Distancing

It looks as if we’ll have to spend a few more weeks holding our distance. 

The White House has extended the social distancing period through the end of April as COVID-19 infection rates soar and the death toll mounts.  So much for business as usual by Easter.

Aside from the drawbacks of “remote instruction,” to use the fashionable euphemism for teaching while campuses remain shut, my day-to-day is similar to that of summer.  It’s no hardship staying in.  I have enough food on hand, I’m getting enough sleep, and I don’t have to commute. 

Which doesn’t mean I’m not following the rapidly developing narrative surrounding COVID-19 or am unaffected by it.  I know I’m okay having self-isolated for over two weeks.  I am very thankful that no students or colleagues have tested positive (at least as far as I’m aware).  Our county of just under 100,000 residents has only a dozen confirmed cases as of yesterday and no deaths to date.  Our community hospital assures us it can meet the challenge posed by the outbreak.  But what we’re reading in the news, not to mention listening to the ominous drumbeat of the 24-hour TV news cycle, is enough to wear the strongest nerves.

A month’s worth of cautious self-assurance that we will weather the crisis and move forward all the stronger is beginning to wane.  My reluctance to venture out is growing.  I’ve postponed shopping for today’s wants in favor of actual needs down the way.  Even a week ago I would have said I wanted to stay home to avoid other people’s craziness rather than the coronavirus itself.  Now I’m planning my next outing to make as few stops as necessary, to buy packaged and canned goods rather than fresh produce, and then to go straight home and wash my hands.  Thoroughly.

And yet, there are many signs of normalcy.  Neighbors come and go.  One story in my newsfeed offered that 2/3 of us are still showing up for their “essential” jobs.  I live near an interstate, and in the middle of the night I can hear semi traffic in the distance.  (Another story in my feed quotes over-the-road truckers as saying they’re working more efficiently now there are fewer cars on the roads.  That means retail outlets are surely being stocked. Someone should tell the toilet paper hoarders.)

But in the midst of all this are the numbers.  Dr. Fauci’s prediction that 200,000 may die in the U.S., the ventilator and testing kit shortages, and the swath the disease is cutting in the hardest hit places like Italy and Iran ratchet anxieties. 

The media provide mixed signals which contribute to the confusion.  Local news broadcasts are as chipper as ever.  Commercials still run for businesses those affected by shelter in place orders can’t patronize, automakers still try to sell us new cars and insurers car insurance, and TV programming remains its inane self.  On the other hand, the “shelter in place” installments of The Daily Show, purportedly recorded from the homes of Trevor Noah and other cast members, fall a bit flat trying to wrest humor from current events.  (The past couple of weeks have reinforced my belief that standup and sketch comedy only work in front of a live audience.)

So, it’s pretty tough right now to know what to think or feel.  Then again, some people are quite certain as to how to react.  Although my mountain resort town has respectfully urged visitors to stay away, feedback from other communities in the region indicates a more aggressive stance.  People in one town are pressuring law enforcement to set up checkpoints on the roads leading in.  A Facebook post suggested slashing the tires of out of town cars.  One local official told a reporter she was afraid someone was going to get shot given the xenophobia prevalent in her county.

As far as they’re concerned, the folks coming uphill won’t be kept from the second homes on which they pay taxes.  One part time resident who couldn’t leave her high-powered gig to shelter out here offered her place on Airbnb, advertising it as a place the prospective guest could wait out the crisis in safety.  The listing was quickly taken down after a backlash.

The official who worried people might get shot isn’t being dramatic or alarmist.  In my state, gun shop owners have demanded the governor classify them as essential workers, with the vocal support of assorted Friends of the Second Amendment.  Firearm and ammunition sales have spiked in the last month.  Soundbites and article quotes give the impression some of the purchasers are eagerly anticipating a breakdown of order.

Fear can be a useful response.  It’s what allowed our prehistoric ancestors to survive, and it can do the same for us.  The important thing is to temper fear with judgment and reason.  Unless you’re directly faced with an existential threat and must act immediately and decisively, there is time for risk analysis. 

