—“Dulce et decorum est” by Wilfred Owen, who was killed on November 4 1918 on the Western Front.

And it hasn’t even been two weeks!

I hope things feel less grim in Louisiana.

From New York City:

Thank you for your pandemic diaries. I find the different voices encouraging and comforting. We are all in this together.

I am a 67 year old man living in Manhattan. For 13 years I have been living with cancer. Initially, doctors gave me little hope, but with the intervention of a life saving clinical trial I am still here. Not well, but well enough. 2 weeks ago, I underwent another of the monthly treatments I have been undergoing for over 10 years.

So I fit the profile of someone at high risk for contracting the disease and experiencing its more frightening complications.

Making matters worse, on February 1st – I began a 3-week cruise around Australia and New Zealand.

Upon arriving home I became ill with chills, fever, muscle aches, sore throat, etc. I immediately saw my doctor and was tested for the standard viruses, all negative. He could not test for Covid-19.

I self quarantined and after a week my symptoms improved. After another week they were mostly gone. This week I contacted my doctor about being tested. He said it is not possible as I am no longer symptomatic. He believes I had an early, mild case of the virus, but without an antibody test it is impossible to confirm.

I hope my story helps those isolated and scared. I fall into one of the worst categories for the disease and seemingly have come out fine. Of course, without a Covid-19 or antibody test it is impossible to know if I was actually infected.

But it is likely. As it is likely many of your readers are/will become infected. Most will experience varying degrees of illness, but the vast majority will recover. Even those at highest risk.

I don’t wish to downplay the danger of this virus, but instead provide perspective.

I hope my experience helps.

From Milwaukee, Uncle Chuckie risks his reputation as the Arch Fiend, and instructs the Cosimanian Orthodox to put on their psionics helmets and travel to hospitals to offer comfort to those suffering from Covid 19. Uncle Chuckie as an agent of mercy? He will never live this down! The instruction begins around the four-minute mark:

From Tulsa, Oklahoma:

Hi from Tulsa, Oklahoma, our new home of five months after 25 years in Southern California. We moved here along with my husband’s parents (also from Socal) because huz is an only child and his folks, in their mid-70s, were really starting to slow down. We needed to live close by, but they couldn’t afford to move near us and we couldn’t afford to move near them. Since we both have extended family out here and my job is remote-able—plus you can get a lot more house for the money!—we all packed up and moved into two houses a few minutes apart.

My in-laws are old-time Pentecostals of the “claim the blood of Jesus and go about your business” tribe. They did so, in spite of our respectful then increasingly insistent warnings. Between bad theology and Fox News, both are now in the hospital.

My father-in-law is doing okay, thus far needing only supplemental oxygen and steroid breathing treatments, but in the wee hours of last night my husband had to give verbal consent to a DNR order for my mother-in-law. She has been in ICU on a ventilator since Saturday, and now everything is shutting down. We are waiting on a call this morning so that my husband can gown up and sit with her as she passes. He has not yet told his father.

We have been self-quarantined since a week ago Monday, when FIL was here to help huz install a new water heater. Our seven-year-old has asthma and we’ve been doing daily breathing treatments to keep his airways nice and clear—but thus far, none of us has symptoms (thanks be to God). We have a wonderful church community that is giving us great support, spiritual and otherwise (praying the morning office together on Zoom is a deep consolation). Two other friends dropped off grocery items on the front stoop yesterday.

We are at once blessed and heartbroken.

Five months ago, they all moved to Tulsa to live together. And now this. These are days.

UPDATE: From St. Louis, Missouri:

In Saint Louis, the full fury is not yet upon us. My wife works at a large teaching hospital, which is eerily quiet as they have cleared out inpatients, canceled elective surgeries, and otherwise tried to prepare for what’s coming. Specialists, who haven’t walked a ward in years, have been polled to determine what their general skills are and how they can be deployed in the coming emergency. The hospital has circulated an online training course to ‘refresh’ emergency room skills. The university is collecting PPE from research labs to donate to the hospital. Everyone is just waiting, waiting…it’s the silent moment between the lightning and the thunder.

