Sacrifice

I couldn’t, can’t sleep from the outrage and grief.

How many Americans are staying home right now?

The most patriotic thing most of us have ever done.

Sacrificing our livelihoods, our pleasures, our visits to our parents’ sickbeds, our children’s births

Working without PPE, without knowledge of the disease

To save the lives of the unknown, beloved stranger—our nurses and doctors, our teachers, our first responders, our neighbors.

Some powerful few suggest that for the sake of the economy, we should turn ourselves into unwitting bullets that will kill hundreds of thousands of other Americans,

To render pointless what we have already done and will keep doing.

I never want to hear again that “All Lives Matter,” that they are “pro-life.”

How can I persuade you that freedom should not murder?

Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020

Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020

Amanda I. Seligman

In June 1992, my classmate and I drove west. The Great Plains terrified me. Fresh out of our first year of graduate school, where I studied the changes that had shaped the North American landscape, my mind’s eye could recreate the vast herds of bison that used to thunder over the American grasslands. Under skies broader than I had ever imagined, horizon unbroken in all directions, you could see them coming for miles but never get out of their way. No matter how fast you tried to run, they would trample you. I knew that nineteenth-century American hunters had shot the bison herds to the brink of extinction, destroying the animals and imperiling the indigenous cultures wrapped around them. But the curse of the historian is to conjure up the past and the future into the present moment. I could almost hear the imminent hooves, and I could not dodge them. I trembled.

I feel that way again, sitting in my living room, letting the internet unreel COVID-19’s spread across the planet into my historical imagination. It’s easy to lose an hour flipping among multiple news outlets, Twitter, and Facebook. I have been preparing in a low key, non-freakout way over the past month. In February, I dipped into Max Brooks’s World War Z, checking whether he had placed the origin of the zombie apocalypse in Hubei province (he had, if I read Chinese geography correctly). On every trip to the grocery store, I bought a few extra essentials to set against the looming lockdown: toilet paper, two dozen cans of soup, ten pounds of flour, five pounds of rice, soap, toothpaste. At each restaurant and school event, I asked myself if this was the last one before we all go into our bunkers. But today I can hear the ground rumbling, and I know things have shifted. Instead of bison, it’s contagion. It might be a while before my next trip to the store.

I send an email to the school superintendent and repost it on the middle school parents’ Facebook page. My university is extending spring break to give instructors time to transform their in-person classes to remote learning. I ask the schools to do the same. My fellow parents’ responses run mostly along predictable lines. Some folks are 100% on board with my mildly phrased suggestion. Others quite rightly point out the hardships closing schools will cause for working parents and families that rely on free lunches. A few are dismayed at the prospect of a couple weeks of alone time with their children. I order myself not to write a rebuttal essay about how public health is undervalued because its effects are invisible. I refrain from explaining that because none of us has lived through a comparable emergency their complaints that not everyone learns well online are off-base. But I do remind myself about the basic stats of the 1918 influenza outbreak: 50 million dead from a planetary population of less than 2 billion people, or somewhere a bit above 2% of the global population. And I choke back the anger of my gut response to my more reluctant internet neighbors: so you want your children to be the bullets that kill your elderly parents and cause the health care system to break down?

Distracting myself from my work with quick hits of current information worsens my mood, exhausting me. I’m on sabbatical this semester, preparing new classes. My colleagues are swamped trying to move their classes online for the duration, but I lack their focus and keep dipping back into the river of news. It reminds me of what happened after 9/11. Psychologists warned us to turn off our TV sets so that our children would not think that new planes were hitting those towers over and over again. I suspect I am traumatizing myself in a similar way by watching the crisis continually unveil itself in my news feed. But I don’t know how to adjust my inner balance: how much information helps me understand the present moment vs. repeated input that will overwhelm me so thoroughly I crumble into an anxious heap? I try closing tabs, putting an extra step and a deliberate choice between me and the news. I set up rules about when I can look to the present and when I must focus on the past. They don’t last long.

