Rod Dreher's Blog, page 160
March 25, 2020
Pandemic Diaries 10
From Los Angeles:
My wife works in a hospital, and there’s no sign of COVID-19 yet. She’s an occupational therapist in a cancer hospital, so it’s unlikely that she’ll be asked to treat any COVID-19 patients. They’re also doing their best to keep the hospital COVID-free, since the patients are medically fragile. Still, they don’t have enough N95 masks, and everyone at the hospital is under tremendous stress, as the hospital has been implementing difficult new procedures. What’s more, visitors have been disallowed — even for dying patients.
I’m now home alone with our two kids (2 and 5 years) for 11-12 hours a day. I normally thrive on my time with my kids, but it’s been a struggle. They miss their friends and their activities, and I’m the one that’s got to fill the hours now. How do I balance education and fun? Do I create a schedule? How much chaos am I willing to endure? Last week didn’t go so well.
I’m an author and consultant who often works from home, but last week I found it impossible to get any work done at all. The kids are just too demanding. My second book, which I’ve been working on for six years, comes out in May. In the last 10 days, the launch events have all been cancelled. It’s a huge, huge disappointment. The book will still get some attention — It was excerpted in Quillette back in January, and another excerpt will be published in Education Next in early May. (AmCon requested a review copy.) But, like all those high school seniors who will miss prom and graduation, it seems unlikely that I will experience the celebratory rituals that I was looking forward to.
That said, there are bigger things to worry about right now. I’m an older dad — just turned 50 — and it’s incredibly stressful to read accounts of patients in their 30s, 40s, and 50s being put on ventilators or even dying. I waited so long to be a dad, and our life has been so blissfully happy the last few years. I can hardly bear to think that all of it could be at risk. My family will be okay financially. But we have many family and friends who were already struggling. I wonder what may become of them if this gets really bad or if the shutdown lasts for months.
Over the weekend, with all of those thoughts rattling around in my brain, I had a panic attack. I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. It took me about three minutes to convince myself that I was having a heart attack, and I was just another few minutes away from telling my wife to call 911. But she kept her cool and talked me down — She knew right away what it was. It only lasted minutes, but it was terrifying. Never happened before.
But, since that night, things have been better. I decided to attack my new job. I get up every morning at 5:30 and get a couple hours of work in before my wife leaves for the hospital. I make a list of everything we’re going to do in the day — educational games, trips to the park, marathon reading sessions, meet-ups with their church friends on Zoom. During their nap, I cram another 90 minutes of work in. Last week I had my phone out the whole day, checking for COVID-19 updates constantly. This week, I’ve put it aside and only checked once or twice a day. I’m less informed but also less stressed.
And I’ve become a hyperactive Mr. Mom. If I let the house fall into chaos, I start to feel my stress levels rising. So I clean the house *all day long*. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s working. This is my new job, and I’m going to try to do it to the best of my abilities.
From Westerville, Ohio:
I live in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. I am an attorney who specializes in litigation support and electronic discovery. I’ve been working from home for two weeks. Two people in our office were exposed to someone with flu symptoms, but it looks like no one has come down with anything further.
The past year and a half, I applied for several different jobs, and I had two that seemed like a sure thing. Both of them didn’t work out. In fact with one of them I was actually hired, but then there was a legal conflict that prevented me from accepting it. I was very frustrated. Now that everything has changed, I’m thankful for my current job. Those other opportunities would have been less stable than this one. The Lord is faithful.
My oldest daughter came back early from college. We haven’t seen each other yet, just to be safe (I’m divorced, and she’s staying with her mother). She was around a lot of people before the school abruptly sent everyone home, and as I said, my office was concerned about exposure as well. So we’ve agreed to just call and text each other. She was having a perfect first year of college, and it was pulled out from under her. She’s disappointed, but understands. My younger daughter is in high school, and was actually looking forward to her “break” once the schools shut down, so she could hang out with friends. I tried explaining things to her but she didn’t really get it. Then someone in her suburb tested positive for COVID-19. That city has a good mayor who cracked down immediately, and so all the high school kids dropped their plans, and stayed home.
I don’t know how much attention you’ve paid to Ohio, but Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, is doing virtually everything right. If you have a chance, watch a brief excerpt from one of DeWine’s press conferences. A few clips are on YouTube. He shows exactly how it should be done: sober, informative, transparent, expressing regret and empathy for people’s suffering, not overreacting or getting defensive to difficult questions, admitting what he doesn’t know, and deferring to the expert next to him (who I’ll talk about in a moment). Most everyone I know, regardless of political ideology, is praising his leadership and communication style, which is often contrasted with what’s happening at the federal level. Even his Democratic adversaries have voiced respect and appreciation for him. This is despite the suffering that’s starting to come because of his numerous orders and shutdowns. Even though it’s an election year, no one to my knowledge is trying to take partisan advantage.
I noticed something very small recently that was beautiful to see. Ohio’s Director of Health is a doctor named Amy Acton. She’s perfect for her role – brilliant, compassionate, and reassuring. She speaks with authority, but isn’t detached from the human impact of her decisions. At one of the press conferences, a journalist asked a question, and Governor DeWine was at the podium and started to answer. Dr. Acton walked up behind him and lightly touched him on the elbow. The Governor stopped talking, without completing his sentence, and just simply moved out of the way. He didn’t have to explain himself. And then Dr. Acton answered the question with all of her medical expertise. When she was done, the Governor came back and reiterated what she said, and emphasized certain points. (You can guess where I’m going with this.) There was mutual respect and admiration, there was effective teamwork and communication, and there was humility. Governor DeWine didn’t have to be the center of attention, and Dr. Acton didn’t have to worry that she would be contradicted, or treated dismissively. As I said, it was a small moment, but it was beautiful. It was the complete opposite of Trump’s press conferences, and his whole style of leadership.
Over the past three years I’ve been much more supportive of Trump than you and many of your commenters. I won’t go into detail why, because it’s irrelevant. I think there were legitimate reasons to appreciate some of the things he’s done. He is very popular in Ohio. But now I’m close to despair. I watch him ruin everything with his interviews and tweets, contradicting the incredible doctor on his team, and even his own Vice President. All Trump has to do is shut up and get out of the way – we’d even respect him for it – but he can’t stop dominating. People are going to die because of his arrogance. And meanwhile, he’s still tweeting his clever insults about the Democrats and the news media. A few months ago, that could be overlooked and forgiven, but now it honestly feels like borderline criminal behavior. He really is playing the violin while Rome burns. It’s Götterdämmerung.
Yesterday a reporter asked Governor DeWine about Trump’s presumption that we can all get back to normal by Easter. This is a direct rejection of our state’s explicit orders and recommendations up until now. Amy Acton has done an amazing job laying out her strategy for dealing with the surge of medical needs that’s about to come. None of it has been done lightly. But poor Mike DeWine looked for a moment like a deer in the headlights. He took a few seconds before answering, and you could tell he was doing his best to find an appropriate way to be respectful. He eventually said that we have to be realistic, that hope and optimism are good things, but his desire is to save lives and protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed, and that nothing would change his strategy for the state of Ohio. I voted for him, but never paid him much attention. I can’t tell you how proud I am of him and Dr. Acton. They are literal godsends, while chaos rules in Washington.
If I can continue in a political bent, for the first time in years I would gladly vote for a competent Democrat for president. But every time I watch one of Joe Biden’s videos, he looks and sounds worse than before. He’s clearly suffering mental decline, and if he can’t handle a campaign even under normal circumstances, he certainly can’t handle one in a year of plague and economic catastrophe. When it comes to Congress, I’m too numb to be angry. I’m so tired of it all. How these people can play the same ridiculous games is beyond me. They waste so much time arguing and bickering over their petty little interests, while literally millions of their fellow citizens are suffering.
My favorite café closed yesterday, and I was their last carry out customer. They tried to stay open but it was impossible, so now they’re all going on unemployment (but not all of them can get it yet because the system is crashing under the strain). My elderly neighbor talked to me two weeks ago about how grateful she was to have her job at a consignment shop. Today she was let go, and I did my best to comfort her. More importantly than that, the hospitals are receiving growing numbers of patients; doctors and nurses are starting to get infected; and people are starting to die (ten deaths so far in Ohio). And this is only the very beginning.
Thank you for giving me a place to speak. May the Lord have mercy on us all.
From the Midwest:
I am a hospital pharmacist in a medium-sized city (~250,000 metro area) in the midwest. Right now, you could count the confirmed COVID cases within 100 miles of here on two hands. There is literally no indication in our patient population that anything strange is happening yet. Thankfully, this gives our healthcare leaders critical time to prepare. Elective procedures are being cancelled, the ER is quiet, supplies are being stockpiled, separate floors are being prepared and workers trained to handle COVID patients.
When people ask our family how we’re doing, we have to tell them that not much has changed for us. We were already homeschooling our kids, so very little has changed there other than many out-of-the-house activities are off-limits for now. I still go to the hospital every day to care for patients without COVID. Grocery stores seem to have plenty of everything except toilet paper, although everyone seems to be a little more wary of how close they get to others. I’m anticipating that my income might actually increase during this time due to extra shifts I’ll need to work (If we get a relief check from the government, we will be using it to help others). We’ve chatted with a few neighbors, and reached out to some elderly neighbors to make sure they know we’re available to help if they need anything. Our church has moved to online, taped sermons with frequent live video-chat sessions. The elders at our church are great; I hear from one of them at least every other day. They are doing a fantastic job of caring for the congregation in an unusual time.
The biggest change is the constant, low-level anxiety. It’s as if we’ve been told that an invading army is approaching, and it is fearsome. It might get here tomorrow, or three weeks from now. Who knows? It might kill many of our friends and family, or not. We might have the resources to combat it, or not. Who knows? It might turn my workplace into a nightmare and make me afraid to hug my kids when I get home, or not. The anticipation and not knowing is almost worse than being in the battle, although I am sure those who are currently in the battle could rightly rebuke me for my naivete.
From Los Angeles:
My wife and I are discovering the glory of homemade bread. Did you know you can make an entire batch of dough for $2? I didn’t. One batch = three or four loaves. Shape to suit your whimsy. Warm bread fresh from the oven tastes like nothing else, and for 65 cents a loaf makes the house smell like nostalgia for a childhood memory you never had. Why didn’t we always do this? Free Time, our abundant new houseguest, that’s why.
She is teaching remotely, from a laptop in our kitchen, and waiting to hear if her private school will re-hire for next year, due to enrollment uncertainty. I am waiting to hear on a television script crawling through the pipeline. I moonlight as an Uber driver, or did, until a few weeks ago. Now, of course, I’m off the road. We are facing possible penury in a few month’s time. In view of this, I did what felt therapeutic. I rented a 20-foot bin and chipped up my asphalt driveway with a pick and prybar. Do I have money to lay in decorative concrete? Of course not. What could be more frivolous than DIY beautification at a time like this? I needed donkey labor. I wanted to turn off the dread feedback loop by grounding myself to the earth. Tip for AmCon readers, it works.
Make soup, bake bread, take on large projects, the more creative and unattainable the better, pray unceasingly, turn off the news and be grateful and patronize any local business you are able. This too shall pass.
From Massachusetts:
I live in western Massachusetts, where many New Yorkers have summer homes. We’ve seen an influx of the second-home owners in the past week. Our local specialty food store announced it would serve only those over 65 in the opening hour of the day. When I arrived in the parking lot, nearly every space was filled. A long line of seniors stood in the falling snow, waiting to get inside.
I turned around and headed to a large chain super market instead. Inside the store, I found myself holding my breath whenever I passed anyone. It was a dystopian ballet – many people in masks and gloves, pushing carts slowly, eyes cast down, careful not to go down an aisle where another was shopping.
While my husband and I self-quarantine at home, we enjoy our dogs, our meals. We are reading books we have held off reading. We are watching news and streaming British mysteries. We are texting or emailing family and friends. I escape the house once a day to walk in the country with my sister. We walk six feet apart.
I recently came across a passage from the nature writer, John Burroughs (1837-1921), which has inspired me, and gives a deep meaning to “shelter-in-place”:
“The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is, ‘Look under foot’. You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world. Stand in your own dooryard and you have eight thousand miles of solid ground beneath you, and all the sidereal splendors overhead.”
From New Zealand:
Was midtype on an NZ PanDiary but then this..!
Attached is a screenshot of ‘message-to-all-citizens’, sent to all mobile phones in NZ this evening (NZST)…For NZ curious readers try https://thespinoff.co.nz/covid-19/25-03-2020/covid-19-nz-live-updates-march-24-yesterday-in-nz-recapped-a-crucial-new-edition-of-the-side-eye/
Draconian or astute? Can they be bedfellows? The healthcare, political, economic and social consequences (and coherence) are tbd.
Much love to all you TAC writers and readers.
Much love to you too, and to all of your writers and readers. Keep the diaries coming to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Remember to say where you live (you can be vague if you need to be), and to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line.
The post Pandemic Diaries 10 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Trump’s Eggshell Minefield
Look, I get the media being furious at President Trump right now. He has not handled this crisis well. All of his weaknesses — the vanity, the instability, all of it — have been on full display in this prolonged event. He will face a reckoning with voters in November. The American people will pass a verdict on his leadership. Maybe he’ll pass, maybe he won’t, but that day of accountability is coming.