Our case numbers put us about 12 days behind New York. We have have shut down the city earlier here. Saint Louis is rightfully proud of its strong public health actions in 1918 and this has been a rallying cry to succeed again. I pray that we do.

At home, I’m teleworking and parenting my daughter whose school is closed. I am thankful for this time with her. While I am not in a high-risk age group, I have a medical condition that puts me at higher risk, and am trying to be cautious. I’m angry at those whose heads are in the sand, who are unwilling to do their part by staying home. The ones for whom my wife puts herself on the line each day. I admire her more than ever.

The little moments with my daughter seem brighter now – playing in the backyard, gardening, baking cookies, reading. Welcoming my wife home each evening (after she disinfects). Grateful for each day of my family’s health. We are reasonably prepared and we have been extraordinarily privileged. Perhaps we’ll be wise enough, when this is over, to remember what is important. And to give thanks. Memento mori.

The post Pandemic Diaries 11 appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Amazing H-E-B

One of the blessings of living in Texas is the H-E-B supermarket chain, especially its premium Central Markets. But all H-E-B stores are good, and they’re owned by a Texas family. Texas Monthly has a great story about how H-E-B has been preparing for a moment like this since 2005 — and ramped up its preparation earlier this year. If only the federal government had the sense of a Texas supermarket chain! Excerpts:

San Antonio-based H-E-B has been a steady presence amid the crisis. The company began limiting the amounts of certain products customers were able to purchase in early March; extended its sick leave policy and implemented social distancing measures quickly; limited its hours to keep up with the needs of its stockers; added a coronavirus hotline for employees in need of assistance or information; and gave employees a $2 an hour raise on March 16, as those workers, many of whom are interacting with the public daily during this pandemic, began agitating for hazard pay.

This isn’t the first time H-E-B has done a good job of managing a disaster—it played an important role in helping the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Harvey in the immediate aftermath of the storm—which led us to ask: How did a regional supermarket chain develop systems that allow it to stay ahead of a crisis as big as this one? We spoke with nearly a dozen employees, executives, and customers to better understand—in their words—how H-E-B has taken on its unique role in shaping its business around the needs of Texans in the midst of trying circumstances.

More:

Justen Noakes, director of emergency preparedness, H-E-B: Just a little bit of history: we have been working on our pandemic and influenza plan for quite a while now, since 2005, when we had the threat of H5N1 overseas in China. That’s when we first developed what our plan looked like, [as well as] some of our requirements and business implications. In 2009, we actually used that plan in response to H1N1, when the swine flu came to fruition in Cibolo, and refined it, made it more of an influenza plan. We’ve continued to revise it, and it’s been a part of our preparedness plan at H-E-B ever since.

Craig Boyan, president, H-E-B: Justen leads our emergency preparedness with a group of folks, and that is a full-time, year-round position. We are constantly in a year-round state of preparedness for different emergencies. We keep emergency supplies at almost every warehouse and have water and other supplies staged and ready to go and kept in storage to make sure that we are ready to [react quickly] when a crisis emerges, whether it be a hurricane or a pandemic. We take being a strong emergency responder in Texas, to take care of Texas communities, very seriously.

On January 15, Wuhan’s Municipal Health Commission announced that the novel coronavirus was spreading via human-to-human transmission. 

Justen Noakes: So when did we start looking at the coronavirus? Probably the second week in January, when it started popping up in China as an issue. We’ve got interests in the global sourcing world, and we started getting reports on how it was impacting things in China, so we started watching it closely at that point. We decided to take a harder look at how to implement the plan we developed in 2009 into a tabletop exercise. On February 2, we dusted it off and compared the plan we had versus what we were seeing in China, and started working on step one pretty heavily.

Craig Boyan: Starting in January, we’ve been in close contact with several retailers and suppliers around the world. As this has started to emerge, we’ve been in close contact with retailers in China, starting with what happened in Wuhan in the early couple of months, and what kind of lessons they learned. Over the last couple of months, [we’ve been] in close contact with some of our Italian retailers and suppliers, understanding how things have evolved in Italy and now in Spain, talking to those countries that are ahead of us in the curve. We’ve been in daily contact, understanding the pace and the change and the need for product, and how things have progressed in each of those countries.