I wonder about the other rules that we are supposed to be following now, the ones implied in the idea of “social distancing.” I understand that we should keep some physical space from other people. But what other rules apply, and how do we know when to implement them? How do we recognize the moment to reduce our outside activities? Is today it? Is it already too late? The Unitarian Universalist Association, offices closed for the duration, is recasting “social distancing” as “community care.” But in practical terms, how do I implement the important idea that it’s my responsibility not to become infected so that I don’t pass on the virus to people who are more vulnerable than my family? Should I bother trying to keep my own kids at home if the schools stay in session? I’m not worried about them getting sick, since children seem less affected than adults. I don’t want them to be vectors infecting others, but what’s the point if everyone else is still merrily out in public? Should I skip church, where last week we already substituted bowing “Namaste” for our usual handshakes and hugs? I probably shouldn’t go to yoga, but can I swim in the pool or walk on the track? Can I go to the grocery store at times when it’s likely to be uncrowded, or is now the time to forego fresh foods?

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted in part from the absence of bison doing their part for the ecosystem of the Great Plains. Pandemic mutates our economic and medical ecosystems. I know that I don’t need to buy clothes in person, but I have $40 in Kohl’s cash that will expire soon. Is OK to spend it online? Does doing so put the packer in the warehouse and the delivery driver in jeopardy or protect their jobs in a time of economic crash? I’m hanging out at home today because a pre-existing cold combined with an adverse reaction to a shingles vaccination to make me feel pretty crummy. Ought I postpone the second shingles injection until after the crisis is over, so that my clinic can focus on more urgent needs?

When someone asks me to identify the worst natural disaster in history, I point to the flu outbreak in 1918. Sitting in my PJs at home a century plus two years after, I can hear it on the horizon again. It’s not the thunder of bison hooves I can imagine, but the planetary echoes of the whoosh of a bat or the scritching of a pangolin somewhere in Hubei province. There are eight identified cases of COVID-19 in Wisconsin today, with one recovery, no deaths, and an unknown number of untested infections circulating or quietly self-quarantined in our community. The disaster isn’t here yet, but I am hunkering down as if for a long series of blizzards. I read a few weeks ago about the utter exhaustion of the nurses in Wuhan and today about the terrible choices of the doctors in Lombardy. I define medical triage for my increasingly less innocent child: quite literally dividing patients into those you can save, those you can only comfort, and those to treat later. I cannot calibrate my emotions or my actions. We will know only if we succeed or fail in tamping down the disease collectively, not individually. I am exhausted from knowing the past and reeling from the anguish of a future we are trying to prevent. The bison are coming up over the planet’s curve. I imagine if we lie very still, they might evaporate into a figment of the past, leaving only the dust they kicked up, making us wonder what all the upset was about, because the worst didn’t happen after all.

Lessons in the Wake of Mass Murder

As the clerk rang up my peanut butter, bread, and cherries, I glanced over my shoulder and could not miss the bright orange turban. A tall young man in the self-check lane, chatting lightly with a young white woman. Although I went to public school in polyglot Northern Virginia with many Sikhs, learned in Sunday School that Sikhism is one of the great world religions, and have a few Sikh colleagues, until this month I knew little about them or their faith.

The glimpse of the orange turban reminded me of some of the things I have learned since the shootings at the gurdwara in Oak Creek: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbor, intimacy.

A photograph of a former mayor of Oak Creek, sobbing, seeking comfort in her husband’s stoic shoulder. Her feelings were my feelings, etched more sharply: grief.

From a letter to the editor, I learned that visitors to the Golden Temple in the Punjab can stay as guests for several days, asked only if they like what they are seeing, not to pay for the privilege: hospitality.

From several news stories, an opinion piece, from comments made at the memorial service held on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, I learned that you can enter a gurdwara at any time, through a door from each of the cardinal directions. If you go on Sunday, or perhaps in the middle of the week, you will be offered food. Worship and nourishment: sanctuary.