Certain habits born of experience help, too.  I’ve been able to stay home for seventeen days and counting because I came home to a full cupboard, fridge, and freezer.  As a kid that was not always the case, so my routine as an adult is to augment my weekly food shopping with staples or household items that haven’t run out but will in coming weeks.  I wasn’t planning on being confined at home and I did not buy in hoarder quantities.  But I had enough to last long enough to minimize outside contact during the first part of the crisis.

Naturally, there were and are a few underlying assumptions.  One was that I would have essentials like running water, electricity, and gas.  (Check, at least so far.)  Another is that retail businesses will stay open and properly stocked.  (We’ll see.)  And so, while I’m naturally cautious I probably would be in a bad place if a full-scale catastrophe struck.

So would you, most likely, though the preppers would be happier than pigs in shit should the unthinkable occur.  There is an unspoken faith in the systems that sustain us.  The COVID-19 pandemic is causing people to question for the first time whether they are robust enough to get us through and not just those on the fringes.  I am very reluctant to entertain the possibility of a disease-driven societal collapse reminiscent of The Stand.  However, even a partial, temporary collapse such as that after Hurricane Katrina multiplied across several regions would shake public confidence to the point where we might see our society permanently transformed and not in the way armchair idealists like me would prefer.

Some of what’s happening was foreseeable and thus preventable, and some of it not.  The New York Times reported this week that the federal government had contracted with a medical device startup back in the late aughts to manufacture a reserve supply of respirators to meet a potential emergency; following a series of corporate acquisitions and mergers and attempted contract renegotiations this never came to pass. That was an attempt at foresight, sabotaged by corporate capitalism though it ultimately was.  The novel coronavirus, as the name implies, was not specifically foreseen and could not have been because we cannot predict evolution.  But if plans had gone as planned, we would have had a better response to COVID-19 than we’ve had.

Past experience with numerous outbreaks affords a roadmap—H1N1 in 2009, SARS and MERS before that, the 1967 Hong Kong flu, not to mention the big daddy of ‘em all, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19—but hindsight is myopic.  Or if we do remember the epidemic spectre, it tends to be PR embarrassments such as the 1976 swine flu fiasco.  Then there’s the fact that both culturally and a matter of business practice we plan for the short to mid-term but seldom for the long haul.

I don’t know what to make of it all. I’m just holed up in my modest abode waiting for the next development.  There’s some distancing you can’t pull off. 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Remote

It’s been a week.  I’ve been cooped up indoors for a solid week.

Like so many others, I’m self-isolating in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Along with a comparative few lucky enough able to do so, I am working remotely.  I’ve left the house only to check the mail and take out the trash.  So far, I don’t mind.  My habits are solitary, so the social distancing thing is pretty much a given.  Better to stay home than to deal with a paranoid public outside my front door.

I’d said so long to last Thursday’s evening class telling them that we’d interact online for the next two or three weeks, the timespan quoted by the administration.  As of midweek the duration has been extended until semester’s end (right before Memorial Day).  I’ve seen the last of my students; from now on our relationship will be virtual.

I’m ambivalent toward online instruction.  My summer classes are usually distance learning, leaving me free to check in from wherever which means I can travel on my own schedule and not necessarily on semester breaks alone.  (Not that I’ll be traveling anywhere anytime soon…) 

But in person classes work best in my experience.  Liberal arts subjects are narratives, and it’s hard even with recorded lectures to sustain a narrative with any life in it online.  All you’re doing, really, is presenting bare facts, and students are paradoxically more likely to ask questions in a physical classroom than by email or LMS message.  Online discussion boards are stilted and inhibit meaningful dialogue.

The abrupt shift to online only has caused the predictable heartburn among colleagues and students alike.  As one student put it last week, “If I wanted to take an online class I would’ve signed up for an online class.”