But until at least Inauguration Day of January 2021, Donald Trump is the president we have. That’s just a fact. I’m thinking now of a conversation I had earlier this year, before the crisis, with a prominent journalist who is a total Trump hater. I don’t begrudge him his anger. I share a lot of it. But what was so strange about it was how consumed this man was with his spite for Trump. It seemed like a kind of black hole that warped the man’s perception of everything else. I recalled that conversation when I read Kyle Smith’s exhortation to the media to stop baiting Trump, and making him worse than he is. Smith writes:
The president is not America. Our fortunes are not his fortunes. He is not, as Chris Rock once said of President Obama, “the dad of the country.” If we happen to be of an opposing political faction, the president’s misfortunes may fill us with glee, or his triumphs may cause us anguish. If you hate the president, by all means do everything you can to bruise him. Rejoice in his every misstep. Luxuriate in his errors. Pounce on his gaffes. Make his life a living hell.
But not now.
No one expects the mainstream media to be even-handed anymore. We don’t even expect the media to be professional. That ship has sailed. We get it: You loathe Trump and will put the worst possible spin on everything he says and does until he’s out of office. (At which point you’ll do the same for whoever the new highest-ranking Republican is.) But, for a limited time, is it too much to ask that the media broaden their scope to include the country and the world instead of just their own Ahabian obsessions about Trump? As far as I know, every member of the Washington press corps, even Jim Acosta, is a resident of Planet Earth. Why are they all acting as if they’re looking down from the Nebulon-235 system and not subject to everything that is happening?
More:
We know that the president is unusually thin-skinned and capricious, that he is keenly and perhaps unhealthily focused on what the media are saying about him at any given nanosecond, that he has a short temper and a quick fuse. He goes through cabinet secretaries like a newborn goes through diapers. And pointing out his errors is the legitimate business of CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, etc. But the way the media are trying to gin up a feud between Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci is disgraceful and disgusting.
Folks, and by “folks” I mean you absolute freaking Muppets, are you trying to get Fauci fired? Do we really want to start over with a new specialist in infectious diseases in the White House? Would you be happy if Omarosa were Trump’s chief adviser on epidemiology? Would you be more secure if Jared were the last man standing during the medical briefings?
Be clear on what Smith is saying: not “don’t report critically on Trump” but rather “don’t exploit Trump’s weakness to make things worse for all of us.” This is a world-historical crisis. If we were in World War II, would the media be so quick to drill down on FDR’s character flaws and foment controversy between him and his most important advisor? Of course not! In normal times, we benefit, on balance, from an adversarial press that gives politicians hell. But these are not normal times. Do they really believe that Trump is going to resign, or be removed from office between now and the election? As Smith argues, it is in the interest of all of us that Trump do the best job of which he is capable. A big part of Trump’s problem in handling this crisis is that he treats it like it’s a reality show. But so do the media, when they try to blow things up between him and Fauci.
Like everybody else, I’m confined to living with my family right now, for the foreseeable future. We’re doing fine, but we can’t help getting on each other’s nerves. This is normal. One of the most important jobs all of us in this house have right now is compelling ourselves to be more tolerant of each other’s faults, for the sake of making sure we all come through this crisis without blowing things up. The other day, one of my teenagers was super-jittery, and was complaining about how he’s going crazy cooped up in the house, missing his friends, and missing being outside doing things. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I told him that he has a duty right now to master his frustration, and in so doing make it easier on the rest of us in the house to keep things functioning through this crisis. It’s a lesson I’m trying to apply to myself too. So are the rest of my family. This is our responsibility to each other now. We can’t control the virus, but we can control how we treat each other. Maybe I deserve to be yelled at. Maybe one of my boys deserves to be chewed out by his siblings for this or that. But the family can’t afford that kind of thing right now. It’s a steep learning curve, but what is the alternative?
Is it fair that we have a thin-skinned narcissist in the White House during a crisis unlike any that the United States, or the world, has ever faced. No. I wish the president we had now was a cross between Harrison Ford and Marcus Aurelius. The president we actually have is Donald Trump. If he fails, his failure will not be his alone. The media have been pretty good at trying to get people to understand that they can’t go to church, or to the beach, or to do things they normally do, because the nature of this virus means that we have to break our habits. You might be willing to risk getting sick by going to church, but taking that risk means that if you get the virus, you are going to spread it to others, to say nothing of adding to the enormous burden on health care providers. It’s not just about you.
The media should apply this lesson to themselves in their dealings with Trump. I was watching one of the president’s daily briefings the other day, and several of the White House reporters kept pressing him on nasty things he said about the media. It made me really angry — angry at Trump for being such a big baby, but also mad at these reporters, because honestly, nobody outside the media really cares if Trump maligns them, at least not in the middle of this horror show.
Again — hear me — I am not saying that journalists should stop reporting critically on what the president says and does. It is their job to hold all political leaders accountable. But for heaven’s sake, stop making it worse, just so you can feel validated that the president is as bad as you think he is. If you have to walk on eggshells around him until the crisis passes, then put on your big-boy and big-girl slippers and tread lightly, for the sake of America.
The post Trump’s Eggshell Minefield appeared first on The American Conservative.
What Does ‘Pro-Life’ Mean In This Crisis?
I wrote last night about First Things editor Rusty Reno’s essay criticizing the lockdowns and social distancing requirements as a surrender to “death’s dominion,” but the more I think about it, the more it bothers me, and the more it strikes me as a bigger deal than I initially thought. Here’s a link to the Reno essay itself. Before you comment on any of this, you ought to read it in its entirely. In this comment, I’m not going to repeat what I said in last night’s entry — read that here — but I’ll sum it up here:
Reno bases his argument on an inarguable point, for Christians: that we are not to be afraid of death, and relatedly, that there are some things worth giving one’s life for. But he uses that truth to make a very bad argument that all the social distancing measures the authorities — including church authorities — are taking to reduce spread of the coronavirus amount to a cowardly surrender to “death’s dominion,” and are a sign of little faith. This is wrong (I said), first because it amounts to an abstract, intellectual piety that is disconnected from the realities of death by coronavirus, and second because it ignores the plain fact that this death-dealing infection is highly infectious, and is spread by close personal contact. When Reno faults priests who (at their bishop’s order) are not able to go visit the sick, he ignores the biological fact that a priest who is infected but doesn’t yet know it can spread the virus to the sick, and kill them. That is a fact that no amount of pious rationality can deny.
If a self-sacrificing priest was only taking his own life into his hands when he visited the sick, that might be a case of heroic sanctity. But the unavoidable reality is that he takes the lives of others into his hands — not only those he visits, but those who the visitors, if they become infected, will later see. Stopping this transmission is why governments are taking the extreme steps of risking total destruction of their own economies to lock everybody down.
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.
Reno is a friend of mine, an intelligent man, and a good man. That’s why I take his column seriously. But it was on my mind this morning when I woke up, and so was this tweet:
My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable.
We will not put a dollar figure on human life.
We can have a public health strategy that is consistent with an economic one.
No one should be talking about social darwinism for the sake of the stock market.
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 24, 2020
When the Catholic editor of the leading conservative Christian magazine allows the fanatically pro-abortion Andrew Cuomo to outflank him on the issue of the sanctity of human life, well, we have a problem.
In Reno’s view, “physical life” is merely one good among many. Indeed, to hold that life should take precedence over other goods, like “justice, beauty, and honor,” is, he claims, a form of “sentimentalism,” and nothing less than evidence of death’s, and Satan’s, expanding dominion over our culture and civilization. This would seem to clash rather violently with the premise of the pro-life position. After all, if physical life can be overridden by other considerations, then we’re no longer thinking about morality in terms that justify absolute (unconditional) strictures against terminating a pregnancy. Put somewhat differently, if justice, beauty, and honor can trump the protection of physical life, then why not the personal autonomy of the pregnant woman? It would seem that Reno has fatally undermined the foundation of his own absolute opposition to abortion.
Yet Reno anticipates this objection and implicitly addresses it head on by making a crucial distinction early on in the essay. The anti-abortion fight, he asserts, is a “battle against killing.” Imposing draconian public-health measures in order to protect our families, communities, and nation from a potentially fatal illness is, by contrast, “an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.”
Abortion is about killing. Public health is about dying. That difference is everything for Reno.
And I would say it’s a significant difference, for a similar reason that murder is not the same thing as negligent homicide. Intent is meaningful. But Linker goes on:
Ending a pregnancy is a great evil because it is the intentional taking of an innocent human life. But other forms of dying that happen by nature (a virus killing its victim is a natural process), like deaths that follow indirectly from social and economic structures that prevail in the United States, are matters of moral indifference. Yes, they’re unfortunate. It is fitting to mourn them. They require “triage,” as Reno repeatedly puts it. But that’s life. People get sick. They die. Bad things happen. Get used to it.
… The implications of this outlook for public policy and self-government more broadly are quite astonishing. Imagine a busy suburban intersection where a car accidentally plows into and kills several children walking to a nearby school. Should the governing township respond by hiring a crossing guard or building a bridge over the thoroughfare to prevent the wrenching event from being repeated? By Reno’s logic, the answer is no. Life is unfair. The world is unjust. Children sometimes die. That’s why we have the Eucharist and the rosary — to console us while we await the return of our Lord Jesus Christ and ward off the temptations of Lucifer.
Linker points out that Reno, in his column, praises Americans of a century ago, who went about their lives despite the Spanish flu. Those, Reno says, were brave Americans. Well, it turns out that this isn’t quite true; Alan Jacobs points out that St. Louis followed social distancing restrictions, while Philadelphia was late to do so. Result: many more people died in Philly. But, says Linker, even if it were true that those Americans who went about their lives without social distancing were somehow moral exemplars, the fact it that their actions caused a lot more people to die than would have otherwise. Linker:
So much for love of neighbor. So much for the common good. So much for sacrificing a little individual liberty for something bigger and nobler than ourselves.
Read the whole thing. And read it in light of this Andrew Cuomo tweet:
We are not willing to sacrifice 1-2% of New Yorkers.
That’s not who we are.
We will fight to save every life we can.
I am not giving up.
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 24, 2020
I have been saying on Twitter this week that I believe the Democrats would be wise to find a way to ease Joe Biden out of the presidential race, and nominate Cuomo. This would be a terrible thing for religious and social conservatives. As I said, Cuomo is a hardcore progressive, spiter of social and religious conservatives, and personally ruthless. He has also been quite good in this crisis. As with Rudy Giuliani after 9/11, he might be an SOB, but an SOB is what we needed at that time. If Cuomo does get the nomination, expect him to run hard on the points he’s made in those tweets. And what will the regular pro-life conservative Christians have to say about it? Where did they stand on the sanctity of life when the lives at risk weren’t the unborn? When they expected impoverished pregnant women to bear the sacrifice of raising a child, because life is sacred, but they weren’t willing to bear the sacrifice of not being able to walk freely down the street to get a latte? It’s a bad, bad look.
I try to be tolerant of intellectuals who say unpopular things, because we need them, especially in a time when everyone else is rushing to take the other side. This is a lesson I learned in the Iraq War experience. This magazine you’re now reading, The American Conservative, was a pariah on the right-wing mainstream, because its founders had the temerity to oppose the coming war, which all right-thinking conservatives supported. I recall wincing at David Frum’s labeling of them as “unpatriotic conservatives,” but I would be revising history if I didn’t admit that my views were much, much closer to Frum’s than to Pat Buchanan’s. As we now know, Frum (and I) were wrong, and Buchanan was right. Always, always, always listen to the outsider. He won’t always be right, and he may often be wrong, but you should make room for what he has to say.
That said, as I reflect on Reno’s essay, I think about the hazard intellectuals face in abstracting themselves from real life. One of the things I’ve written that most embarrasses me was a piece for NRO, leading up to the Iraq War, in which I quoted, with approval, the line from Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” — “Sweet and fitting it is to die for your country.” I thought I was sounding noble and courageous. I fact, I was a 35-year-old soft-bellied scribbler sitting at his desk in midtown Manhattan, working himself into a patriotic spasm. A reader whose name I have forgotten e-mailed me a caustic rebuke, telling me that I had no idea what it was like to die in war. He was 100 percent right. I have never forgotten that.
A couple of years ago, First Things published an essay by a Dominican priest defending Pope Pius IX’s seizing of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish child who had been secretly baptized by the family’s Catholic housekeeper. The priest wrote:
Pope Pius IX, who had been elected in 1846, was not deterred by the negative reactions. In fact, he repeatedly replied to those who, in the face of the public brouhaha, urged him to return the Mortara child, “Non possumus”—that is, “We cannot.” Piety, not stubbornness, explains this response. Those involved in the removal of Edgardo Mortara were certainly conscious of the human pathos, but the human element was not the only one to be considered. Both the law of the Church and the laws of the Papal States stipulated that a person legitimately baptized receive a Catholic upbringing. Today’s Code of Canon Law, can. 868 §2, still affirms that “an infant of Catholic parents or even of non-Catholic parents is baptized licitly in danger of death even against the will of the parents.”
The requirement that all legitimately baptized children receive a Catholic education was not arbitrary. Since baptism causes birth into new life in Christ, children require instruction about this form of new life. Furthermore, although the Italian Risorgimento had begun, the diplomatic world in 1858 still recognized Pius IX as both pope and prince in Bologna. While the pontiff displayed his human feelings by making Edgardo his ward, Pio Nono nonetheless felt duty-bound to uphold the civil law. This law was not unreasonable, moreover. Even today, the Code of Canon Law, can. 794 §1, assigns to the Church the task of educating Catholics.