As I loaded my daughter into our car, the young man with the turban and the white woman walked to their car, parked next to mine. She was wearing denim cutoffs. He was holding a bright blue package of Oreos. He seemed so carefree at the moment; I did not want to remind him of what had happened, just because I was thinking of it at that moment. I looked away.

In Colorado, you cannot tell by looking at a stranger that they might have been at the movie theater, or infer that they know someone who was there. Here in Milwaukee, though, our survivors, our male survivors anyway, are marked. Their dress reveals their faith. The liberal in me rebels against allowing myself to assume anything about someone based on their appearance. Did I look away to spare his feelings, or my own? Doubt.

Yet the murders in Oak Creek felt different to me from the ones in Aurora a few weeks ago, as awful as they felt. Daily, I pass among people for whom Oak Creek is home. I remember after 9/11 disbelieving a New Yorker who angrily insisted that if you were not there, you could not feel what they had felt. But now I feel what proximity brings. Not just our own grief, but inescapable, forceful reminders of what those among us might be feeling as we greet them. Neighbors.

I looked him in the eye. “How are you doing?” I asked. Not a nod, a hollow “how are you?” but “How are you doing?” He answered, not quite lightly, “I’m doing all right.” I knew he meant, “As well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

Intimacy.

Lessons in the wake of mass murder: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbors, intimacy.

Circle Swimming

On Monday morning, I arrived at the pool later than I like to. If I can get up by 5:40, I can get to the Jewish Community Center when it opens at 6:00, swim and shower, and be back home to get the morning crew going by around 7:30. If I’m thrown off by more than 15 or 20 minutes, I have to give up the prospect of a swim for the day.

Because I arrived at the pool at around 6:20, it was already full this morning. A couple people hung around the edges, waiting for a lane to open up, but I didn’t. I started a circle swim in one lane, and one of the waiters asked the lifeguard to help him start one in the center lane. The policy at the J is that when three or more people need a lane, everyone needs to circle swim. Circle swimming isn’t too difficult, especially if people swim at around the same speed, but it does take coordination among the swimmers. I’ve seen people stubbornly pretend they don’t understand the request (even though the rules are posted also in Russian, the dominant second language at the J) or get out of the pool altogether, but I have rarely seen a swimmer get as angry about it as I did this morning.

When the lifeguard asked Mr. Angry if he minded circle swimming, he angrily replied “I do mind” and got out of the pool to berate the lifeguard about what a stupid policy circle swimming was. His tone was not softened to account for the power differential between Mr. Angry and the kid who was lifeguarding; maybe it is easier to speak angrily to someone who is a third your age and makes a poor hourly rate. He pretended that I was not getting into the next lane over, looking right through me and suggesting that it was empty, that everyone else who wanted to swim could wait five or ten minutes and have a private half-lane to themselves. Among his reasons for not circle swimming was that he had paid to be at the pool (to which, the lifeguard responded reasonably, so had everyone else, since it’s pretty much only members who swim early in the morning; and, contradictorily but also rightly, that it was a public pool). He also pointed out that the other swimmers in the lane might get angry about their speed differential, since he was faster than the other swimmers in the lane and would have to pass them. Never mind that his belligerent tone was poisoning the atmosphere in the entire room.

What Mr. Angry seemed to miss altogether was that the J is also a religious and community center, and not just a place where you buy the right to exercise in private. When we are in community together, we do not just atomistically go about our business without regard for the people around us. We say hello to them in a civil fashion. We ask if we can help each other. We ask for help we need. And we share our space, deriving both the benefits and troubles of community life from the interaction.

In this light, circle swimming suddenly came to be a metaphor for the larger business of living in community together. No, it’s not ideal to have to share a lane with another person whose stroke is at a different speed (or who thinks that doing the butterfly in a shared lane is a good idea). But there are larger benefits of sharing the space, which we can appreciate only if we accommodate ourselves at least a little bit to the needs of our fellows.