It’s for our own good, of course.  And we’re all in it together, albeit in cyberspace.  But it’s not the inconvenience that worries me about my students’ welfare.  There’s the obvious; I want them all well.  But the local economy is heavily dependent on tourism, and my younger learners (and not a few of their elders) typically work in hospitality. While they undoubtedly have lots of time now to devote to my class, they’re not earning what they need to pay the bills.

There’s a lot of that going on.  Daily unemployment claims in my state doubled over the last two days.  Meanwhile surreal headlines commingle the horrible and mundane; one from yesterday’s CNN newsfeed read “U.S. Death Toll Hits 149; Dozens of Malls Close.”  Conflicting messages about the crisis continue to shake confidence.  And when there is uncertainty in a crisis people start to behave unpredictably.

The examples of erratic behavior are mounting so fast you need wings to stay above them.  A middle-aged Brooklynite got in a shouting match with a bunch of twentysomethings congregating outside a bar.  He felt the patrons should have stayed home.  One woman was quoted in a news report as being too scared to buy gas because she might pick up coronavirus from the pump handle, evidently forgetting she could have just gotten a couple of paper towels from the dispenser to avoid skin contact.  People without symptoms insist upon wearing face masks in public despite pleas from health officials to refrain from doing so.

Then there’s the panic buying and hoarding.  Fortunately there hasn’t been any of that locally; on my last trip to the supermarket everyone was shopping normally.  But you hear the stories.  There’s the hoarding of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, of course.  There are the nervous suburbanites clearing shelves of pasta, rice, and beans as if in anticipation of a siege.  Then there are the enterprising folks who roam from store to store buying up scarce items looking to sell them at a premium on Amazon.  Just today a senior citizen was robbed in a parking lot of the bag of groceries she was carrying.  I had to read that last story twice to believe it.

It’s easy to get a laugh out of panic buying when there’s no credible evidence of impending shortages.  But there are vulnerable people already adversely affected by the abrupt economic downturn who could be made to suffer further, people who don’t have the financial resources to meet price increases in household necessities.  At this point there are local food banks forced to cut back on their operations due to the quarantine policies, and the one serving students at my college has closed for the time being.

Economic divides become more evident in crises.  The online editions of the Business Journal ran an article today—behind a paywall, naturally—with the headline, “The Rich Confront the Virus: ‘Do I Quarantine in the Hamptons?’”  The opening line, the only one publicly visible, reads with nary a touch of irony, “Even in an age of inequality, a global pandemic can be a great—and terrible—leveler.”

Normally I’d dismiss such a fatuous pronouncement with a harsh laugh if it didn’t echo a tidbit a student shared with me.  The student works as a livery driver shuttling well-to-do seasonal residents from our small airport to whichever mountain aerie is their home away from home.  That afternoon she had driven a family arriving from the Bay Area.  People with means tend to be unguarded among the servant class, and these were no exception.  It was a younger family with school-aged kids, and one parent remarked to the other that it was a good thing the schools had closed since they could “wait out” the “craziness” seizing San Francisco and other cities.

This student is both observant and perceptive, and she was startled and amazed by their choice of words.  She was disturbed by their obliviousness.  They believed themselves above it all and had decided to take an extended ski vacation while civilization broke down elsewhere.

I’m not so surprised.  We’ve been on a slippery slope toward apocalyptic thinking for a long time.  Whether this is due to the disproportionate cultural influence of evangelical Christianity or plain and simple self-absorbed fear is hard to say.  It’s probably a little of both.  Community is a thing of the past.  As Robert Putnam put it, we’re bowling alone.  COVID is making us even more suspicious of each other than usual.

Returning to the vacationing family, they would surely be indignant at what their driver did once she had safely delivered them at their destination.  She thoroughly cleaned the car’s interior with disinfectant.  It probably never occurred to them that they could possibly pose a threat to anyone; it’s the rest of the world that’s the threat.  Remote, indeed.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar