Pandemic

 

 

November 9, 2020

 Greetings from this lens,

 Last year I read the book ‘Factfulness’ by Hans Rosling, and then told everyone I know to read it.  I gave copies to all of my children.  I was surprised by how much it impacted me, more so today.  The premise of the book is a startling one: we are wrong about how we see the world; things are better than we think.  Rosling poses ten questions about humanity’s circumstances to bright people all over the world and in their responses, we can see a dramatic gap between perception and the reality.

 I am reasonably intelligent, well read, widely traveled, and unabashedly optimistic, and I answered the ten questions and failed.  My assumptions about the world, based on what I thought I knew, were largely wrong.  The facts, assimilated from WHO, USAID, the UN and the World Bank and other pillars of objective, factual information, showed that the human condition is improving, better than I knew.  More people are literate, live longer, are healthier, immunized against disease, have pathway to greater economic stability, than the generations before.  I won’t spoil it for you; go buy the book, or find it at your library.  If you lack either of those resources, come have coffee with me and I’ll tell you all of it.

 In the same light of these extraordinary positive revelations, there was something else.  In the back of the book Rosling reveals five global risks that still concerned him.  The first on his list was a global pandemic, one that behaves EXACTLY as the one we are experiencing.  The author, who passed away as the book was printed, even as he wrote of his fear, also pointed out that the world is better prepared for a pandemic than it was for the Spanish flu in 1918, when probably 50 million people died, and the average lifespan of humans dropped from 33 to 23.  I’ll stop here and let you absorb how far we have come since then. 

 We have watched in this country as science has done very public lab experiments in order to find a way to survival for the greatest number of people during this pandemic.  Some of the experiment has been confusing, some of it wrong, some of it exactly right.  Aside from some meddling, little of what has been done by science to save our specie from disaster has been driven by ulterior motives.  And yet, somehow there are people who doubt, suspect, who now ignore science and embrace myths.  Worse, there has been a divide created among us, just when unity is most important. 

 In 1989, Hans Rosling was in Zaire, doing research on an incurable paralytic disease called konzo.  One morning he stepped outside his hut to find fifty people there, armed with machetes, whose intention was to kill him.  They were convinced that he was taking their blood and selling it, or to make something to hurt them.  Thankfully he was rescued by one woman in the village who already had seen her child saved by the measles vaccine that she too once feared. 

If you are insulted by the comparison, I apologize, I know so far that people in our country have not responded with machetes, but perhaps the danger is as real.   I recognize that a certain skepticism is healthy, but only if it is informed by fact, not fear or fable or blind zeal. 

 After the attacks on September 11, nearly twenty years ago, we faced a new challenge as the government responded, trying to make air travel safe.  In time, people grew weary of the security, the lines, the screening.  I remember a woman saying “I’m sick of this, just let us on the plane.  If it’s my time to go, that’s the way it is.”  Obviously, if it were ‘her time to go’ I didn’t want to be on a plane with her, since I felt sure it wasn’t also my time to go.

 What’s interesting is that I heard almost the identical quote from a couple people recently.  “I want to live my life.  If it’s my time to go…”  My response is the same; it may not also be my time to go.  People are tired of washing their hands and keeping their distance and wearing their mask.  There are those who are past tired of it, they feel victimized in some way for having to conform.  There are others who have made this into an issue of personal freedom, of pride, and connected it to politics or religion to bolster their perspective.  These are the clanking machetes I worry about.

 In my desk is a copy of Time magazine from December 2001.  On the cover is the Person of the Year, America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani.  He was a hero of sorts, certainly an icon in those terrifying times.    In January of 2002 I attended a meeting where Giuliani was the keynote speaker.  He spoke about his in experience in New York during the crisis, and a little bit about where we would go from there. 

 In the question and answer time, thinking of the muttering in the TSA lines, I was able to ask him about the issue of national security versus personal civil liberty.  He said this: “Let’s not confuse infringing civil liberty with inconvenience.  There are laws that will protect the rights of the people in this country, and there should be laws and actions that protect our lives as well.”

 It is a different challenge before us, but the response and the responsibility have to be the same: Don’t succumb to the temptation to find how science failed, or compare today’s methodologies to barbers doing bloodletting over a hundred years ago.  If you look for a conspiracy, whether government or big business or alien interference, you will find people to join you.  Those same people who mobbed the small hut in Zaire, who sought to kill the scientist who brought a cure.

 We need to behave together.  It may be a year before a vaccine can make a difference in our country and around the world.  The Covid fatigue you feel now will likely get more burdensome before it’s over, but it is not fatal.  Neither is it an assault on your freedom.  In the context of human experience, it is an inconvenience. 

 The human specie is nothing if not resilient.  We are built to adapt, to survive, equipped to continually improve our condition on this planet.  Our strengths, though, became most effective when we behaved together.  From the first tribe that gathered, and then hunted, and then farmed, and now built the rockets to outer space, we are better when we behave together.

  I urge you to look at the world with the Factfulness lens.  See the true hope that has been created by our lives getting better over the last generations, in almost every way.  There are still challenges, still people left behind, but we are gaining on them.  This will also be true of the crisis in front of us today.  We will find a solution to the pandemic, and in this time between now and then, we must trust each other, behave together, create a time in history that will echo with the sounds of our unity, and not the angry clashes of machetes.

 “Hope is a passion for what is possible.”  Soren Kierkegaard

 

Hope this finds you behaving

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2020 David Smith