The essayist continued:
Prior to the arrival of the papal gendarme at his parents’ home, Edgardo Mortara was an anonymous Catholic. In his case, divine Providence kindly arranged for his being introduced into a regular Christian life.
You get the idea. “Being introduced into a regular Christian life” means “was kidnapped by agents of the Pope from his Jewish parents and raised as a Catholic.” From a Christian theological point of view, the validity of his baptism can’t be denied. But observe the stone-cold logic used here to justify stealing a boy from the bosom of his family! There was a lot of outrage that First Things published this essay (it was in the form of a book review), and Reno wrote a thoughtful response to critics, pointing out that his wife and children are Jewish, and that in publishing the essay from the priest (Fr. Romanus Cessario), he wanted to give voice to a writer whose views about what baptism requires challenged his own softer views. I find that respectable, but given the outrageousness of what Pius IX did, and how much it resonates through history, had I been Reno I would not have published a review that takes it as a given that what was done to that child and his family was an effect of kindly Providence.
Anyway, I bring it up here simply to say that what for intellectuals can be an interesting moral and theological problem can sound monstrous to the ears of ordinary people living in the world of flesh and blood. Come to think of it, I first met Damon Linker over lunch in Manhattan in the spring of 2002. I had been writing very critical things about the Catholic hierarchy over its response to the scandal, which blew up in Boston that January, and was spreading across the country. Father Richard John Neuhaus had been phoning me to scold me for the things I was saying publicly, telling me that as a Catholic, and indeed as a conservative Catholic, I had no business doing that. Linker, at the time an associate editor of First Things, was aware of this, and invited me to lunch to talk. Given his subsequent very public break with the magazine, I don’t think he would mind my telling this story.
Linker said that the editorial meetings at the magazine were hard for him to bear. He was the only one in the room who had young children, he said. He was listening to Father Neuhaus and the others discuss the scandal in an elevated, abstract way — the sort of thing you would expect from religious intellectuals. But Linker was a religious intellectual — he was Catholic at the time — and would go home at night to see his small child, and wonder if the fellow Catholics with whom he worked even saw them as real. He knew that I, as a father of a small boy, was struggling hard with the knowledge that it could have been my child, and if it had, the bishops would have rolled over my family too in an effort to defend the institution, its image, and their privilege.
Father Neuhaus and his team couldn’t see that. I saw it, and Damon Linker saw it, and it scandalized us. The people who were most real to Father Neuhaus were cardinals, bishops, priests, and theologians. Ideas were more real to him than people, at least in the matter of the scandal. To be fair, he eventually came around. He remains a man I greatly admire, despite his flaws. His is just a lesson in the blindness that can affect intellectuals. I want to emphasize that at the same time I was railing publicly against the bishops and privately against Neuhaus for not getting it, I was also publishing bullshit dulce et decorum pieces, gaudily displaying my own moral and intellectual blindness. For me, a writer at National Review in the year 2002, think-tank talking heads, Republican Party figures, and the ideas they espoused were much more real to me than the lives of soldiers who would be sent to the field to kill and die for those ideas, and those talking heads — to say nothing of the Iraqis. In this way, I was no better than Father Neuhaus.
This is a hazard faced by writers and other public intellectuals. And it should be said too that people who refuse to think hard about issues, who instead just go on feeling, are in danger of making foolish, immoral choices. Not being an intellectual does not make you right, or righteous. As Kierkegaard put it, the trouble with life is it has to be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards. This extraordinary moment in history is an apocalypse, in the literal sense — an unveiling of who we really are, deep down. We are at a moment when our president, our leaders, and, because this is a democracy, all of us, are faced with a terrifying choice: poverty or death. That is, do we accept the ruin of our economy for the sake of saving more lives, or do we accept the sacrifice of lives in the hope that our economy will not be destroyed, and our middle-class way of life obliterated?
Wendell Berry, in a 2008 essay called “Faustian Economics,” wrote:
The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as “higher animals.” But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals — which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: “I am that I am.”
More:
If we go back into our tradition, we are going to find a concern with religion, which at a minimum shatters the selfish context of the individual life, and thus forces a consideration of what human beings are and ought to be.
This concern persists at least as late as our Declaration of Independence, which holds as “self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . .” Thus among our political roots we have still our old preoccupation with our definition as humans, which in the Declaration is wisely assigned to our Creator; our rights and the rights of all humans are not granted by any human government but are innate, belonging to us by birth. This insistence comes not from the fear of death or even extinction but from the ancient fear that in order to survive we might become inhuman or monstrous.
And so our cultural tradition is in large part the record of our continuing effort to understand ourselves as beings specifically human: to say that, as humans, we must do certain things and we must not do certain things. We must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period. At times, for example, some of us humans have thought that human beings, properly so called, did not make war against civilian populations, or hold prisoners without a fair trial, or use torture for any reason.
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.”
As I write this, I can hear my 16-year-old son, a singer, in his bedroom singing a fragment of an antiphon: “God is love, God is love, God is love.” He is so innocent of what is happening around him. Chances are that his parents will be poor for the next few years. Maybe always. His own prospects for making a living, and knowing economic stability, have been and are being dramatically reduced because of what is happening right now, beyond the boundaries of our quiet subdivision. But because of the economic sacrifices being forced on so many of us — people we know and love, and before long, us — he stands a better chance of surviving this crisis, and being around for many years to proclaim God’s love with the voice God has given him. And maybe his grandmother, bound like a prisoner to her house in the country these days, will be around to see him marry. What kind of price can you put on that?
My late father, who was born in 1934, used to tell my sister and me stories all the time about his Depression childhood. How his father was absent for much of his youth, because he had to be out on the road making whatever he could to send home to support his wife, his widowed mother, and his two sons. How the only way the family had meat many nights was if my dad and his older brother went into the woods and shot squirrels. Things like that that were scarcely imaginable to us kids, growing up in the relative prosperity of the 1970s. Daddy used to say, one way or another, “We were so poor, but we didn’t know how poor we were, because everybody around us was poor too. But we had each other, and that’s what mattered.” Ruthie and I heard that so many times that we treated it as a sentimental cliche. Daddy’s words sound different in my ears today, in the light of this present apocalypse.
The idea that we are meant to live without limits is a curse that manifests itself on both the left and the right, in different ways. In political terms, the next election will be fought on what’s being done right now, in this crisis. As regular readers know, I deeply and passionately reject the Sexual Revolution, and all its pomps and works, which include the belief that sexual freedom is a fundamental good, and that limits on sexual freedom are immoral. That has a lot to do with why I am against abortion, against most SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) laws, and favor strong protections for religious dissenters from the progressive program. The Democratic Party has become the party of defending the Sexual Revolution, which is ultimately a defense of a particular view of what it means to be human. I reject that view. That’s why I almost always reject Democratic candidates.
But the view of limitlessness as a blessed state also manifests on the right, usually (but not exclusively) as economic policies and practices. It is by no means wrong that Donald Trump, or any president, would be concerned with the economic destruction the virus is wreaking across the country. Andrew Cuomo, and all governors, are also concerned with this. How could they not be? After all, in New York, the people who will be made poor by this shutdown are not just Republicans, but mostly Democrats, as the state is a Democratic stronghold. (Here in Louisiana, my friends who have lost their business are liberals; another friend who is on the verge of losing his business, is also a liberal.) Are we willing to accept severe limits to our own prosperity for the sake of saving more lives? That is a political question as well as a moral one, and it’s one that all of us have to answer, because it will touch all of us. I believe that the answer to that question will be the only real issue in the fall election.
What are pro-life conservative Christians saying about all this right now, in a time when nobody can say what the near-term future will hold, when our leaders — Democrats and Republicans both — have to make agonizing decisions based on limited information and moral principle? What does it mean to defend the sanctity of life under these conditions? What does it mean to defend humanity? Given the stakes, there are no easy answers, and liberals who feel the temptation to moral preening should imagine themselves having to explain their choice to families who have lost everything because of the shutdown. We’re not talking about Wall Street bigs here; we’re talking about the little guys — the millions and millions who will be economically devastated by this.
Still, I agree with Damon Linker — and I encourage all my fellow pro-life Christians to think hard about this:
Put somewhat differently, if justice, beauty, and honor can trump the protection of physical life, then why not the personal autonomy of the pregnant woman? It would seem that Reno has fatally undermined the foundation of his own absolute opposition to abortion.
Again, I find it astonishing, and a very bad sign for the future standing of intellectual Christian orthodoxy, that the basically godless left-wing governor of New York, an infamous exalter of abortion, has taken a firmer stand for the sanctity of human life than the editor of First Things magazine. Insofar as Rusty Reno’s stance is shared among leaders of the Christian Right, it’s not the kind of thing that will be forgotten, or easily overcome — especially when the death toll includes your own mother, your own neighbor, or your own child.
UPDATE: Look, I will not take guff from readers who say that I’m not taking the economic side of this crisis seriously. It’s not true at all. It scares the hell out of me to think about how I would support my family if I lost my job. It scares the hell out of me to think about what kind of society we will live in if there is general economic collapse. Reno did not write a column talking about the tradeoffs between economic suffering and deaths by virus. I folded the broader discussion about economic pain and virus response into this comment about Reno’s column, but keep in mind that Reno is writing about something adjacent, but not the same thing.
A reader just wrote to say it’s a false choice to say we have to choose between saving the economy and saving Grandma, because mass death is also economically devastating:
There is no way out of economic pain. We need to kill the virus. That’s the only option. And the fastest way to do that is 3 weeks of sheltering in place. That’s what India is going. 1.3 billion people! But not here. Here it’s all, “oh, I’ll personally be fine, so let’s get back to work.” Which is a mixture of ignorant denial and rank selfishness.
If you’re going to criticize my position, do it honestly. I’m not saying that the economy, and the pain from a collapsed economy, is meaningless. As I pointed out repeatedly in this piece, there are no good choices here, and no easy ones. But our leaders have to choose anyway — and, because this is a democracy, so do we.
UPDATE.2: Alan Jacobs is very good on the motte-and-bailey dance being done by some conservative Christians. He characterizes it like this:
A. We’re not going to practice any sissified “social distancing” — we’re followers of Jesus, and ours is not a spirit of fear. We’re not afraid to die! We know we’ll go to be with the Lord!
B. Okay, that’s fine for you, but what about all the people you might infect? What if they aren’t ready to die? What if they’re not even Christians? And anyway, should you be making that decision for them?
A. Ah, those people aren’t going to die. This thing is basically just the flu, and the whole panic has been whipped up by the media to discredit the President.
Read all his commentary on it.
UPDATE.3: Just putting this out there:
And this:
The post What Does ‘Pro-Life’ Mean In This Crisis? appeared first on The American Conservative.
March 24, 2020
Pandemic Diaries 9
From Barcelona; this is my niece, who has been living there since January, and who shared this on Facebook:
From London:
People are finally taking things seriously here, with Boris’ latest curbs introduced. We (me, my wife, our 18-month old) are midway through the second week of 14 days self-isolation after I had symptoms last week. Still not sure if I had it!
We’re pretty safe thankfully. I study part-time, supported by church and small amounts of giving from individual supporters, and work in a state school the rest of the time, as does my wife. Our income is pretty stable, but we’re concerned for many around us, including vulnerable family members.
A few years ago, when I first read The Ben Op, I scoffed at these lines towards the end, as you describe what we must do to survive the coming social and cultural collapse in the West: “And we also tell [our children] in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf, and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West”. I actually wrote a note in the margin that just says “…right…”
I scoffed at the time because you placed those things alongside (though admittedly after) teaching our children the Bible. I’m still firmly evangelical, but was more gung-ho then. A few years later, getting married, becoming a dad, considering homseschooling, and being exhausted by the cultural destruction of the woke agenda has changed a few things.
What do I find myself doing with my emptier evenings now we’re confined to the house and now that the culture around me is having to consider its own mortality?
Well, I was reading Dante’s Inferno anyway already (alongside your book). And, like you, it’s given me unexpected nourishment.
In spite of graduating with an English degree in 2014, there’s so much classic poetry I’ve never studied (largely because my degree was essentially a degree in postmodern critical theory). I finally plucked a volume of Tennyson off the self, and have been reading aloud to my wife. I’ve been recording readings of him and other classic poets to send to isolated friends. I’m trying to memorise Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.
Most notably, I ordered myself a copy of Augustine’s City of God. There seems no finer time to read a great work about how the church stands whilst a morally decrepit, decadent civilisation is washed away in an unexpected disaster (though said civilisation still finds a way to blame the Christians!)
There’s much to come in the months ahead. But, for now at least, I have to admit that you got me. The great works of the West are nourishing me in this strange time.
Thanks for all your work on covering the virus. It was a real help, and spurred me to take things seriously and make my vulnerable dad isolated a while before restrictions were imposed here. That may have made the difference for him.
From Cambridge, England:
I am a joint degree candidate at Harvard Law School and the University of Cambridge, and am here in the UK with my wife and 1yo daughter. We’re hunkered down here for however long this lasts, unable to afford a relocation on such short notice.
