A weird time for the better angels of our nature

It’s a weird time but you all knew that. Many of you are home, tied to Netflix and whatever sanity you can find in comfort food, good wine, and a basement stuffed to the gills with toilet paper. Some people still have to go out though and they have papers now – like passersby in 1940s Germany who are seized upon by trench-coated Wehrmacht officers demanding to ‘see your papers.’ Having those papers shows police that you are ‘essential’ and you have some fundamental reason to be outside your home other than grocery shopping. As I say, it’s a very weird time.

And being a writer in this time is also very weird. One would think, first of all, that it would be a wonderful time to get a ton of writing done. It might be and for some I’m sure it is. The problem is, I have papers, so I still get up every day at 6 and go to work. When I get home I head to the basement, where I stay until I go to work again the next day, and that’s where I am now on a Saturday as my family moves about with their lives upstairs.  This is where I’ll be until my wife calls to me and meets me at the stairs with a plate of lunch and again at dinner. If I make it upstairs at all, everything I touch is with a disinfecting wipe.

Let’s be clear about this – I do not have symptoms of COVID-19, I am not sick. I do not have a fever or cough. But I still go to work and by being out among the world beyond the borders of our house, being out where the bad things are, I present a clear and present danger to my family – while at the same time, my continuing to work presents a clear and present advantage over millions of Americans who no longer have jobs to go to; who worry about not only the virus, but the rent, and food and the worries about everything else that being able to go into the world alleviates – except the virus.

And for all the weirdness the virus is bringing, it’s also bringing a lot of very cool things to light. There is a lot of goodness out there that is finding a voice and some meaning in all this. If you haven’t seen John Krasinski’s SGN (Some Good News) YouTube channel you are missing out. I’ve linked episode one, but episode two (there are only two as of this writing) is stunning.

Had this virus happened at any time before the advent of really good, internet (like back in the days of dial-up or before), it would be entirely different and it would have felt different – if this had happened in the 1980s it would have been brutal (but with a much better soundtrack). But thanks to exceptional internet service people can join together in Zoom conferences and make incredible things happen – like Krasinski did in episode two. (Yeah, I have to link that as well).

Later today, a bunch of celebrities will gather online from their far-flung homes, to play a poker game to raise more than a million dollars for feeding America – and give us all something to do at the same time as we watch. Technology hasn’t dulled the impact of the virus, but it has allowed us to carry on in a manner that is more or less civil.

If not for the tens of thousands of people who are dying, and the hundreds of thousands more whose lives will be forever impacted by this virus, we might be able to say one day that this was all a good thing, that we came out of it better as a race; that our sense of empathy took a step forward ahead of our sense of entitlement; and that our planet benefited from our enforced lock-down (Indians can see the Himalayas for the first time in more than 3 decades; Los Angeles has had some of the best air quality of any city in the world for multiple days)

Maybe, at some point in the future, we will be able to look back and find the positives. For now, we can take some solace that as people we have not yet descended into darkness and, in fact, our light seems to shine more brightly amidst the weirdness.

I will leave you with a partial quote from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address that, when taken in the context of COVID-19 as the conflict, seems particularly apt:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.“