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