The Week the Earth Stood Still (COVID-19)

March 17, 2020. Last week began almost normally with COVID-19 infections few and far away, single cases making news. "Best wash your hands and not shake hands, but no fear." Then, day by day over the week, the drumbeat crescendoed  to what feels like hysteria but makes precautionary sense, like wearing a seat belt even if you've driven for years without a crash.

Here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, it's all precautionary. Because the virus incubates for days and spreads from people without symptoms, next week's precautions have to be made yesterday. And because nobody's immune, it spreads explosively under normal conditions, doubling every week until it infects most of the population. The mortality rate is modest, maybe one percent (we don't know because mild cases go unreported), but that's much more lethal than flu. 

As I write, there's only one case in Spotsylvania County--one out of 134,000 people and that one quarantined--so there's little chance that the clerk handing me a receipt in Walgreens is infected. But unless we all keep our distance from each other, the next infected person (and there will be one) will probably infect two or three more, and so forth. Do the math. A week ago, I'd never heard of "flattening the curve." Now everybody has, and it justifies months of near-quarantine for most of us. As a 78-year-old hoping for good medical support when I do eventually (probably) catch the virus, I'm all in, despite the catastrophic effect on the local theatre and music scenes I love. But by the time I post this, all of this may be old news.

I want to to document this astonishing week, the beginning of the end of yet another World as We Knew It, at least equivalent to 9/11. We're looking at more than a quarantine, more than forty days. When a new normal forms over the world--maybe as early as this fall, maybe much later, but in any case less suddenly than the old normal evaporated--it will be like a neighborhood in the aftermath of a hurricane: a few buildings leveled, windows broken, roofs leaking, and all the loose branches, lawn chairs, and flimsy signage swept away.

   The the church I attend (George Washington's boyhood parish celebrating its 300th anniversary) was a striking example. Services were normal on February 23. A week later, the rector suggested that touching during the Sign of Peace was optional. A week later, we are asked not to touch, and the week after that (March 15) services were cancelled. Just days later, the governor of Virginia authorized police to shut down public gatherings of ten people or more.

   Four Weddings and an Elvis, a play I was to act in, collapsed more suddenly. Last Friday, the producer instructed the director not to cancel. By Sunday's rehearsal, March 15, Governor Northam had "temporarily" banned gatherings of a hundred or more, which doomed our March 27 opening. We rehearsed Sunday, hoping for a delayed opening in May, and planned to rehearse with costumes Monday for for a video shoot next Sunday. Monday afternoon, the producer who had green-lighted three days earlier shut even the video shoot down. Three days, not three weeks--that's the head-spinning speed that left me with a memorized script and new friends, but nothing else to show for Elvis.

   March 18, 2020. Just week ago--it seems at least a month--I accompanied my wife to Richmond for her painting workshop, and we talked about the epidemic (which wasn't a "pandemic" yet). As recently as then it seemed remote. She painted in a packed room. I wrote in a coffee shop. After her workshop, we met our son and his partner at Elwood Thompson's, a local-and-organic grocery. The shelves were full, the aisles uncrowded. We ate at the now-closed buffet, sitting in the only unoccupied booth. We lazily shopped the aisles, not seeing other shoppers as threats. We hugged because we were family, and I washed my hands almost as an afterthought. Normal life was still normal, and the quarantine-like conditions now called shelter-in-place seemed remote.

   The next day, as usual, I went out to my favorite Starbucks, sat in a comfy chair by the window, and wrote, vague thoughts of contagion crossing my mind but enjoying the clatter and screech of other people. I'm what I've heard called an extroverted introvert. I like to see human activity around me but am comfortable with minimal social interaction. Solitary work in a busy place suits me. It didn't cross my mind that this might be my last coffee shop session for months.

   The next day was Thursday, the regular night to sing at the Highmark Brewery open mic with my musical partner, Abbe. By then--the day after the WHO declared a pandemic, the NBA suspended its season, and Trump banned travel from Europe--the virus was at least in the back of everybody's mind. Abbe is available only every other week, so I suspected this would be our last Highmark for a while. I didn't realize yet what a no-brainer that was. We had fun, sang a good set, and daredevil boomers thrust out their hands to shake (I'm not a boomer, by the way, but one of the Silent Generation), and I gave in twice, but not comfortably, and didn't go in for a couple of usual hugs. I heard the rumble by then of the peste-train at full steam just around the curve.