The UK response at every level has been appalling so far– all dictated by the glacial imbecility of 10 Downing. The university is bound to regurgitate government directives (and did so), but I was astonished to find that even my church and British friends were also committed to a steadfast ignorance even in the face of my research and arguments. As soon as Johnson’s govt began talking about a ‘herd immunity’ strategy, I did the math based on public NHS data and began publishing documents detailing why it was a doomed idea. This was three days before Imperial College researchers got the exact same arguments in front of Boris. At the same time I began writing and publishing guidance on why the vulnerable must start isolating, as well as how to reduce transmission to them. Almost a week later directives came down from on high validating every word. The obliviousness is pervasive: up until two days ago my classmates talked of nothing except what format they wanted our June exams to be changed to, arguing about time zones, word limits, open or closed book, etc. Few realize, even now, the scale of what we may be facing. If we have examiners by June, that will be an undeserved blessing.
The last few days I’ve been producing training documentation for the student governments of the Cambridge colleges, explaining the key legal and organizational steps to take now to become self-reliant as their administrations to fall sick. (There are at least a thousand students still resident here, and likely for more than that.) This morning I woke up to a long email from senior university officials; apparently this work is “encouraging of panic” by projecting “misplaced fears of [an] inadequate institutional response”. This from the same officials whose “inadequate institutional response” left the coronavirus to circulate among our students and faculty for at least two more generational cycles than was necessary. Fortunately for my spirits, the university Student Union also contacted me today looking to partner on future projects, having seen my work so far.
As in the US, much of the fight here has been between the collectivists and the individualists, but unlike the US it has been the latter who have been at the forefront of COVID-19 prep here. The Americans in particular are a revelation. I have one friend from Louisiana who is usually a very polished PhD candidate in computational Hebrew linguistics, but when he and I sat down and discussed the coming storm he went straight to backcountry doomsday prepper folk in a matter of seconds. I swear even his accent began to revert. Now that the country is beginning to mobilize, I hope and pray that the British collectivism will prove to be an asset. But up until now I have not seen such a thickheaded response to reason (on the part of the authorities and public) since I attended Falwell’s Liberty University as an undergrad in 2012-15.
It’s hard to say what exactly the next weeks will bring. There will be many deaths, especially in London. Boris will likely have to revise his lukewarm lockdown to a more Continental set of policies for them to be effective.
Depending on how well resources can be moved around the country, the NHS may struggle on for a time. But I fear for the university I’ve come to love over the last year. Its faculty are one of the world’s greatest intellectual resources, and many (most?) are squarely within the COVID-19 danger demographics. The project I am working on now is a cross-college comms network to assist those vulnerable professors maintain isolation when the official infrastructures begin inevitably developing gaps. If we who are young cannot step up now, who can? This will be no country for old men.
Pray for us. Pray for me.
From Chicago:
I’m a busy homeschool mom from Chicago with two daughters. My husband is in the highest risk category as he is immunocompromised due to an organ transplant. Because I had been keeping up with your coronavirus blog posts, following infectious disease epidemiologists on twitter, and had also been in contact with my husband’s transplant clinic and doctors – we had some sense of what was coming in early February and started prepping. I decided to take a leave of absence from our homeschool co-op and my husband transitioned to working from home in early March, before the state started canceling schools and locking things down.
I would be dishonest if I didn’t say I am scared for my husband. He has already been fighting another virus for almost three years – the JC virus – which does not act as quickly as the coronavirus, but can be just as deadly if gone unchecked. So I know he already has a weakness towards viruses. I am willing to do whatever I can to prevent him from getting the coronavirus.
Which brings me to my current project/obsession. When things started ramping up in places like Seattle in early March and later in California and New York, I kept remembering back to February 14 when I got sick with what I thought was the flu. Fortuitously my husband was on a business trip while I was sick. I had two excruciating days of sickness starting with chills, low grade fever, and the absolute worst ongoing headache of my life. I was in bed for two days sipping bone broth and kombucha and rubbing essential oils all over myself. I might have taken a Tylenol a couple times. The fever and chills subsided after the first day, but the headache continued for another day and it was debilitating. There was residual but abating head pain for a couple days after that. I read this recent article from the Washington Post recounting what people with mild symptoms of COVID19 experienced. A few people experienced what I had with the headaches.
All this to say, I am now wondering if I had COVID19. By the way, after I got better and before my husband returned from his business trip I cleaned and sanitized the home thinking at the time that I wanted to prevent him from getting this awful flu bug. And perhaps it really was just the flu. Which brings me to my current obsession. Because I am following science twitter carefully these days I am aware that the protocols for a serology test is available. For those not familiar with a serology test – it tests for the presence of antibodies in your blood. If you have been exposed to the virus and had been asymptomatic or symptomatic and recovered, tests will show you have the antibodies in your blood about a month and a half later. Please read these twitter accounts first from a medical school professor in NYC – he and his team actually came up with the protocols for the serology tests and are making it available to any lab for their use.
https://twitter.com/florian_krammer/status/1241753398321561600?s=20
Also, here’s an excellent twitter thread by Yale professor Nicholas A. Christakis on the importance of doing serological testing now.
https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1240689935557865472
Christakis’ thread is quite long, but his tweets 29, 30, and 31 in the thread are what I want to highlight the most:
As the epidemic proceeds, we will want to do serological tests (by drawing blood) on as many people as possible to identify people who have recovered and are highly likely to be immune. This should be a national priority. 29/
People who are known to be immune based on such serological tests for SARS-CoV-2 are no longer infectious (they basically cannot spread the virus), and they can return to work, school, etc. This is going to be especially valuable for health care workers. 30/
But here’s the thing: once you’re immune to COVID19, you can go about your business. Immune people can move about & help restore our economy. As number of such people rises, it will also confer “herd immunity” to our population, by blocking viral transmission, helping us all! 31/
Obviously, if I might have had this virus already (and maybe my daughters too, they both had colds around the time of my sickness) – that changes everything for us. It means I can go out and do the grocery shopping without fearing I am bringing the virus back to my husband. It means we can resume our homeschool co-op whenever that gets going again. And of course it means everything that Christakis mentions – it’s valuable for the health care systems to know which of their workers are immune, immune people can’t spread the virus leading to an eventual herd immunity in the population, and finally a recovery of our economy!
So this week my efforts have been to tell all my doctor friends who work in hospitals to get their in house labs to start the serological testing. I’ve also tweeted, commented on facebook, and emailed the Chicago Public Health department about getting serological testing going. Every day at 11am central time the Chicago Public Health department has a livestream on Facebook and Twitter – for a Q&A with the public and I watched yesterday and asked my question live. So far – no responses from the Chicago Public Health department. Granted they are busy just trying to deal with the rise of COVDI19 sicknesses in the city. But as Christakis says – this should be a national priority. The test protocols are available, any lab in America should be able to test.
Towards the end of yesterday, I decided to contact my alderman, IL state rep., and IL state senator. I called their offices, spoke to staff and then followed up with an email message to each staff person I spoke to. So far my IL state senator is the only office that responded to me saying they received my email and will pass it on to the senator. So this morning I found myself asking – is there anything else I can do? Then I remembered your Pandemic Diaries posts and thought – I will write to Rod! I feel I’ve done all I can do to advocate for this testing. Can you help me advocate for this as well? – seeing how valuable a tool it will be to fight this virus.
From eastern Pennsylvania:
I live in eastern Pennsylvania – a Roman Catholic father of 5 (ages 1-9) with a 6th on the way in August. That makes me an old Millennial though I don’t really identify as one (for the reason that I actually practice a faith, among others). My family’s safe and I’m lucky to have a white collar with which I can work remotely. I thank you for taking this seriously early on – I credit a good deal of the “prepping” I did over the past month to you, Wyoming Doc and a few other sources.
Reflecting recently, I’ve come to realize the world my daughter’s coming into will be much different than that of even a month ago. I agree with your thoughts on the “apocalypse” or revealing this pandemic has brought, particularly for America. We will be a different culture when we come out the back end. Even despite the crash of 2008, we as a culture really haven’t suffered…truly suffered. Life has been comfortable for most and this is the first time we, particularly middle and upper classes, are forced to sacrifice.
As terrible as this time will be, and I truly believe most Americans have not yet grasp what the next month particularly will bring, I believe we – all of us – have an opportunity to stop and re-evaluate our priorities, our lives during this time. Many of our cultural comforts and securities have been stripped away – almost fitting when you consider this crucible is occurring during the depths of Lent. Some are handling this well, or as well as one can. Others are struggling; I think part of this may be a result of the peeling away of our normal everyday routines to reveal there’s not much substance or a foundation on which lives are grounded (i.e. we live in a godless world for most). I’ve witnessed this with family and friends, particularly as people are forced to confront their mortality in a way that previously went unacknowledged. Some people are manifesting this through panic and hysteria, others through denial – hence the ridiculousness of people I still see at public parks, having play dates and parties and congregating in grocery stores etc. I expect the next 2 weeks will change that as this spreads and people realize this isn’t a hoax. As part of my job at a Fortune 500 company, I’ve done org transformation and change implementation. It’s interesting to view how our society is progressing through the change curve with the seriousness of this….you can see it in mainstream news, social media. People are starting to see that this sh*t is real; When people are dying by the dozens in our own region, doing push-up’s on Instagram in the latest viral see-10/do-10/give-10 “challenge” sorta becomes irreverent. But hey…the first stage is Denial.
https://www.cleverism.com/understanding-kubler-ross-change-curve/
However, I was reminded yesterday that we can’t lose hope for what this will bring for our world. In order to avoid the cabin fever of being stuck in a house with 5 young kids, my wife and I have been taking post-dinner drives to our parish parking lot, praying the rosary in the van at the Marian grotto (you want to experience self-mortification…try leading a 1,3,5,7,9 yro in a rosary, while strapped into carseats). Side benefit – it kills about a 40 minutes before bedtime.
It was rainy, cold, and cloudy all day, but just as we finished the rosary in pouring rain, the skies opened up and the sunlight shone through, creating a rainbow. I’m not one to look for “signs”, but I could not help but see this as God’s reminder to remain faithful and hopeful through this all. Of recent, the latter has been a challenge, especially as the media (you excluded) sensationalize this situation and only focus on the death tolls and pitiful government response (both terrible…not minimizing these). But nevertheless, we have hope – despite the irresponsible behaviors, suffering and death, I’m reading stories of people stepping up to help their neighbors – even if it’s just by staying home and washing their hands. This likely will bring out the worst of humanity, but also the best. We can’t forget that part and we need to remain hopeful.
We have a choice as to how we will respond to this situation. I thank you for helping us to respond with hope and charity in these dire times.
Oh – and after the brief rainbow…the clouds closed up, the rain began again and it got even darker….we’re not out of this yet.
From Minnesota:
I would like to thank you for your early warnings. A couple weeks before everyone else was cleaning out the shelves we stocked up on some necessary things. That included a couple large packs of toilet paper from Sam’s Club. I recall reading a while back that during Russia’s economic collapse in the 1990’s toilet paper was used as barter currency so it occurred to me that we should get some. Maybe there is something about the primal urgency of nature’s call that causes people to get anxious about it.
I live on the outskirts of a small town of 600 in Minnesota, but I work in Wisconsin and my work place is considered “essential” so it is not included in Gov. Evers of Wisconsin’s imminent stay at home order. Fortunately, at my work place it is relatively easy to maintain distance from each other. My wife on the other hand is home. She is an outpatient physical therapist at one of the local hospitals whose rehab services department is closed down due to the crisis, but if and when the SHTF she may be asked to come in a pool capacity to help out. My two teenage children are old enough to take care of themselves at home if it come to that and we are far enough away from town that it takes some effort to sneak out to hang out with friends.
I am not sure how serious my 79 year old parents are taking all this. My Dad called me Saturday evening from a farm supply store where he was buying a couple of 50 pound bags of clover seed. I told him he should probably be staying home, but he said that there was hardly anyone there, so don’t worry about it. He wanted me to come over Sunday afternoon and help him spread the clover seed in his cow pasture. My first inclination was to go, but my wife talked me out of it. I could tell my Dad was exasperated when I declined. “You aren’t coming over to sit on my lap! What’s the big deal?” He called me again late Sunday afternoon and made sure I knew how tired he was from walking around the pasture by himself. I could understand all this if he was younger and was still an active farmer, but he retire several years ago and is renting out all his crop land and pasture land. If the pasture needs clover, he should get his 40 year old renter to do it. My Dad and Mom are very healthy for 79, so the odds are probably still in their favor but why take the chance.
I can count on one hand the number of times I have stayed home and watched Mass on TV since I became Catholic 21 years ago, all for illness or weather. This was the first time I ever participated in a live streamed Mass. My wife is fan of Fr. Mike Schmitz, the priest at the Newman Center of the University of Minnesota-Duluth who does podcasts and special speaking engagement, so we participated in his live streamed Mass. We recited the responses, stood when we were supposed to stand and knelt when we were supposed kneel in our living room. The Mass was very stark. No music. Just Father and a couple college students to do the readings and read the intersessions. The sound and video were a little out of sync (I am not sure if the problem was on our end or not) so that was a bit distracting, but for me on the whole the mass very moving not in spite of the starkness but almost because of it. 40 days of Lenten fast indeed.
So, all and all I should feel fortunate at my individual circumstances, but it is hard to shake a feeling of dread in the back of my mind over an uncertain future. I have a job now but what about a month from now? Will someone close to me or will I myself die alone in quarantine choking on a ventilator tube? Looking at the current numbers, I have good odds but the chance of a bad outcome is not zero. I always knew on an intellectual level that I have very little control over the events of this world and that God is in charge, but you are faced with it directly it is much more uncomfortable.
