Day 534…
On Monday morning, Michael and I spent two and a half hours in line outside a Red Cross tent in front of the main train station in Rome to get a rapid COVID test. It was extremely hot but, thankfully, the wait was in the shade under the terminal’s overhang. Even with vaccination cards, the US requires a negative test within 72 hours of arrival so there we were.
We are still in the middle of a global pandemic. Using both of those words is redundant because the definition of pandemic is an epidemic that crosses international borders, but in this case the redundancy is on purpose. COVID 19 is affecting the entire human population of the planet. There’s no getting away from it. It is everywhere. Traveling to Italy drove that home for me.
Having spent most of this past year and a half in New York, it’s easy to think of “here” as being Manhattan and “there” as being everywhere else. Reading and watching the news you might start to think of “here” as being the United States and “there” as being other countries. The reality of this virus, though, is that we need to look up at the stars and the countless galaxies around us and realize that “here” is planet earth and “there”, for now anyway, is the great beyond.
In the early days of the shutdown, we all watched from here as Italy started drowning in the virus and took comfort in its being “there”. We could be horrified by what we were seeing and hearing but believe that it wasn’t impacting us. Italy lost the game of Russian roulette at the beginning but rather than learning from their mistakes and their discoveries we just kept playing the same game here. Soon, New York was giving Italy a run for its money. Our numbers went up and morgue vans started appearing on our streets. Our hospitals started overflowing into convention centers and into tents in Central Park. While we floundered, the rest of the United States looked on in horror at our liberal little island and were relieved that it was all happening in their “there” and not in their “here”.
Now, some of those places are seeing their “here’s” looking just as bad as the places that they never believed they would become. In the past few days four states have hit new high-level marks for COVID infections: Florida, Mississippi, Oregon, and Hawaii. Oregon and Hawaii are faring better than the other two because their vaccination rates are higher and there are mask mandates in place. Their ICU beds are at about 73% capacity, but most of the patients in those beds are not suffering from the virus. Conversely, Florida and Mississippi, where vaccination rates are low and there are no mask mandates are seeing their ICU beds at about 90% capacity with most people in them there because of COVID. Only 36.1% of the population of Mississippi has been vaccinated which is well below our national average of 50.8%.
“Here” and “there” along with “us” and “them” seems to be a universal way we humans have of looking at the world and our relationships with each other. We do it on every level of our lives. Employers and employees invariable end up as “us” and “them”. In my job, my position tends to vacillate between one group and the other. Sometimes I’m perceived to be being with the producers, sometimes I’m seen as part of the company. Sometimes producers and companies become a united “us” against the critics or the ticket-buying public “them”. People choose sides when they watch games. It all becomes our team versus their team. Parents and kids. Families and neighbors. This neighborhood and that neighborhood. Our town against their town. Our state in opposition to their state. Our country standing up to their country.
Aside from a seemingly universal desire to behave that way, we do everything that we can to avoid being a unified “we”.
President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is generating an almost hysterical level of contradictory responses. We have poured trillions of dollars and thousands of lives into a small country in the middle of Asia trying to get “them” to act like “us”. That it has taken them mere hours to dismantle the entire jerry-rigged political structures we took twenty years to put into place, should be some indication of how misguided we have been.
There are likely to be some very dark times ahead for different groups of people living in that country given our swift exit. The people who worked for and with the United States are going to be seen as collaborators and likely face retribution. This is nothing new. The Indians who worked with the British in India likely fared no better when the British ceded power than these people probably will. Across Europe, the people who worked with and for the Nazi’s, whether they thought they were helping their own people by doing so or not, were often ostracized from their communities or worse after the fall of the Reich. Colonists who supported the British here in our own country had their lands confiscated and goods seized when the Americans won the Revolutionary war.
Afghani women are likely going to have a particularly hard time of it in the coming days, months, and years.
Would we not be somewhat better off, however, if some of the intense political handwringing about what may or may not befall the Afghani people were directed back at our own country? At least for the moment?
Anyone who has ever flown on a commercial jet knows that when oxygen masks appear, you put the mask over your own nose and mouth first, and then, and only then, do you help others.