   Saturday, I stayed home all day, skipping the usual coffee shop, and Sunday was the first canceled eucharist and the final Elvis rehearsal, already discussed, and Monday we did go out to the grocery store. Then Tuesday, yesterday, it seemed a good idea to plan on grocery delivery. We're doing heavy gardening work and taking daily walks, occasionally chatting with neighbors more than six feet away outdoors, but my wife and my Morkie (see picture) promise to be my sole companions for the next month or two. 

   There is a board meeting Saturday to deal with an April one-act play festival I devoted 200 hours to judging and planning over the past six months, doomed it now appears. There is reluctance to cancel it for economic reasons, as if we could collect a paying audience in mid-April. Abbe and I have a paying gig at a bar scheduled for six weeks from now. Well, I'm not holding my breath.

   March 19, 2020. "Scary times," said yesterday's ad from guitarfetish.com, extending their Saint Patrick's Day Sale indefinitely. "We all live in a leper colony, a leper colony, a leper colony," my son a block away parodied "Yellow Submarine" (online, of course, working from home), which sends me back toward my last posting about fear. My resolve was not to fear what I can't control but to use fear-energy to control what I can and, having done what I can, and to let go of fear. The challenge is to judge correctly, to avoid worry, stress, and anxiety on one side and passive fatalism on the other. 

   Given that today's hospitalized coronavirus cases (three in the metro area now) stem from contacts two weeks ago, maybe we underestimated what should have been done last week. I won't know until a few more days of isolation if I'm infected, but the chances are infinitesimal, so there's no personal reason to fear. But our collective welfare might be well served by more personally unreasonable fear--by elevated levels of adrenaline and cortisol in more bloodstreams driving more of us (unlike the notorious spring-breakers on Florida beaches) to socially distance ourselves. Maybe I should be afraid, not so much out of self-interest as for love of neighbor.

   I'm reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and see an ironic application of his iconoclastic view of truth. There's no reason, he wrote, to reject an untrue opinion if it is "life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving." To renounce all false opinions is to renounce life (I:4). This, like much of Nietzsche's work (particularly when it was taken in directions he did not imagine by his Nazi sister and German nationalists) has served evil ends, but I see validity in his critique of moral "truth." Take the assumption that we should assist fellow human beings when we can, especially if we can conveniently relieve great distress. This pillar of morality, though species-preserving and life-furthering, cannot be described as true in a falsifiable sense. I can't imagine any objective standard by which we can measure its truth against except, as Nietzsche allows, that it furthers human life as a structure of informal insurance. A space alien indifferent to human life and happiness--like Voltaire's king in the last chapter of Candide, who doesn't concern himself with the comfort of mice on his ships--would have no reason to regard the moral imperative to charity as any truer than its opposite.

     Like most other "truths" of ethics or religion, the imperative is operational, not factual. It's grounded in the desirable things that happen when it's believed, not in our ability to prove it to a skeptic, let alone a space alien. Nietzsche dismisses the Golden Rule as "slave morality" and similarly rejects the categorical imperative, Kant's rationalized version in his Metaphysics of Morals, but I understand the Rule as an operational "truth." 
    Of course, if it--or any other eleven-word motto--were followed without exception, disaster might follow, but there's no chance of that. Egotism is always pulling in the opposite direction. However, as a corrective understood to be "true," to be followed as far as our ego-hobbled wills can, the Law of Love seems to be species-preserving and life-furthering, especially in times of society-wide peril such as pandemics. When all are threatened, nearly all will come out better as individuals if we make manageable sacrifices for the greater good. At least wash our damn hands. I read that people quit drinking out of a shared dipper in a bucket after the 1918 pandemic--a lasting Dixie Cup revolution--and wonder what residue this will leave behind.

Updates as of Monday, March 23

California, Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio, Louisiana, Delaware, and New York locked down. 

One son and his partner (and dog) to move in with us from Richmond.

My first virtual board meeting via Zoom: our one-act festival to go online.
   National Guard mobilized.