From Miami Beach:
I moved to Miami Beach four years ago from DC, for a job. I’m a DoD contractor, so I’m teleworking now. My fears of being laid off were not serious–the Pentagon never sleeps. My wife owns her own tax consultancy, so she works from home anyway. The only hit we’ve really taken is our Airbnb rental, which has completely tanked. It used to be booked solid, year-round (it’s on Capitol Hill in DC), now people have cancelled as far out as October. I don’t know what the long-term consequences are going to be for us.
Here in Miami Beach, everyone noticed how the Spring Break revelers didn’t care one bit about social distancing. They’re gone now, and the beaches are closed. Hotels have closed. Restaurants are open for take-out and delivery only, but many have simply closed. This is a giant blow to a city that is almost entirely hospitality-based. The mega-wealthy are fortressed, and the rest of us are just stumbling along.
I’m 58, but for some reason I have lots of friends in their 20s. The restaurant servers among them have already been laid off. The airline flight attendant, 24 years old and thrilled with her job, is now expecting a layoff any day now. The trio of sisters from Minnesota who run an organic restaurant are counting the days until they shut down. Their location is in some of the highest-rent commercial real estate in the world, so how can they make it? The gal who sells her silk-screened t-shirts is going back to NYC. At least she has people there. The guy who just opened a gym, after years of struggling with permits and licenses, is now ruined. Everyone is shell-shocked.
The City of Miami Beach closed not just the beach, but all parks and even the popular boardwalk on which folks are accustomed to run, walk, and bike. I see more people wearing masks and gloves out in public now. Many of these are older, retired people.
What strikes me is the sense of doom that hangs over everyone and everything. In my high-rise condo, people are almost afraid to talk to each other. We still communicate by text, so there’s that; but I wonder what the lasting effects will be, once the restrictions are lifted and the crisis is declared “over”– how much will people really trust that? Will they still keep their distance? What will that mean for us?Finally, I had a dream about the end of the world a few weeks before this really got going. The first time I’ve ever had a dream like that. Make of that what you will, but my prayers these days run along those lines. May God have mercy on us all.
This reader did not say where he is from, but his message needs to be heard:
As a leukemia and stem cell transplant survivor (2009-2010), I am one of the immunocompromised people who would not fare well with the coronavirus. In the ten years since my transplant i have lived an almost normal life. In 2015, however, I contracted a severe bacterial pneumonia which resulted in septic shock. That shock developed into ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome. I was put into a medically induced coma. I was on a ventilator for two weeks. When my kidneys failed I was put on dialysis. Then my liver failed.
I write this because ARDS is the reason the corona patients with severe pneumonia are dying. In 2015 I was a patient in one of America’s top hospitals. In the ICU I had one doctor and one nurse whose sole responsibility was my care. Caring for an ARDS patient requires a tremendous amount of near constant vigilance . Blood pressure needs to be raised then lowered then raised again. I shudder to think of the quality of care that the corona ARDS patients will receive when the amount of ARDS cases swamps the hospitals. Even if i had the best care like I had in 2015, i would likely not survive ARDS a second time, as this is a very very rare thing to happen. And so I trust God and recite many psalms and hymns that i have loved and have leaned on in tough times prior to this. Christ is my shield and my hiding place. I hope in his word. (Psalm 119)
Keep them coming, friends. I’m at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and please remember both to say where you’re writing from, and to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line.
The post Pandemic Diaries 9 appeared first on The American Conservative.
You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead
Nurses at Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics in California could be fired immediately for wearing their own face masks, according to unions representing nurses at the facilities. The news comes after nurses were ordered to reuse disposable protective gear to save supplies in the face of shortages brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The California Nurses Association and National Nurses United sent a flyer to members noting that Kaiser had threatened nurses with firing if they wear their own N95 masks, which offer a high level of protection from airborne contaminants, to work. “Kaiser has told nurses that if they’re seen wearing their personal N95 masks, they could be fired ‘on the spot’ for insubordination,” the flyer read. The unions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kaiser spokesperson Marc Brown said firing nurses for using their own N95 gear is not the company’s official policy. Asked if nurses would not be disciplined if they wear their own masks, Brown did not provide an answer. “That is not our policy. We provide the appropriate medical-grade protective equipment for the protocols and level of patient care being provided. We cannot assure the integrity of protective equipment not provided by Kaiser Permanente,” Brown wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “We want them to wear equipment we can be sure is effective.”
The Los Angeles Times reports this afternoon:
As of this afternoon, California had more than 2,200 confirmed cases of coronavirus infection. Of the total cases, 662 (and 11 deaths) have been reported in Los Angeles County.
The disease is spreading, and most likely, the worst is yet to come. Hospitals around the state are bracing for an influx of patients in the very near future.
In L.A. County, five people had been hospitalized at some point with COVID-19 as of March 6. Two weeks later, it was 48. By Monday, it was 90. Those numbers sound low, but the overall trajectory and rate of increase suggest they’re about to get a lot higher. Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration forecast needing 20,000 hospital beds in the state to treat coronavirus-infection patients. Now, it has upped that number to 50,000.
The L.A. reader who e-mailed those items to me says:
The nurses in the Bay Area are being asked to intubate people, but they don’t have PPE. Some are threatening to walk out, and there may even be a strike. Things are already getting bad here, and its only been a few days. People think that when they get sick, someone will take care of them. But that isn’t true—there won’t be enough trained people. COVID is running through our nursing homes, and the first minor in the US has died.
The largest transfer of wealth in American history is about to take place, and we don’t even know who is getting what, when, or why. And Trump is telling people to fill the churches on Easter Sunday as a sign of their faith. Some of you will be sacrificed for Wall Street. It’s filthy, and infamous.
He’s referring to some remarks the president made to Fox’s Bill Hemmer after a White House town hall:
Trump on why he picked Easter as the day he wants to end strict social distancing and reopen American businesses: “Easter is a very special day for me … Easter Sunday, and you’ll have packed churches all over our country.” pic.twitter.com/6cXEtW8LmR
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 24, 2020
Earlier, during the town hall meeting, Trump kept hitting on the theme of how he wanted America to be back to work by Easter Sunday (April 12). Hemmer called the rebirth of commerce an “American Resurrection.” Really.
I think this is madness. Certainly I hope that this can be accomplished. You would have to be insane to want America to enter into an economic depression, which is certainly coming if the economy stays forcibly idled. But watching Trump’s town hall comments (see here for clips), he kept comparing the coronavirus deaths to deaths from automobile accidents — the idea being that we lose tens of thousands of people annually to car crashes, but we don’t ban cars. He said that the damage from the economic shutdown is worse than the deaths that would result from learning to live with the virus.
This is crazy talk. As we know, the problem is not simply the raw number of deaths. The problem is that our hospitals are going to be overwhelmed. As the L.A. reader points out, in the Bay Area, the nurses union says their workers are having to intubate people without protective gear. What if medical personnel go on strike, demanding basic protection, to which they have a right? Or what if too many of our doctors and other medical personnel are felled by the virus, and can’t work? A physician e-mailed me yesterday, saying that he is physically exhausted, and struggling with depression. If the country goes back to work too soon, we’re going to see even more death, and the destruction of our health care system, without getting the economy working. Do you really think we can have a functioning economy with hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, being infected by this runaway virus?
I do not understand the view that the economic hit would be unquestionably worse than death. Let’s be clear: this is not about sacrificing the poor and the working class for the rich. I don’t agree with the L.A. reader that these sacrifices are being proposed for “Wall Street.” Millions of ordinary people will lose their jobs, and be financially ruined, by a depression. We know this. I’m one of them, and most likely, so are you. Every political leader in the world is, or soon will be, facing a tragic choice now, making a gruesome cost-benefit analysis between economic destruction and mass death. I think for most of us tonight, this is still a mostly abstract threat. We haven’t lost anyone close to us to this virus. If we’ve lost our job, the real pain hasn’t hit yet. Soon enough, we will have lost someone dear to us, and we will be suffering real economic pain.
Still, I can’t wrap my mind around the idea that we, as a nation, would believe that it’s better to accept a much higher death rate from this disease if it could save the economy. Besides which, I don’t think people grasp how this would work, or rather, not work. Bill Gates said today:
“There really is no middle ground, and it’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is all that counts,’” Gates said in an interview with TED Tuesday. “It’s very irresponsible for somebody to suggest that we can have the best of both worlds.”
Trump has suggested that this middle ground would indeed be possible — by letting some healthy people return to work, for instance, while keeping more vulnerable workers in their homes. Experts have said that drastic and widespread social distancing is required to keep the pandemic from spreading further. Trump has said he would make a decision at the end of the month but has said that he believes the “cure” could be worse than the “problem itself.”
Asked what he would do if he were president, Gates returned to his concerns about reopening the economy.
“The economic effect of this is really dramatic. Nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes,” Gates said. “But bringing the economy back … that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension — huge pain — in order to minimize the pain in the diseases-and-death dimension.”
Over at First Things, Rusty Reno discusses the theological aspects of the crisis, calling on Christians to “say no to death’s dominion.” He writes, in part:
At the press conference on Friday announcing the New York shutdown, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “I want to be able to say to the people of New York—I did everything we could do. And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.”
This statement reflects a disastrous sentimentalism. Everything for the sake of physical life? What about justice, beauty, and honor? There are many things more precious than life. And yet we have been whipped into such a frenzy in New York that most family members will forgo visiting sick parents. Clergy won’t visit the sick or console those who mourn. The Eucharist itself is now subordinated to the false god of “saving lives.”
Truth is another casualty of this sentimentalism. The media bombard the public with warnings about the danger posed by the coronavirus, when the truth is that only a small percent of the population of New York is at risk. By an unspoken agreement, leaders, public health officials, and media personalities conspire to heighten the atmosphere of crisis in order to get us to comply with their radical measures.
A number of my friends disagree with me. They support the current measures, insisting that Christians must defend life. But the pro-life cause concerns the battle against killing, not an ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.
More:
This is what is happening in New York as I write. The media maintain a drumbeat of warnings. And the message is not just that you or I might end up in an overloaded emergency room gasping for air. We are more often reminded that we can communicate the virus to others and cause their deaths.
Just so, the mass shutdown of society to fight the spread of COVID-19 creates a perverse, even demonic atmosphere. Governor Cuomo and other officials insist that death’s power must rule our actions. Religious leaders have accepted this decree, suspending the proclamation of the gospel and the distribution of the Bread of Life. They signal by their actions that they, too, accept death’s dominion.
This is all so bloodless and abstract and pious. Governor Cuomo and other officials — and doctors, nurses, and medical personnel — are dealing with an unprecedented crisis that may crash the city’s health care system. They are also no doubt thinking that if it gets bad enough, with people dying unable even to get into the hospital, the police and National Guard may have to put down civil unrest.
The Hasidic communities in New York City, who have resisted following social distancing rules, have become a hotspot of coronavirus. I guess they have courageously rejected the dominion of death. Now look. Because they didn’t want to change their lives, other people — health care workers — have to bear the burden of trying to save the lives of those who end up in the hospital because of it.
A reader of this blog commented on another post today:
Yesterday was one of my hardest ever as an ER nurse. I had an 89-year-old lady with pneumonia and possibly COVID (test result not back yet) on bipap respirator as well as vasopressor medication to keep her blood pressure up. It was an intense 7 hours and she was really struggling and her BP kept going dangerously low. Then her daughter showed up, her only family, and they made the decision to take her off all support. Daughter said her goodbyes to her mom then left.
I disconnected her from the respirator, from the medication, turned off the heart monitor. Now no more noisy alarms, I dimmed the lights, played some Chopin piano on my phone, and my job shifted to keeping her comfortable with morphine and Ativan until her heart inevitably stopped. Which it did two hours later. The last things she said to me in the hour before she died was “Thanks” “Can I have a sip of water” and “What is your name?”
Going to go in tomorrow and do it all over again.
Every day, this — until we get a vaccine, or somehow build herd immunity, if we don’t crush this virus now. Anyway, that’s what death means. A friend just messaged me from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, saying that the sound of ambulance sirens is a “constant soundtrack.” It is true that Christianity teaches us that death is not to be feared, but that does not mean we should seek it out. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, after all. There really are some things more important than physical life — Christianity teaches that martyrdom is better than apostasy — but to confine oneself to one’s home during a national emergency, to stop a virus that threatens to crush our hospitals, is not exactly a Joan of Arc move.
Last autumn, I interviewed Father Kirill Kaleda, a Russian Orthodox priest who pastors a church dedicated to the martyrs made under the Bolshevik yoke. His office is on the grounds of a national monument to the 21,000 political prisoners executed by the predecessor of the KGB in that field over a 14-month period. This is a man who lives with death. He told me that we have to be prepared to suffer, even to suffer martyrdom, because that’s what it means to be Christian. But we are under no obligation to seek this out, he said. He said this in an emphatic way, as if to cut off in my mind any romantic idea of Christian suffering and martyrdom.
Reno, who’s a friend of mine, is passing harsh judgment on priests who are not serving mass to congregations today, accusing them of a lack of faith, and of moral courage. This is so, so wrong. Nobody — not those priests, not the faithful — wants to be away from church now. We do it not out of fear, but as a temporary sacrifice to save lives. You really can communicate the virus to others by your presence. Yesterday my son and I drove up to the country to bring some food to my mother, who is old and has COPD. If she gets the virus, it will almost certainly be a death sentence. She is self-quarantined in her house. We delivered her groceries, cleaned them with sanitizing wipes, and talked to her from twelve feet away. All three of us knew that to have given her a hug could have meant passing on the virus — if either my son or I are carrying it, and don’t know it — that would take her life. So we all kept our distance, and hated it. Have we surrendered to death’s dominion? Or is that a sacrifice all of us are prepared to make to keep my elderly mother from drowning to death in a hospital bed from fluid-filled, virus-infected lungs?