We, here in the United States of America, did not pass the Equal Rights Amendment to our constitution. We voted AGAINST giving women equal rights and equal responsibility in this country. Countless bills designed to protect women from domestic violence, workplace harassment and the like get voted down all the time. Here, not there.
We rise in horror when genocide happens somewhere else, but we were all OK with it happening here when we all wanted the land that the Native people of this continent had been living on for millennia ourselves. We decry the marginalization of cultural groups by oppressive regimes in foreign places, but we seem to be fine with doing that here. That there needs to be a movement entitled Black Lives Matter at all makes that perfectly clear. Not that Black lives are better, or they deserve more than anyone else - simply that they matter.
We dumped the Kurds in Syria a couple of years ago without a second thought. The general population here is not even particularly clear about who the Kurds are. Whoever they are, they are over “there”.
Our former President’s desire to pull out of all our international treaties and agreements was clumsy and ill-thought out. In all of that, though, there was a kernel of something true. We do not need to be the earth’s police force. We do not need to impose our way of living on anyone else. We should, however, be strengthening the bonds we have with other countries and not dismantling them. Those bonds help create a larger “we”.
Last week the Senate voted overwhelmingly in support of a $1 trillion dollar infrastructure bill. The vote was 69 to 30. Even the good senior Republican Senator from Kentucky voted for it. It still has a rocky path ahead of it in the House, but here’s hoping. The bill is designed to modernize our outdated power grid, rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges, and strengthen our broadband. It will also fund new climate-change resilience.
Surely our money is better spent here on that rather than there in Afghanistan. We have spent generations leading with our military might, maybe we would do better through leading by example. Jesus, himself, said, “Physician, heal thyself.” We should try it.
The House is trying to leverage their voting on this by insisting that the Senate first pass a $3.5 trillion social policy bill. The whole thing is sure to drag out endlessly, but it is heartening, that the wheels have been set in motion.
In Rome, you can’t even go into a McDonalds without a Green Pass, proving that you’ve been vaccinated. So far, about 61.6% of the people in Italy have been vaccinated - a much higher rate than ours. You can’t get onto any form of transportation or go into any business without a mask. This is true in tiny little towns and in the middle of the Capital. To get into the Vatican, you must show your Green Pass or US vaccination card or else you will be turned away.
This isn’t to say that everyone in Italy is behind the vaccine. There are anti-vaxxers there, too. In the little hill town we were in for most of our trip there were a couple of “No Green Pass” signs spray-painted on the sides of houses. One of them had been firmly altered by just cleaning off the “No” so that it simply read, “Green Pass”.
It was sobering to see first-hand that we are all going through this. Everyone in the Fiumicino Airport was wearing a mask. They were all flying off to different places. Some of those places will let them take off their masks when they land, and some will require that they keep them on. The virus, however, will behave the same way wherever they end up. There will be more mask less, unvaccinated people in those places that don’t have mandates’ ICUs than there will be in places following the protocols.
August is not a great time to go to Italy. Italians often take the month off to escape the heat and many things close. It was over 100 degrees many of the days we were there, and we often huddled indoors during the middle of the day. After spending most of our time in a small town, on the last day we went into Rome so that we could get tested to fly home.
Like New York, Rome wasn’t crowded. It wasn’t empty, but there were far fewer people than we have ever experienced there in the past. I was able to take a picture of the Coliseum without anybody at all in front of it. It is usually thronged with tourists.
We aren’t through this - not “here” and not “there”. We want to be through this, but not following basic protocols because we are sick of them is only going to extend the disruption. London is a month or two ahead of us in trying to reopen their theatres and it’s messy. Shows are opening and then having to close, reopening, and then having to close again. I’m watching what’s happening there and I’m thinking that the same thing is going to happen here. I would love to be back inside a theatre watching a play with a thousand people next to me, but I don’t know that I can bring myself to do it. Yet.
In the meantime, it looks like we have some work to do. Here.
Here in Ireland, thinking so many of these thoughts, and as usual you say it brilliantly. Thank you! Hope you and Michael had a great time even with the constraints! ❤️❤️❤️
Excellent!