Post 77 - May 27, 2020
Day 77…
One of the things that I have been able to do much more of during this strange period of forced inactivity, is read.
I have always been a pretty avid reader.
My father wrote and my mother was a Librarian - it was somewhat inevitable.
We all read.
The newspaper in the town we lived in in New Jersey once ran an article about my mother and father and sister and I being “the family that read together.”
We had to pose for a picture of all of us together reading.
I’m sure I must have gotten teased for that, but I don’t really remember that part.
In the last couple of years, I have been travelling so much that there never seemed to be time to just sit and read.
There was always something else to do.
Clearly, that’s changed.
My taste in books is fairly eclectic - running from the classics to popular crime novels. I try and mix it up as I go.
A few years ago, I got through all of War and Peace.
Which I loved.
It took a while, but I stuck with it.
The list of my top ten of all time would start with The Once and Future King by T.H. White. (Walt Disney based the Sword and the Stone cartoon on a section of that.)
There is probably a Dickens in there (Nicholas Nickleby, perhaps) and an Austen (Pride and Prejudice?) but I would definitely include a Stephen King novel called The Stand.
The Stand was published when I was a junior or senior in high school.
Since then I’ve read it at least twenty times.
The Stand is a very long apocalyptic end-of-the-world novel about what happens after a weaponized virus wipes out most of the world’s population.
The survivors of the plague, as they make their way through the now desolate landscape, start dreaming about one of two people.
Our heroes dream about an old woman named Mother Abigail who lives on a farm in Nebraska.
The villains of the book dream about a shadowy dark man named Randall Flagg who ends up in, of course, Las Vegas.
The two groups start pulling together and the story ends up with an epic show down between them.
Good vs. evil.
I won’t tell you who wins, but, come on.
There is something a bit contrived, storytelling-wise, about COVID-19 striking at the moment we are facing a major election.
Nonetheless, that’s where we are and that’s what we are facing.
The pandemic seems to be crystalizing the views and positions of both parties as we head into November.
Those positions were clearly differentiated over the Memorial Day with pictures of Senator Joe Biden wearing a mask and pictures of the President, not.
In a sense, those simple, clear images of the two men are emblematic of exactly what’s dividing us.
On the one hand, you have a person wearing a mask, following the science.
On the other hand, you have a person, not wearing a mask and not following the science.
Wearing the mask, however imperfect a safety measure it might be, sends a message that you are trying to care for others.
Not wearing the mask, sends the message that you only care about yourself.
So, in a sense - good vs. evil.
Science vs… what?
If you look up what the opposite of science is, you get a whole bunch of words like ignorance, blindness, inexperience, immaturity, weak-mindedness, lack of knowledge, falsehoods, and unawareness.
It is hard not to look at all of the pictures of mass gatherings over the weekend in places all over the country and not think about the words that are considered the opposite of science.
There are people, nationwide, who are truly suffering financially and emotionally as this pause in our lifestyles continues.
I don’t think that those people were necessarily the ones who spent the weekend partying.
There is a difference between being trapped in a life or death situation and just being bored and feeling cooped up.
The science is telling us that the virus has not gone away.
The science is telling us that we are very likely to get a second wave of cases that will be greater than the one we are currently in.
While the country starts behaving as if the first wave is over, the science is telling us that we are still in the middle of it.
The numbers are rising.
Mary Chapin Carpenter has a lyric in her great song I Feel Lucky that goes, “Hey, the stars may lie, but the numbers never do.”
The numbers are the numbers.
You can try and misrepresent them like the Governor of Florida did when he tried to create a downward case trend by reordering the days (really??) but they are what they are.
We ignore them at our peril.
New York City has seen its numbers decline for several weeks.
We are going to start Phase 1 of reopening soon, but only if the trend continues.
If, after, we start, the numbers start to rise again, we will stop.
That is an example of following the science.
Remember that the numbers we are talking about are people.
A single number rise in the death count means that somebody’s mother or father or aunt or uncle or friend or lover or sister or brother has just passed and is gone forever.
So, we wait.
We have some more time ahead of us.
I hope that the time ahead does not mean undue hardship and pain for anyone.
If this time does mean hardship and pain, then please, you owe it to yourself to reach out.
Contact a relief organization.
If you are in the entertainment industry, The Actors’ Fund is standing by, waiting to offer assistance or a referral.
If you aren’t, there are similar organizations throughout the country.
That’s what all those liberal do-gooders do.
They try and help.
We all have good days and not so good days.
What is OK for one person may be extremely hard for someone else.
Let’s not make a terrible situation worse but all just doing whatever it is we want to do in the moment.
There are consequences.
Consider them before you act.
At the end of the day, for the moment, maybe it’s better to just stay home and pick up a book.