This is not an abstraction. The political leaders who have closed down economies in European nations, and in some American states, are fully aware that by doing this, they are choosing to accept a staggering amount of material loss and pain onto the body politic, for the sake of saving lives. Are they also cowards who have “accepted death’s dominion”? Or is it more truthful, and of course more charitable, to say that they recognize that human life is sacred, and that while we cannot save everyone, we ought to be prepared to bear a great sacrifice to save as many as we reasonably can?
I wonder what doctors, nurses, paramedics, and frontline medical personnel would think about the claim that accepting social distancing and lockdowns in this public health emergency is a liturgy serving the “false god of ‘saving lives'”?
Similarly with the push on the political right now to get the economy back on track. I get that. Honestly, I do. Like all of you reading this blog, I have been thinking about what it would mean to lose my job. I have one friend who has already lost his business, and another who is on the verge of it. I wish it were possible to make this all go away, by sheer force of will, and good old American optimism. But the virus does not care about our narrative. It’s not a reality show, where the plot has to resolve itself by Easter Sunday.
When you think about the choice the virus confronts us with between poverty and death, remember the title of a Flannery O’Connor short story: “You can’t be any poorer than dead.”
UPDATE:
The post You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead appeared first on The American Conservative.
Covid Will Not Kill Social Justice Warriors
James Lindsay is a mathematician and academic gadfly who has made his name outside of academic circles as a harsh and witty critic of “critical social justice” theory, and of its progressive crusaders. Along with colleagues Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, Lindsay pranked “grievance studies” journals by submitting fake papers that made absurd — but politically correct — claims, and were accepted for publication. More recently, Lindsay is the founder of New Discourses, a website that aims to be “a home for the politically homeless, especially for those who feel like they’ve been displaced from their political homes because of the movement sometimes called “Critical Social Justice” and the myriad negative effects it has had on our political environments, both on the left and on the right.”
Lindsay is a man of the political left, and an atheist. He is also one of the smartest analysts of what Critical Social Justice means for our society. His 2018 Areo essay explaining why critical social justice is a religion is a fundamental text for understanding this phenomenon. I wrote Lindsay the other day and put a series of questions to him about the future of critical social justice in a time of pandemic. Dare we hope that the hard material realities of plague and economic collapse will shove these loonies permanently to the margins? Here’s our interview:
RD: On my more hopeful days, I consider the possibility that this pandemic crisis (including economic collapse) will finally put the SJWs, critical theorists, and the rest, out to pasture. But when I realize how deeply embedded they are within institutions (governmental, corporate, media, academic, etc), I realize that they are going to find a way to use this crisis to their advantage when it is over. What do you think?
JL: The “Critical Social Justice” Theorists, as I have come to refer to them, are activists, first and foremost. You have to understand that. Their primary occupation isn’t being an academic, an administrator, a legislator, an HR director, an educator, or any other such profession you might find them in; it’s being an activist and making their professional role about doing their activism. Once you realize this, your question kind of answers itself, doesn’t it? Of course they’re going to find ways to use this crisis to their advantage. They go around inventing problems or dramatically exaggerating or misinterpreting small problems to push their agenda; why wouldn’t they do the same in a situation where there’s so much chaos and thus so much going wrong. My experience so far is that people are really underestimating how much of this there will be and how much of it will be institutionalized while we’re busy doing other things like tending to the sick and dying and trying not to lose our livelihoods and/or join them ourselves.
It’s very important to understand that “Critical Social Justice” isn’t just activism and some academic theories about things. It’s a way of thinking about the world, and that way is rooted in critical theory as it has been applied mostly to identity groups and identity politics. Thus, not only do they think about almost nothing except ways that “systemic power” and “dominant groups” are creating all the problems around us, they’ve more or less forgotten how to think about problems in any other way. The underlying assumption of their Theory–and that’s intentionally capitalized because it means a very specific thing–is that the very fabric of society is built out of unjust systemic power dynamics, and it is their job (as “critical theorists”) to find those, “make them visible,” and then to move on to doing it with the next thing, ideally while teaching other people to do it too. This crisis will be full of opportunities to do that, and they will do it relentlessly. So, it’s not so much a matter of them “finding a way” to use this crisis to their advantage as it is that they don’t really do anything else.
We have seen over the past two decades “social justice” ideology finding acceptance within institutions — especially schools — on grounds that they make the institutions safer and healthier for the marginalized. After this crisis passes, do you foresee SJWs appealing to health and safety to advance their ideology within institutions?
Appeals to safety are pretty much the main tool that they use when not outright calling people highly morally charged names (like “racist”), so definitely. They will make hay out of every possible instance of a preventable death of a member of a minority group and, more importantly, every single disparate outcome by identity groups, whether there are other explanations for this or not (like poverty, trust or lack thereof for the medical establishment, language barriers, etc.). Some of this kind of watchdog behavior needs to be happening, of course, and helps us improve our systems, but the critical approach we see in Critical Social Justice will be overwhelming, tendentious, and often downright exaggerated, misinterpreted, underinformed, or ginned-up.
I strongly suspect and will go on a limb to predict that the term “health equity” is very likely to become a key idea in our national conversations and beyond as this crisis develops and eventually passes, and it will be considered a top priority to bring the idea of “social equity” (which is what “equity” really refers to) to healthcare, public health, and policy. It will definitely be rooted in the need for safety for the most vulnerable, as they define them, but it will also rest heavily in the idea of “equity” itself, which means “adjusting shares so that citizens are made equal,” that is, enforced equality of outcomes. In the health arena, this can be done more or less responsibly, up to the application of applying a “progressive stack” to providing medical care, which means prioritizing who gets care according to how underprivileged intersectional Theory says they are.
A lot of people on both the left and the right see one major effect of this crisis will be to leave us with a much more powerful state. If the left takes power, in what ways do you foresee the social justice/critical theory advocates using state power to advance their ideology?
I think it’s important to recognize that in this crisis, we will see a necessary expansion of state power and will therefore need to be vigilant on the far side to make sure that it isn’t abused, as has happened in previous calamities. Because Critical Social Justice is ultimately a kind of bureaucratic takeover, that is, it’s fundamentally an institutional effort, it will certainly seek to use any expansions in state (and other institutional) power to its advantage. It will do this by bending the will of these institutions to their vision.
Take the Equity Task Force that just got approved by the state legislature and Governor Inslee in the state of Washington. This is an entity that exists to bring more equity to the state of Washington, and members of the task force said–on camera, mind you–that their definition of equity is to “disrupt and dismantle” the current system in favor of their own and that their intention was to make sure the administrative offices created by and around it last at least fifty years. This was pushed through before the Covid-19 pandemic became significant–and very significant in Washington–and now we have to wonder exactly what kinds of agendas with “health equity” it is likely to try to enforce on that state. We’ll see repeated experiments of this kind in other states as well as on the federal level, for certain.
It also seems clear that the government will adopt Chinese-style monitoring of citizens through smartphones, initially as a health measure — which makes perfect sense, actually. But once they have that power, how can we be sure the state won’t use it to monitor ideological dissidents?
It’s not really within my expertise to talk about how to prevent the state from misusing power like this, which is probably necessary in the short term, as you observe. I will say that it would be important to make sure that any legislation and policy that is enacted in this regard has time limits put upon it. To kind of relate back to the Washington Equity Task Force, remember that they wanted to make sure their administrative power lasts at least fifty years–they said so explicitly. They also explained why: people might think they’ve accomplished their mission at some point and want to end their programs, and they don’t want to see that happen. There will need to be calls, then, that curb this power-grabbing impulse and seek to put deadlines on these expansions of power.
Follow James Lindsay on Twitter @conceptualjames
His book, How To Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, co-authored with Peter Boghossian, is widely available.
And if you think Lindsay might be laying it on too thick, look at this provision on the Democratic coronavirus bailout bill:
Annnnd….in case you thought we were done with the woke-scolding, you were wrong.
Families can't pay their mortgages and there aren't enough ventilators, but you know what we will have? Corporate budgets dedicated to diversity & inclusion initiatives! pic.twitter.com/tBuO3hrBfB
— Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) March 23, 2020
The post Covid Will Not Kill Social Justice Warriors appeared first on The American Conservative.
Liberty U’s Stiff-Necked Leader
Yesterday:
Some of this is already happening, obviously, but it seems like very soon, social distancing is going to be treated by many primarily as a political act—a way of signaling which “side” you’re on.
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) March 23, 2020
Now, here we are. While the rest of the academic world has sent its students home during this life-or-death crisis, Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University is MAGA-ishly defying the crowd:
As the coronavirus threatens to spread across the Lynchburg region, Liberty University officials are preparing to welcome back up to 5,000 students from spring break this week.
Defying a national trend of campus closures, President Jerry Falwell Jr. has invited students to return to residence halls and has directed faculty members to continue to report to campus even as most classes move online.
In an interview Sunday night, Falwell said somewhere between several hundred to more than 5,000 students are expected to live in campus dorms, where they will continue coursework online rather than in classrooms.
Meanwhile, hundreds of professors and instructors without a valid health exemption will come to campus to hold office hours.
“I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life,” Falwell said.
What on earth is the point? They won’t be going to classes in classrooms, but will be studying online — which can be done from anywhere? Why bring them back to dorms? You know that some of them will have been exposed to the virus while away. They will bring the virus back with them to the dorms, where they will spread it. And those professors forced to have office hours — what is Falwell trying to prove?
On Monday, Liberty prof Marybeth Davis Baggett issued a public appeal to Liberty’s board:
This foolhardy decision tracks Falwell’s conspiratorial thinking about COVID-19 and smacks of defiance.
He has repeatedly made it clear that he canceled residential classes for legal, not moral, reasons. In fact, his public comments on the pandemic have manifested bravado, self-congratulation and callousness in the extreme, as, even this week on the Todd Starnes radio show, he spewed far-fetched, unsubstantiated and misleading information about the coronavirus outbreak.
For one charged with leading a Christian institution of higher learning, these are troubling qualities, fundamentally at odds with both Christian faith convictions and an academic mindset. For a leader dealing with a situation of such magnitude, they are outright terrifying.
By continuing to flout the danger of this novel coronavirus, Falwell also encourages reckless behavior in the university’s students. The kicker is, he points to the droves of students coming back to live in the dorms as evidence of his wise decision to keep the campus open.
Falwell cavalierly assumes no responsibility for at least enabling and at most incentivizing the students’ decision to return. Rather than provide the steady leadership needed at this sober time, Falwell has chosen to indulge and endanger the students, as he did last Friday in his convocation message.
“You guys paid to be here, you wanted to be on campus,” he told them. “And I want to give you what you paid for.”
She points out that Falwell has publicly said that the disease scare is just hype meant to bring down Donald Trump. More:
I am deeply grieved that Jerry Falwell Jr’s control of Liberty University is so complete that not one person in leadership is speaking up as the loyal opposition on behalf of the vulnerable that Falwell’s impudent and imprudent decisions have put at risk, both at Liberty and in Lynchburg.
The leadership’s willingness to enable Falwell’s self-professed politically motivated decision bespeaks a spirit of fear, or worse, that shames the mission they ostensibly pursue. I beg the deans, senior leadership and board members to think more long-term. They are compelled by what is genuinely best for the university to act, to say nothing of their altruistic obligations as Christians.
These leaders may think they are helping the institution, but in fact, they are sowing the seeds for its devastation.
She’s risking her job to say that. Liberty faculty, if I’m not mistaken, are on yearly contract. They don’t have tenure. But she’s right: if Falwell brings those kids back to campus, and there’s a massive outbreak there, the school’s reputation will not recover, and it will be sued into the ground by grieving parents.
The post Liberty U’s Stiff-Necked Leader appeared first on The American Conservative.
March 23, 2020
The Heroism Of Hospital Workers
Dr. Craig Spencer contracted Ebola when he was in Africa fighting the 2014 outbreak. He’s now working in the ER in a New York City hospital. This is what it’s like for him and for all the other medical personnel there:
Thank you everyone for your incredible messages of support and encouragement.
Many of you asked what it was like in the ER right now. I want to share a bit with you. Please RT:
A Day in the Life of an ER Doc – A Brief Dispatch from the #COVID19 Frontline:
— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) March 24, 2020
The post The Heroism Of Hospital Workers appeared first on The American Conservative.
Pandemic Diaries 8
Everybody seems to love pictures of Roscoe. This is him frolicking in the backyard today after his bath. If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that Roscoe Is A Good Boy
.
Here’s my coronavirus diary for today. The state of Louisiana went on lockdown at 5 pm. My son Lucas is 16, and has his learner’s permit. He needs to get fifty hours of practice driving in with a parent in the car. So he and I today went to the grocery store to pick up a few things for my mom, and take them to her up in the country. There was no toilet paper and no bread in our local supermarket; Mama needed bread, but I was able to get her frozen biscuits. She also need Coca-Cola, without which she would surely expire, so we brought a lot of that, a couple dozen eggs, and a half-gallon of Blue Bell Vanilla.