Read it all.It’s a fantastic story — very encouraging, and an example of how to behave in crisis. The logistical planning here is just amazing. I’m so grateful to Texas Monthly for bringing us an inspiring story like this.

Anybody have a similar story about a business performing well in this crisis? Please share it.

I’m pleased to share with you this coronavirus clip below from H-E-B’s president. My favorite thing about living in Texas was H-E-B’s Central Market. The original Austin location where my new fiancée and I bought chips, salsa, and Veuve Clicquot to drink the night we got engaged in 1997. The Lovers Lane store in Dallas was my happy place when we lived in that city from 2003 to 2010. Every time I go back to Dallas, I go buy and stock up on hundreds (not kidding!) of CM tortillas, which we freeze and try to make last until one of us gets back to Texas. If you’re a Texan, you’re lucky to have H-E-B. That is some capitalism I can celebrate like Coach Taylor and the Panthers winning the state championship.

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The Value Of Human Life

A reader writes:

1. The whole world, perhaps for the first time in human history, is focused on one problem and nobody knows what to do (world wars were really only between a few major powers even if they had consequences for everyone; that nobody knows what to do is evidenced from the range of expert opinions from this to this)

2. The question of the value of each human life vs. money (root of all evil?) is at the center of the developing debate

If I were making a recipe for an apocalyptic cocktail, well, I’d think I’d only be looking for the garnish at this point.

Well, some good news: the lead researcher on that Imperial College paper has dramatically walked back his estimates for expected mortality in this crisis. It was so quick a turnaround, and so dramatic, that I can’t help but be skeptical about it. But let’s hope it’s true. Even if it is true, the horror scenes in Italy and Spain are real, not made up. No city and no country wants to see what we’re seeing there — and right now in New York City. New Orleans is set to be the next epicenter, in part because of all the people who were infected at Mardi Gras. But if we keep up the social distancing, we will force a peak on this virus, and maybe we can get back to work in a couple of months. Even if the death rate is much lower than we feared, that’s still a hell of a lot of people if this thing spreads widely. It’s a mere statistic until it’s your mother, your husband, your best friend.

Whenever this ends, and whatever the death toll when it does, we are learning a lot about who we are, based on what we care most about. This is why this world-historical event is “apocalyptic,” in the sense of an unveiling. It’s an X-ray into the kind of people we are.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s fair to say that either we care about human life or we care about filthy lucre. In the real world, we make decisions all the time about how to balance risk with opportunity. If we had no speed limits on the highways, we would maximize freedom to go as fast as you want, but we would have more deaths. If everybody had to drive at 30 mph, we would have fewer deaths, but the burden that would place on society, and on commerce, would be something few people would be willing to tolerate. When I grew up, nobody used the seat belts in cars. They were thought to be silly nanny-state accoutrements. But things changed, and we came to believe that that inconvenience was worth it to save our own lives.

We will make the same kind of moral calculus in our collective coronavirus response. This is normal. We don’t have enough resources to give everyone the same level of treatment. Italian and Spanish doctors are having to make terrible decisions about who to treat, and who to let die. That these decisions are unavoidable makes them tragic, not evil. But what about the decisions we make under somewhat less dire circumstances? How do we determine when the economic pain from lockdowns is worse than the likelihood of more deaths if we don’t shut down? People like to say, “If only one person was saved because of what we did, it will have been worth it” — Gov. Cuomo said so the other day — but that’s not how anybody actually lives. Again, if we ban cars, lots of lives will be saved … but it will not have been worth it.

How do we know when it’s “worth it”? My general view is that we should have a strong bias towards saving life. I strongly identify with what Southern Baptist pastor Russell Moore writes:

A generation ago, the essayist and novelist Wendell Berry told us that the great challenge of our time would be whether we would see life as a machine or as a miracle. The same is true now. The value of a human life is not determined on a balance sheet. We cannot coldly make decisions as to how many people we are willing to lose since “we are all going to die of something.”

