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Can you hear me now?

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The other day I had reason to call customer support for one of my credit cards. Words to strike fear in the hearts of even the strong, right?

It went about as expected, maybe a bit worse. After the customary stalling by running through the automated responses a few times, I was put on hold, and eventually the grating music was interrupted by an actual human voice.

Lucky me, I thought. The voice was clearly South Asian, probably Indian. I say clearly, but advisedly. The line kept crackling and breaking up. Whenever I mentioned that, the person at the other end apologized, did something technical, and asked if that was better.

It was. In a way. During the static-free intervals when the transmission was clear, there were constant noises in the background. The suport person obviously had the call on speaker phone. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of the poor voice quality on speaker phone; it’s as if the call were taking place in a cavern. The distraction from the backgropund noise only made matters worse; the constant clatter was occasionally punctuated by a loud bang.

The support person resolved my problem, and I thanked her whole-heartedly.

Why? Because the issues with the call reminded me of what is happening in India while much of the rest of the world is enjoying a respite from a cruel pandemic. How a nascent success at controlling Covid-19 was derailed by a misguided populist leader, who prematurely declared victory and removed all restrictions. How hospitals and other health services threw up their hands in defeat, overwhelmed beyond their capacity. How the sick and dying were housed in tents and corridors. How a moratorium was declared on cremations due to concerns about contamination of the air. How the Ganges, a river sacred to Hindus, was awash with unidentified corpses under the reign of a Hindu extremist, of all people. How working from home was a luxury not afforded to many in India but was a means of survival in the midst of catastrophe to those who could do it.

I thanked her for somehow bearing all that and still managing to survive and function at all, let alone well.

I thanked her for surviving and hoped that the children I heard in the background would grow to be as strong as she is.

And I thanked her for reminding me of what is and isn’t important.

A year of muddling through: things learned from the pandemic

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You can’t waste time. There is always more of it. You might not be in it, but in that case you won’t be around to complain.

You can’t spend time, as if it were a commodity to use in a value exchange. You can’t spend it because you have no control over it.

For the same reasons, you can’t use time, wisely, foolishly, or any other way. To use a thing, you first have to grasp it. Try to grasp time, and it disappears.

It is possible, however, to feel you don’t have enough time while simultaneously feeling overwhelmed by its abundance. You can feel pressured and bored all at once.

The mind is like a huge muddy prairie, full of boundless wonder, but easy to get bogged down in. Even if you keep moving, you leave behind deep ruts for the return trip.

Hindsight is rarely 20/20. It’s a haze of excuses and misplaced or unrecognized priorities. Luckily, you can just make out reality if you squint.

Memory is the vapor trail you leave behind in the turbulence of your passage. Look at it long enough, and you can see all kinds of fanciful shapes.

Work is anything you do for other people; play is anything you do for yourself. The problem is that they often mix, and it’s hard to keep them straight.

Some things you crave only because you can’t have them. Other things you crave even though you already have them.

No amount of worrying has ever determined the future, which happens with no regard for your plans. Then it becomes the past, which no amount of regret has ever changed.

The meaning of life is like a knife that’s all edge and no handle. Go ahead, try to grasp it.

You need people more than you think, even if only in the background. Just sitting in a room full of other people is healing.

Nothing will keep you from dying.

Love is not all there is, but it is all that’s worth anything.

The death of satire

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Let’s invent a fictional character. Let’s give him a name, say, Tod Croz, and then let’s make him a United States senator.

Let’s say his father, born in a foreign country, entered the US through Canada with his American wife and 4-year-old Tod, who had been born in Canada.

Let’s say that in spite of that background Tod fiercely opposes foreign immigration to the US.

Oh, and let’s throw in a part about Tod once shutting down the entire US government in a failed attempt to keep a bill providing medical insurance to everybody in the country from becoming law.

Just to make things clear, let’s have him thoroughly despised in the government he’s a part of, even by members of his own party. Let’s have one of his colleagues say that no one would be convicted if they murdered Tod in the senate.

Then let’s say that not long ago, Tod ran for president, and his opponent belittled, bullied and slandered him, and called his wife ugly to boot. Just for fun, let’s also say that his opponent accused Tod’s father of being complicit in the assassination of a sitting US president. In spite of all that, since his opponent’s subsequent election Tod has been his staunchest supporter, some would say acolyte. In fact, Tod is one of the most vocal supporters of the enormous lie that election fraud cost his erstwhile opponent the most recent election, and even is seen urging a mob to storm the very chambers where he and his fellow senators are soon to meet.

Oh, and a deadly plague has descended on the country, and Tod spends his time not only opposing, but ridiculing any attempts to deal with the plague based on scientific evidence.

Then –stay with me here– Tod’s home state suffers a terrible natural disaster in the middle of the grinding plague, and instead of using his powerful position to help, he decides to go off to a sunny beach in Mexico.

This, understandably, causes a huge uproar, and Tod rushes back, claiming the whole thing was the idea of his pre-teen daughters, so he can’t be held accountable for it.

However, our character is still seriously considering another run for the presidency, and his party sees nothing wrong with that.

Well, what do you think? Is this character believable? Should I go with him in my new novel?

Disease by the numbers

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Credit: tumsasedgars

Every morning I check the Covid-19 stats for the state and county I live in. Every day the numbers get bigger and the picture grimmer, even when things are improving. How can this be?

First of all, let me dispel the notion that I want to downplay the danger. Far from it; I fully support efforts to get people to wear masks in public places, to avoid large groups, and to keep a reasonable distance apart when interacting. I support those measures being made mandatory when necessary. I hear people say that they’ve “done their time” in lockdown, and that it seemed to them that the threat turned out to be much less than the government let on.  Setting aside for the moment the question of what motivation there would be for the government to impose lockdown, except to keep the pandemic under control, these people miss the obvious fact that the measures they complain about are exactly why the direst predictions never materialized.

But those issues have been dissected and debated abundantly; there’s no reason to add my 2 bits beyond what I have already written.  My interest here is in information and the extent to which it is useful.

Keeping a running total of infections doesn’t seem to be very useful. You might find it helpful if your motive is to keep the sense of crisis alive, but even that is questionable. There is no shortage of published articles on crisis fatigue. At a certain point, there’s just an overload, and the human alert system just shuts down. Eat, drink, and be merry, as the saying goes, for tomorrow we die. 

We need a way to assess how many people are actually infectious at any given time. In my county, for example, just over a thousand cases have been reported since the beginning in March. Something over sixty have died.  But I can’t easily find how many of those cases have recovered.

So, out of that thousand, you can subtract the deaths, which are statistically miniscule. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could also subtract the number of recovered, and therefore no longer infectious, cases?  I know those numbers are available, but why can’t we see a number for current cases that are actually a potential threat? Shouldn’t that number be front and center?

Service in hard times

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It’s a thing nowadays, thanking veterans for their service. I get it a lot, because I was, as Bill McClellan so eloquently put it, “…patriotic enough to flunk out of college and get drafted…”  I always feel a bit uncomfortable. If only they knew what my service was like.

But now we have lots of people who really do deserve our gratitude for their service: delivery people, grocery store employees, all the people going to work as normal while the rest of us hunker down.

Of all the people who deserve and need our support, however, none are doing so much and taking greater risks than health care workers. They’re on the front line day after day, working long hours with inadequate equipment, literally risking their lives.  They get exposed to the biggest doses of the virus and for longer periods, which seems to induce much more severe illness, at a time when fatigue and stress reduce their ability to resist.  I am certain that when this is all over, we will have many, many cases of PTSD among health care workers.

Let’s thank them now, but above all let’s not forget them when times return to something like normal. We owe them so much.