Lucas pulled onto Interstate 10 at rush hour, but it might as well have been a Sunday morning. Not much traffic. When we arrived at my mom’s place 40 minutes later, she met us on the back porch. How strange and painful it is not to be able to embrace her, or to come closer than six feet. We unloaded the groceries, wiped them all down with a sanitizing cloth, and talked with her for a few minutes. She gave me information about where her essential papers are stored, in case she doesn’t make it through this pandemic. She is 76 years old, and has COPD. If she catches this thing … I don’t want to think about it. But I had to think about it today, when she gave me the list of where to look for the funeral insurance documents and other papers, just in case.
I have a friend in the Midwest who almost certainly has the virus. His doctor has put him on a drug cocktail, saying that he can’t afford to wait for the test to come back. But aside from that, I’m not aware of anybody close to me who has the virus. Talking funeral documents with my mom today made it real to me in a way it hasn’t yet been. All it takes is one exposure, and she’s gone. How can I be sure that I sufficiently sanitized those eggs today, that ice cream?
It is not at all farfetched that my mother could die without me ever touching her face again. That’s where we all are right now. Late today, the Louisiana governor, a Democrat, tweeted this:
I ask you to join me in a day of prayer and fasting for comfort to those that have lost a loved one to COVID-19, the complete recovery of those that have tested positive, and that God will, as He has done before, heal His people and our land. #lagov #lalege
— John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) March 24, 2020
And the first response to his tweet?
As a Muslim American living in Baton Rouge, let me also share that I will be fasting tomorrow too according to my faith. I believe that we will overcome this pandemic together with the help of God. #lagov #lalege
— Fevzi Sarac (@fevzi_sarac) March 24, 2020
God bless Louisiana. And God bless us all.
From Upstate New York:
I’m a hospital-based physician writing to you from upstate NY. Over the past few days, we have been planning for the wave to hit us as it has downstate NY. I have lots of friends downstate who tell me about the overnight flooding of their ICUs with covid19 patients requiring ventilators (I note that the visuals of this reality, which is similar to Italy, has not really been widely advertised in the US media). We haven’t seen anything like that yet, but I do know at least three physicians I closely work with who have already gotten sick from covid19. One of them worked with my division, so now all of us have to wear masks all day and check our temperatures twice daily. In other words, the barbarians are already beyond the gates, and by the time you learn this, it’s likely that you’ve been exposed. Thankfully, those who are ill are doing ok so far, but I know that over time at least one health care worker in our institution will not be so lucky. And that’s how most of us feel – that we inevitably are going to get sick and be pulled out of work, and we hope that we are in the lucky majority who recover easily.
As an aside, I’ve come to really hate the stereotyping of “young people” or “millenials” as being too dismissive of this disease. I hope readers remember that the majority of the first wave of hospital-based medical professionals – doctors, nurses, PAs, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, etc – are going to be millenial or Gen-X. This is especially true at teaching hospitals that will take the sickest patients. We are the ones who are going to get sick first because we don’t have enough PPE or community testing. But we are still going to show up to work tomorrow and the next day and week until the pandemic abates or we get sick.
Thanks for highlighting various perspectives and giving an early warning about this disease to those who were willing to listen.
From Downstate Illinois:
One item only. I’m writing from a town of 1000 people, 30 miles northeast of St. Louis. When dining in at restaurants shut down last week, we called the operator of the one restaurant in our town (she goes to our church and we wanted to know what things were looking like for them). She immediately told us about four people who normally eat 2 or 3 of their meals there every day. Two of them were guys north of 85 years–one widower, one bachelor. Our family is now taking lunch to them every day.
This is just to say that shutting down a restaurant in a small rural town is in no way similar to telling Maggiano’s in the west Chicago suburbs that it’s carryouts only for a few weeks.
From Portland, Oregon:
I’m writing from Portland, Oregon where things are relatively quiet. We’ve seen significantly fewer cases here than in our neighboring states to the north and south (Washington and California). I wonder why that is. I’m hoping (how realistically, I don’t know) that our relatively small population will shield us to some degree. Even in the state’s most crowded city, where I live, it’s easy to get out and walk around the neighborhood without coming near many people. That said, we now have a “stay at home” order from the governor. She had held off imposing such an order but was pressured into it when a burst of pleasant weather last weekend sent droves of urbanites to sightseeing spots in the Columbia River Gorge and the Oregon coast. Towns on the coast are worried that people from Portland will bring the virus with them, though Oregon’s cases so far are spread all over the state and not particularly concentrated in the cities. With the rainy weather returning, I expect we’ll find it easier to stay home for a while. Unfortunately, all public Masses have been canceled for the past week and more, following a prior order from the governor. “May our hunger for the Mass and the Body of Christ be a source of grace for us,” Archbishop Sample wrote in his letter to the archdiocese, which I thought a fine prayer. Many of the parishes in the city (including my own, Holy Rosary) are livestreaming Masses now, which I have mixed feelings about. I will say that for all my very liberal city’s quirks and wrongheadedness, I have seen people taking each other’s welfare seriously, sharing, looking out for older folks and those at higher risk. When I see small businesses closing and so many people losing their jobs, I do worry that the cure may prove worse than the disease. But for now I’m enjoying the stillness and the sound of the birds.
From Texas:
As an outpatient psychiatrist, I have the advantage at times like these of being able to care for most of my patients through various forms of telecommunications. It is not ideal—I much prefer to see my patients face-to-face, and I always hope that will be the dominant form of my practice. But in these times of coronavirus, it is safer for my patients (and, obviously, for me) if they do not have to travel to the clinic, sit in a crowded waiting room, and spend time in my office.
My heart and prayers go out to my colleagues who are on the front lines in the war against this pandemic. They are completely justified in being fearful for their safety and the safety, by extension, of those family members and loved ones to whom they might transmit the virus. In that context, I have some reflections related to “Coronavirus Confidential,” March 18, 2020.
To be a doctor is to be exposed quite possibly to infectious disease, contaminated needle sticks, chemical and radiation exposure, violent patients, etc. Before I entered my current specialty (and on some occasions since), I have experienced very close encounters with each of those. While prudent safety measures can keep the risk at acceptable levels, medicine is by nature a potentially dangerous profession, and we do no favors to those we admit for training to encourage any illusions to the contrary. No one wants doctors to be exposed to infectious disease unnecessarily. But like the military, you don’t sign up unless you are willing to tolerate what comes with a high and sometimes perilous calling. It may not be as dangerous as the combat zone. (I’ve been there and done that too.) But it is not without real threats.
A relative of mine, a young physician who is currently serving in a city with some of the highest rates of coronavirus in the country, has been having real doubts about staying at his post when doing so might put his young child and his wife at risk of exposure, or of losing him altogether. Who can fail to understand his fears?
Yet for ages, fidelity in times of danger has simply been part of the calling and obligation of our profession.
Years ago, after Hurricane Katrina struck southern Louisiana, I participated in a medical reception team in one of our southern cities receiving medical evacuees from New Orleans. At the end of my second day, as the flights were becoming less frequent, some of those included evacuated medical personnel who had continued serving for days in the hospitals of that city, working to the point of exhaustion in medically primitive conditions without relief. As I worked my way through the patients and professionals that sat in our improvised reception center (an old airport hangar), I spotted a young Asian male sitting quietly off to the side wearing a white coat. He was an intern who had arrived on the most recent flight. As he related his experiences to me, I learned that he had faithfully stayed at his post and cared for all who were assigned to him ever since the storm hit. He could barely stay awake, sipping his Gatorade with the thousand-yard stare one usually sees only in combat veterans.
He told me of the desperate conditions he had been working in, the days without sleep, the heat, the sounds of gunfire outside the hospital, the wretched unending physical and mental exhaustion. After describing the experience, he paused a moment, as if unsure of whether to say what came next.
“My residency supervisor, a doctor on our hospital staff—he left town when he saw what was about to happen. He left us to handle it.”
You could see disappointment, perplexity, disillusionment written all over this young man’s face. He had stayed at his post, bearing the cost of an ancient oath of fidelity, while the mentor that he had respected, admired and—indeed—depended on, took to the hills.
He was only a few months out of medical school. But he was a better doctor—a better man—than his teacher.
To this day, I can get tears in my eyes thinking of that young intern and his devotion to his calling in the most difficult of circumstances. I hope that today he is practicing where his courage is needed in these very dangerous times, teaching his own interns and residents to follow the example that he set so many years ago. And may we all do so in the days to come.
My wife and I watched “A Hidden Life” for the first time last night. Conviction and courage. What a story for these days.
From the East Coast:
I am a Catholic priest in a religious order resident at a prep school in a largely rural area about an hour from a major East Coast city. And never have I been more grateful to live in the middle of nowhere. For the moment, we have not had much local experience of COVID-19.
In some ways, the lockdown mentality is familiar, akin to the more monastic life of some of my religious cousins and forebears, to say nothing of my own novitiate year in a rural area.
For my part, I’ve been trying to maintain a regular routine of work, prayer, exercise, and leisure, and I’ve achieved a relatively high level of success in doing that.
What’s different is that I have to keep five classes of high school boys churning. That is difficult, though they are eager to be together in our online video meetings, as they miss coming to campus and being with their classmates. Our campus is dozens of acres and we have high profile athletic programs, so this is especially hard for our highly competitive athletes. I feel deeply for our students, especially for our seniors. This is going to be seared into the hearts and minds of an entire generation. God only knows what that will mean.
We are anxious here to return to school, and also about what the economic dislocation holds for our future and the future of our students. We are healthy in terms of enrollment, but tuition is not cheap, and there are sure to be ripple effects. No one is unrealistic about the likelihood of a return before summer or possible deleterious consequences for own enterprise, to say nothing of the effects on the long-teetering Catholic educational project in the United States.
Among our neighbors in the community—farmers and farm workers, teachers, nurses, restauranteurs, small business owners—one finds what one would expect: anxiety, uncertainty, fear, concern.
The strangest part of this whole ordeal had to be celebrating Sunday mass in private. I’m almost at a loss for words about what that was like. Somber. Sad. All that. And yet also fortifying for the difficulties ahead, my own small part in imploring God’s grace and blessing upon His creation.
The weekend before this last one, I was in a place where Sunday masses had not yet been canceled, and I preached on the virus, about the Israelites in Exodus quarreling after Moses had dragged them out into the desert upon freeing them, how they had wanted to go back to their slavery. There’s no going back. That’s for sure. But God is in our midst, and the best way to embody that will be solidarity with our neighbors in the difficult time of recovery. I pray our nation is up to that. If the charade in the Senate is any indication, our leadership class may not be. So it will have to be an organic development, growing from below.
I also mentioned in that last homily how only a few days earlier I had awoken early and was tossing and turning for about 15 minutes, with the sun coming into my room, without thinking about the virus, and how peaceful and welcome that was. Needless to say, those days are gone.
From Maryland:
I read you all the time – glad to have your thoughts as part of my life. Thanks for doing this series – it’s so easy to get caught up in press conferences and charts and public planning – it’s good to hear the ups and downs from people on the ground.
Millennial in Maryland here – watching the world spin around me, or maybe my head is spinning. When I put it all down on paper, though, I see that it all has happened before. That’s a cold, hard message to be prepared, but also a sure hope that we will see this through. Here is a bit of my story:
Flashback to 2008, my undergrad finance degree newly minted, I sat at my desk near the trading floor and watched my company’s shares fall through the floor the day we announced an amended SEC filing showing greater risk exposure than previously reported. The market had no appetite for risk (and certainly not additional risk!) with the financial crisis in its first grueling salvo. It all had the air of a movie about it – a dramatic moment slowed for effect: spinning in my desk chair between CNBC on the TV behind me, my 4-monitor PC setup, stark looks on faces of colleagues around me, frantic phone calls being made. Cut to next scene; I was mercifully one of the first shown the door along with the other junior analyst on my team.
Had I been like my more experienced and entrenched colleagues, I might have been dutifully sending out my resume instead of spinning around in my chair, but truth told, I was done with that job before it began. My heart, alas, was not in commodity trading. That said, it took me a decade to see another paycheck like that one.
My heart was in my stomach, as they say, and I made my way to the food world. Starting from scratch (and minimum wage), I worked and learned from a few small food enterprises the fine art of cuisine and the less glamorous reality of keeping a food business alive with small margins, revolving door staff, and a heap of passion. Mercifully (again), I am no longer in the restaurant business and am in a much better position to make it through our current crisis than many of my friends who have already found themselves out of a job. Renewed interest in home cooking and stockpiling with retail shelf-stable goods has allowed my company to hold steady, as an importer of just that sort of thing.
While I haven’t quite despaired, I feel setback again. The system, which worked so well for my grandparents and parents, has failed me again. I’m spinning again, and waiting for the next, unknown scene.
It’s harder this time to see through the smoke. It’s not just my own bootstraps to pull up, but a whole young, growing family. While many in my generation have waited or given up on spouses and family, I have grasped firm and held on to those blessings. My wife and kids are both my refiners fire and the light at the end of the tunnel. I have an obstinate hope that, knowing my own weakness and inconstancy, can only be attributed to grace. But it’s a heavy load to carry in uncertain times; I guess my mistake was even for a second believing that times could be certain.
My great-grandfather died from Spanish Flu in 1918, leaving behind a large brood for his wife to tend alone. Will I meet the same fate, a century later in the same place, but in a very different world? Probably not. Watching my wife go to the front lines in the ER certainly increases the chances of us getting sick, but we are young and healthy, even the worst data shows we are likely to come out alive on the other side. But what will that life be? Here we are again.