A life in a nursing home is a life worth living. A life in a hospital quarantine ward is a life worth living. The lives of our grandparents, the lives of the disabled, the lives of the terminally ill, these are all lives worth living. We will not be able to save every life. Many will die, not only of the obviously vulnerable but also of those who are seemingly young and strong. But every life lost must grip us with a sense of lament, that death itself is not natural but is, as the Bible tells us, an enemy to be withstood and, ultimately, undone.

That means we must listen to medical experts, and do everything possible to avoid the catastrophe we see right now in Italy and elsewhere. We must get back to work, get the economy back on its feet, but we can only do that when doing so will not kill the vulnerable and overwhelm our hospitals, our doctors, our nurses, and our communities.

And along the way we must guard our consciences. We cannot pass by on the side of the road when the elderly, the disabled, the poor, and the vulnerable are in peril before our eyes. We want to hear the sound of cash registers again, but we cannot afford to hear them over the cries of those made in the image of God.

Read it all. And let me be clear: we are all going to have to pay more taxes, at least for a while, to pay for what the government has had to do for the American people during this mass emergency. I believe that the burden of these taxes should fall on the wealthiest, but I also believe that people like me — not wealthy, but solidly middle class — should accept our part of this sacrifice for those who have less.

Ronald Brownstein writes about how this question is playing out politically. Excerpts:

How much do the healthiest people in society owe to the most vulnerable?

That question—about Americans’ capacity for shared sacrifice—was at the core of the struggle over repealing the Affordable Care Act during the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency. Now, it’s resurfacing in the escalating partisan debate over responding to the coronavirus crisis.

In designing the ACA, then-President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats put a premium on policies that encouraged more sharing of medical and financial risk among those with greater and fewer health needs, such as requiring insurers to guarantee coverage to consumers with preexisting conditions. During the repeal fight in 2017, Trump and congressional Republicans condemned those same efforts, arguing that the law required the young and healthy to sacrifice too much to reduce the risk to the old and sick.

A similar divergence is emerging as the country grapples with the social and economic strain of containing the rapidly intensifying outbreak. In his public comments this week, Trump—amplifying a chorus of conservative economists, elected officials, and media figures—has effectively argued that shutting down the economy is imposing financial pain on more people than can be justified by the number of lives the restrictions will save. Democratic governors, such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo, counter that the broader society has an obligation to save as many of the most vulnerable as it can, whatever the pain to the many. “Job one has to be to save lives,” Cuomo declared in a video he released Tuesday. “We are going to fight every way we can to save every life that we can.”

These contrasting perspectives place the parties in the same position they were in not only during the recent attempts at repeal but also during the initial debate over passing the ACA in 2009. “It absolutely is a parallel there,” says Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “It’s very much about the social compact and how much cost do I have to incur to help my neighbor, who may be in greater need than I am?”

Read it all. 

Again, the question is not a stark either/or (i.e., “You love life or you love money”). Nobody is a purist on either side, or can afford to be. The question, though, has to do with where we draw the line. I do not believe that Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who said old folks like him ought to be willing to die to preserve the economy for the young, is right. I don’t believe the value of life is measured by the degree to which we are living in middle-class comfort and stability. But to be fair to Patrick, he said he was willing to sacrifice himself for others. He’s not demanding that others die so that he might live as he prefers to. What bothers me about Patrick’s argument is the belief that the lives of the old are not worth imposing serious economic cost on the young. What does that kind of argument say about how we measure the value of human life, versus wealth? I’m sure Patrick didn’t mean this, but it might be implied from his calculus that the lives of the poor aren’t worth living. Read me clearly: I don’t think Dan Patrick is saying the poor don’t deserve to live. Rather, if death of the old and weak is acceptable to preserve the standard of living for the younger generations, why would it not also be true that the poor are expendable so that those with a higher standard of living will be able to continue living as they do?

What are you willing to give up to support those who have lost, or are losing, nearly everything in the virus-caused collapse? I don’t expect any of us to have a clear answer now. But we need to be thinking hard about it, because one way or another, the question of what kind of lives are worth saving will come up. It’s really a question of what kinds of lives are worth living. Sorry to go all Godwin on you, but the German doctors of the early 20th century came up with the concept of “life unworthy of life,” to justify (at first) killing the disabled and those with serious medical problems. We all know where that ended up. Conservatives, especially conservative Christians, have spoken out against abortion and euthanasia — two practices generally supported by liberals — in favor of natural death, because we believe that life is sacred. Liberals, on the other hand, value personal autonomy so much that they support the idea that one has a right to decide whether or not to bear a child when one falls pregnant, and the terms on which one will leave this life.

If you believe that some lives aren’t worth living, though, on what grounds do you tell libertarian-conservatives that they should have to pay a significant financial price, against their will, to support a lifesaving effort that will disproportionately benefit the old and unproductive?

And if you are a conservative who is against abortion and euthanasia on sanctity of life grounds, why are you then quick to accept that we should keep the economy rolling, even though doing so will almost certainly result in many more agonizing deaths than if we had a painful lockdown?

The coronavirus is challenging everybody’s narrative. We are going to arrive at a solution somewhere in the middle. This country will either come out of it with a greater sense of solidarity, or we will fall apart. We’re not going to be the same after it. We will not be able to un-see and un-know what we are now seeing and knowing, about how each and every one of us regarded the value of human life. Rebecca West said that “there is no such thing as an unmixed motive”; it’s best to keep this in mind about ourselves as we think through this crisis. Somehow, I think this passage from West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her great 1930s travelogue of the Balkans, applies to us now. You can read the full passage in a dispatch in the Atlantic’s archive. This excerpt, from West’s visit to Rab, a poor Dalmatian island, speaks to our situation, somehow:

This was cause enough that Rab should be poor; but there was a further cause which made her poorer still. It is not at all inappropriate that the men and women on these Dalmatian islands should have faces which recall the crucified Christ. The Venetian Republic did not always fight the Turks with arms. For a very long time it contented itself with taking the edge off the invaders’ attack by the payment of immense bribes to the officials and military staff of the occupied territories. The money for these was not supplied by Venice. It was drawn from the people of Dalmatia.

After the fish had rotted, some remained sound; after the corn had paid its 10 per cent, and the wool and the wine and the oil had been haggled down in the Venetian market, some of its price returned to the vender. Of this residue the last ducat was extracted to pay the tribute to the Turks. These people of Dalmatia gave the bread out of their mouths to save us of Western Europe from Islam; and it is ironical that so successfully did they protect us that those among us who would be broadminded, who will in pursuit of that end stretch their minds till they fall apart in idiocy, would blithely tell us that perhaps the Dalmatians need not have gone to that trouble, that an Islamized West could not have been worse than what we are today. Their folly is certified for what it is by the mere sound of the word “Balkan,” with its suggestion of a disorder that defies human virtue and intelligence to accomplish its complete correction.

I could confirm that certificate by my own memories: I had only to shut my eyes to smell the dust, the lethargy, the rage and hopelessness of a Macedonian town, once a glory to Europe, that had too long been Turkish. The West has done much that is ill; it is vulgar and superficial and economically sadist; but it has not known that death in life which was suffered by the Christian provinces under the Ottoman Empire. From this the people of Rab had saved me: I should say, are saving me. They were in want because the gold which should have been handed down to them had bought my safety from the Turks. Impotent and embarrassed, I stood on the high mountain and looked down on the terraced island where my saviors, small and black as ants, ran here and there, attempting to repair their destiny.

Do we spend our treasure to save the lives of others? What if that treasure is our life itself, and like Dan Patrick, we are willing to die so that others may be spared material hardship? What do we owe to our neighbor? Who is our neighbor?

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Andy Hardwick’s Viral Viral Video

This video of Andy Hardwick, a British coronavirus patient, brings home hard what the experience of living with it is like. It went, um, viral in the UK. If you’re starting to wonder if social distancing is worth it, watch this. If, like me, you are tempted to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal to go out to the grocery store to buy some more diet Snapple, watch this. Is it worth risking it?

According to the Guardian story, Andy’s doing a bit better now. His wife said his friends barely recognized him in this video.

If you do go out to get groceries, what’s the safe way to handle them? Here’s a great video by a physician, a clip that’s full of clear, practical advice answering that question. Seriously, take the 13 minutes or so to watch this presentation:

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