Praying for good health for you and yours, and blessings to exceed your wildest imagination – even in trying times.
From southern Virginia:
I have long wondered when and how our mega-globalist-citified ways of seeing things, habits of doing things, with their/our unquenchable desires would tumble down. The stories of the ‘Tower of Babel’ and ‘the Great Flood’ advised -poetically, at least, and perhaps in actual historical fact – that such would be the case. They did or may be doing.
From your piece The Present Apocalypse:
To repeat the message with which we started: we don’t know if this is the End of History, but we can say confidently that it is the End of a period in history, and the start of something new. The easy, comfortable Christianity that most of us have been living will not endure this time of testing.
This is a good foundation for some thought and conversation, I thought? First, I thought, much of the histories of Christian folks has not been easy or comfortable. So, what – and how – may be learn from them.
I thought close at hand to our local historical Black congregations – here in rural southern Virginia – whose generations came to faith, remained in faith, and passed along faith – through hundreds of years of brutal slavery, family destruction, sexual violence, hunger and other abuse, lawful and un-lawful, Constitutional and un-Constitutional, and always inhumane and perhaps at times demonic. I’m convinced that racism has been one of Satan’s – yes, he/she/they is real – ‘greatest’ achievements toward being the ‘Anti-Christ’: attacking and weakening the Body of Christ.
My husband and I, just in February, attended a wonderful performance about Harriet Tubman in a local Black congregation (seemed like we were the only two ‘White/ish-identified’ people there, and two gay guys at that!). Oh my! What stirrings of faith in the performance and in the congregation! And then just before the pandemic crashed into America I attended a performance of the magnificent Oakwood University Aeolians (along with a colleague visiting from Swarthmore, my first schooling): the Holy Spirit was filling that place in song, testimony, and worship. So, one suggestion I have would be for folks to ‘youtube’ etc the history of Black church song, gospel choirs, etc. One of my all time favorite movies has been Say Amen Somebody that I saw when it first came out in 1982 (or some such long ago). It is re-stored and re-released – https://sayamensomebody.com– and just in time!
I saw an interview on one of the ‘talking heads’ panels about ‘faith in the pandemic’ where the journalist was trying to get everyone to smear Kenneth Copeland offering prayers and preaching about God’s power to heal. The pastor of the Black congregation didn’t take that ‘culture wars Christianity shaming’ bait: pastor said, yes, people of faith believe in God’s power, and God’s power to heal, and added – as if to say, ‘and Black believers’ – that ‘we must also be practical’. Black believers have always had to be practical in their faith because having, sustaining and passing along faith required that! I like teaching ‘youtube’ or Alan Parr, with whom I don’t always agree, but because of whom I have learned more about how to see and apply Scriptural teaching to my life. He just did on on the pandemic. I learned something and was strengthened in that practical faith that I’m talking about.
Lesson learned/ing: Sustaining faith in bad times requires a mighty belief in a mighty God, that can be done in soaring song, and in vigilance in practical matters.
Then I saw a notice that the nearby St Thomas Aquinas Seminary – I’m told that it is the largest ‘traditionalist’ RC seminary in the world – just 30 minutes away – would be offering a votive Mass for Times of Pestilence. And saw too that the General House would be offering same Mass daily for all of us around the world. This reminded me that faith communities have made liturgies – ‘works of/for the people of God’ – in times of pestilence for a long long time. Let’s keep doing that.
It is comforting to me – and likely to many – that these brothers and priests and communities are offering this special liturgy. I have attended ordinations, services and other liturgies there. I’m not RC so could not receive the elements in the Eucharist – just as we cannot do when watching a Mass/Communion online – but I was there, joining the ‘work for/of the people’, and benefited from the contemplative use of scripture, litanies, and ‘pageantry’ showing publicly what I said above about the Black church experiences: a mighty faith in a mighty God. Oh, and there is a great view of a hundred miles or so of the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains from the courtyard in front of the great bell that will/may eventually ring from the great church they intend to build.
Lesson learned/learning: Sustaining faith in bad times requires suppleness, as well as practicality, to learn wisdom from ancient as well as contemporary resources that can build up the Body of Christ.
These can help us remain hopeful as well as joyful.
Oh, and not far from the Seminary is a wonderful place – Yogaville – where it has been, in a most scenic spot along the James River, for many decades! yes decades, in rural southern Virginia, serving the community who lives there, who comes to study there, and the entire rural area in ways that it can. My husband and I go for the quiet, calm and beauty. We can visit the LOTUS, walk the grounds, read in contemplation, and if we wanted to do we could join some yoga.
We have participated in some wonderful world-wide-web-cast teachings on mindfulness (which, the science makes clear, can be affirmatively helpful tools for improving immune system resiliency, and/or for reducing adverse and health-harming anxiety, stress and emotional distress). There are many highly qualified clinical professionals who teach mindfulness in this way and not as a devotee of a school of Buddhism. But, I’m quick to add that the Buddhist teachers I have known typically teach mindfulness skills without tending toward devotion. A teaching by Tara Brach recently regarding life with the pandemic was especially helpful to my husband and I in handling careening emotions that many of us are confronting at this time.
Lessons learned/learning: There are skills that humans need – particularly with handling emotions, observing reality accurately (without the darkness and confusion of anxiety, fear, and prejudice that we may carry with us) setting priorities and taking steps for out health and the health of others, and to keep calm – that we might find in many different places.
Tara Brach told a great story: a Buddhist monk observed that when over-crowded boats with Vietnamese refugees threatened to tip over from the panicking, terrified boatload, if just one (mindfully calm) person in the boat spoke confidently a plan to keep from capsizing the boatload could be saved.
People of faith will need, I believe, to be mindful and calm, in touch through mighty faith with a mighty God, in many forms (ancient and new) worship and study, praise and prayer, with both the everlasting and the practical to the forefront.
From Sandy, Utah:
Rod, on the topic of “Mormon Benedict Option,” I thought you should know what our church is doing during the current crisis.
We’ve closed our chapels and stopped holding Sunday services worldwide, but because most of our men are ordained, everybody who wants it is still able to receive the sacrament–in our case, every Sunday. Today I presided at a small service in my living room with just me and my family, where I blessed bread and water (since we don’t drink wine). After we ate and drank, I delivered a short sermon from John 6 and Matthew 26 about the bread of life and eating Jesus’ flesh and blood. (It was a very short sermon. I have four kids under eight.) Then we closed the worship service with a prayer and my wife taught a short Sunday school lesson out of the Book of Mormon. (It involved throwing a ball into a bucket–again, four kids under eight.)
This sort of thing is easy for my wife and me–we’re educated and we were both missionaries earlier in life. But the Church actually announced a year and a half ago that it was going to start getting everyone ready for the possibility that they might not be able to have services outside their homes. It released a schedule of weekly scriptural readings for everyone, along with a manual to help people to teach their own Sunday school lessons at home on that week’s readings. It even cut down the Sunday meeting schedule (formerly three hours, now two) to give people more time for home study.
Not all of our experience is going to be replicable for people with different ecclesiologies, but I’m fairly impressed by the way the Church has handled things so far, and there may be things we’ve done that spark ideas for other people trying to deal with the situation. In particular, I’d encourage other Christians to get people teaching each other scripture in their own homes if they’re not already. It will do a lot more than simply hearing it taught via livestream.
I’ll look forward to reading more on your site about what other people are doing to worship until the churches can open again.
From Austin, Texas:
Quickly I want to thank you for your persistent, realistic assessments of coronavirus as it has spread across the world. In a highly polarized time, it feels like your daily musings were a place to cut through the noise. At least they were for me.
As we, as a nation, go into this pandemic, I’ve felt a strange form of privilege.
On one hand, my wife, and many close friends, are doctors. They’re on the front-line of battling this thing. As scary as it is for me to have her to wake up at 6 AM every day and head to the hospital to face the coronavirus, I feel privileged to have such a partner in my life. I see the grace with which many doctors and other medical professionals are dealing with this pandemic and I know that we can figure this out.
I experience the same thing going to the grocery store or if we’ve ordered delivery. When you turn off CNN or Fox and when you tune out of Twitter, the world is a much better place. People do want to help. They are risking their health to make sure families like mine can have some semblance of normalcy.
I feel privileged in another way. I’m getting to watch what community in a digital world looks like. I’m in Austin where SXSW was canceled. Hundreds of jobs lost. Just as those jobs were lost, Austinites banded together to create a site that crowdsourced SXSW workers’ incomes to help them stay afloat.
I made a call for volunteers to make check-in with and deliver food/medicine to isolated seniors in a safe manner, and have had more people message me than I can count. People are turning despair into hope. They’re not waiting for some corporation or government to step in. They’re doing it themselves.
Under the sound bites and tweets, I believe there are strong community bonds being woven that will see our nation through this. Anecdotally, I know that similar community mobilizations are happening in at least a few other communities where I have friends.
While I feel hope and this privilege, I’m also angry. I read recently that manufacturers that produce PPEs have been signaling since the Bush Administration that America does not have enough equipment. That we would be in trouble because the actual manufacturing of that equipment was sent away, mostly to China. We’ve been warned for almost two decades that this would be a problem.
And now it is. And now my wife, and many of my closest friends, are going into hospitals without the proper equipment to keep their patients and themselves safe. And it is resulting in some residents being ordered to stay home. Because our hospitals and government were underprepared for this pandemic, the already overwhelmed system is being more burdened. It is absurd and irresponsible.
Yet, even in the face of that, I know of Americans who are pulling out their sewing machines and churning out masks. I have friends who are organizing 3D printers to print respirators. I see friends working with American manufacturers to make masks. And they didn’t have to wait for any corporation or government to become the helpers.
My Guru once told me that Hindus don’t believe. Belief means doubt. He told me that Hindus know.
I don’t know if what Hinduism or any other religion teaches is right. What I do know is that in spite of the gross incompetence of some, many of us are coming together to create new kinds of communities that will be better for America. We will be stronger. We will be more loving.
Thanks again for creating your space.
OK, now I have tears in my eyes. Just look at all you wonderful people, doing your best. Thank you for the gift of these stories.
Keep them coming, folks. Email to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com — and don’t forget to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and say where you’re writing from. You never know what a gift your stories may be for someone whose face you will never see, and whose name you will never know, but who will find hope in them.
The post Pandemic Diaries 8 appeared first on The American Conservative.
Fatal Idiocy Is Not Trump’s Fault
Did you hear the story about the elderly couple in Arizona who … well, read it:
An Arizona man has died after ingesting chloroquine phosphate — believing it would protect him from becoming infected with the coronavirus. The man’s wife also ingested the substance and is under critical care.
The toxic ingredient they consumed was not the medication form of chloroquine, used to treat malaria in humans. Instead, it was an ingredient listed on a parasite treatment for fish.
More:
On Monday Banner Health, based in Arizona, said the couple, both in their 60s, took the additive called chloroquine phosphate.
The couple unfortunately equated the chloroquine phosphate in their fish treatment to the medication —known by its generic name, hydroxychloroquine — that’s recently been touted as a possible treatment for COVID-19, which has infected more than 42,000 people in the U.S. and killed at least 462.
An NBC News reporter spoke to the widow on the phone:
Woman in ICU: “Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure.”
NBC: “What would be your message to the American public?”
Woman: “Oh my God. Don’t take anything. Don’t believe anything. Don’t believe anything that the President says & his people…call your doctor.” https://t.co/C8EiTQQ3r1 pic.twitter.com/UAOXBNsS4t
— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) March 24, 2020
Oh, for pity’s sake, really,, ma’am? You’re seriously going to blame the president because you and your husband decided to eat stuff you’re supposed to use for treating sick aquarium fish? From NBC’s report:
The man’s wife told NBC News she’d watched televised briefings during which President Trump talked about the potential benefits of chloroquine. Even though no drugs are approved to prevent or treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, some early research suggests it may be useful as a therapy.
The name “chloroquine” resonated with the man’s wife, who asked that her name not be used to protect the family’s privacy. She’d used it previously to treat her koi fish.
“I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?'”
No, it wasn’t! That’s not what the president has been talking about! It’s an algaecide.
In the audio clips released by NBC, the reporter did not challenge her blaming Trump because she and her husband ate chloroquine phosphate instead of hydroxychloroquine. Why not? Because it was too good to have a grieving widow on tape blaming Trump for her travails? I can imagine not wanting to be hard on a recently widowed woman in ICU, but come on.
At least NBC is not going as far as this radio station:
That’s fake news, straight up. They did not eat “chloroquine,” in the sense that they ingested the stuff the president was talking about. They ate something different. The president did not tell them to eat that stuff. The president didn’t even tell them to ingest hydroxychloroquine, the actual fit-for-human-consumption drug!
There are a thousand coronavirus-related things you can legitimately fault Donald Trump for, but two people in Arizona eating fish tank cleaner because the president said that a legitimate drug that sounds like the active agent in the aquarium powder might show promise against coronavirus — that’s not one of them.
This is a sad story, for sure, but it’s the fault of this woman and her husband, nobody else.
UPDATE: Yup:
the entire point of marriage is if one of you suggests ingesting fish tank cleaner the other says no
— cc (@cc_fla) March 24, 2020
The post Fatal Idiocy Is Not Trump’s Fault appeared first on The American Conservative.
Rod Dreher's Blog
- Rod Dreher's profile
- 503 followers
