Day 137 of Nat'l Emergency: Praying for Rain

Like the toothache that doesn’t hurt when you get to the dentist we have been stymied to discover if the repairs to our gutters and leaders have been effective.

It’s rained only once since we had the new rainfall channels installed 10 days ago. To be sure, the rain Wednesday night was intense. But we weren’t home to observe how the gutters and leaders performed. We had chosen that night to socially distance a dinner visit with friends.

It sprinkled Friday morning, not enough to even dampen the newspaper thrown onto the driveway. The longterm forecast for the next 10 days suggests sunshine except a 40% chance of rain next Tuesday and the following Monday.

In pre quarantine days we would exult in weather that fit our desire for outdoor activity. But those options are severely limited these days. No Garden Conservancy tours. No trips to the beach. Or to a friend’s pool. No outdoor festivals. Or flea markets. 

With temperatures hovering near and above 90 degrees with a dew point index an uncomfortable 60-plus, walking extensively outdoors, even on a shaded trail, is out of the question.

Confinement is not how Gilda and I anticipated spending this year. Scratched already have been trips to Washington with Shalom Yisrael guests, to Omaha to see our daughter’s family, to Colorado for a first cousins get together, to Massachusetts to see our son’s family, to Switzerland for a car tour with my brother and his wife, to Maryland for their oldest grandchild’s bat mitzvah, to Portugal for a bus tour.

On the local level we’ve missed out on plays from our subscriptions to Playwrights Horizons and Second Stage, countless dinner parties with friends at our home or theirs, hosting the Passover seder, and attendance at synagogue services and programs.

Zoom cannot replace those experiences.

There’s a special heart rending poignancy to crossing those activities out of my paper calendar that cannot be matched by deleting them from an electronic calendar on my iPhone. 

I know. My fatigue and disappointment with coronavirus life is no more extreme than what many or all of you have gone through. No one in my immediate and extended family has been infected.

At least I have this public blog to express my feelings. And for a change I am not ranting about Donald Trump.

Stay healthy. And pray for rain, enough to test our gutters and leaders. But no flooding. 

Day 57 of Nat'l Emergency: V-E Day and the Virus

Today is V-E Day. Victory in Europe 75 years ago, May 8, 1945. 

No doubt, like many of you sheltering in place, to pass the time I am making my way through televised series, some new, some old. Maybe I will finally see “The Wire” (highly recommended by our son Dan). And “Game of Thrones.” I just finished “Band of Brothers,” the 2001 HBO 10-part series relating the factual experiences of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101 Airborne Division, U.S. Army, during World War II.

At the end of the fifth episode Easy Company was marching into Bastogne during the pivotal Battle of the Bulge at the end of December 1944. Confronting a last ditch effort by the Germans, Easy Company was under-equipped. The soldiers lacked sufficient ammunition and warm clothing.

From my previous extensive viewing of war movies I knew how the fight to control the strategic crossroads town ended. I knew how the Battle of the Bulge ended. I knew how the war ended. 

Yet the story of the Band of Brothers soldiers of Easy Company, compiled in the acclaimed book of the same name by historian and author Stephen Ambrose through interviews with survivors as well as journals and letters from the soldiers, is gripping and emotional.

I’ve seen lots of war movies depicting practically every conflict joined by American servicemen on land, sea and air, from colonial times till the present. Even into the future, if we are to believe sci-fi imaginations.

Having avoided service during the Vietnam War, I have no first hand experience by which to gauge the special bonding of a platoon unit and the trauma of combat. Viewing choreographed battle scenes in France and Belgium, I feared for the safety, the lives, of individual soldiers on my TV screen. But my anxiety, palpable as it was, could not match the reality of what those young men, the real soldiers of Easy Company, actually underwent.

At the end of episode eight of “Band of Brothers,” as the surviving members of Easy Company are being transported away from the front lines for some well deserved rest and relaxation, a voice-over narrator contrasted their experience with an American home front emerging from shortages and restrictions. Life in the States was returning to normal.

Few civilians, the narrator said, could identify with “the price paid by soldiers in terror, agony and bloodshed” during the Battle of the Bulge and the siege of Bastogne. 

I wonder now about the state of our nation’s backbone. For sure we are in the midst of an extraordinary trauma. More than 76,000 lives lost, with no reliably accurate forecast for how high the toll of death may rise.

Jobs have been lost at a level not seen since the Great Depression when few of our current fellow countrymen and women were alive.

Family wealth, if one can employ that word for the millions who live paycheck to paycheck, has been wiped out for many.

To help stem the spread of the new coronavirus we have been asked to shelter in place and social distance.

But, after less than two months, significant portions of society are rebelling against quarantine. I cannot imagine how they would have fared if they lived in occupied Europe during the war. If they had been Jewish and had to hide in cramped quarters for years to stay alive, with little food or freedom to walk outdoors or entertain oneself with no radio or other media.

I get it. People want to work. They want to eat in restaurants. Shop in stores. Go to the gym. Get their hair cut, their nails trimmed. They don’t want to wear masks. They want to hug their friends, their extended family.

Do they not realize they are placing personal desires over the welfare of the community? My immediate reaction was to think of them as extremely selfish and self-centered. 

Then again, I am fortunate not to have to worry about a mortgage or retirement income. I don’t have young children to feed or school at home. 

What to me are inconveniences of social distancing are traumatic life changes for those younger than my three score and eleven years. 

And yet, I find deep resonance in what New York governor Andrew Cuomo says about the need to balance re-opening the economy against the value of a life. I am not ready, as some politicians have advanced, to jettison older, frailer people so that the next generation can go to the mall, movie theater or restaurant. In this argument, I am a right-to-lifer, which makes me wonder why I have not heard all religious leaders and anti-abortionists loudly proclaim allegiance to shelter at home and social distancing directives. 

Even while we were fighting Nazi tyranny pacifists spoke out against war. They weren’t unpatriotic. They just had a different understanding of what support for our country’s principles meant. 

We are engaged in an all-out war against COVID-19. It is a stealth enemy that has shown it can strike even inside a well-shielded (we would hope) White House. Nearly 77,000 have already died in America from the coronavirus. We are on a trajectory to soon match the number of servicemen the Department of Defense says were killed in action in Europe from D-Day through May 8—104,812. 

Perhaps most troubling is that so many needn’t have died. A new study, led by Princeton Medical Center, asserts that if orders to stay-at-home and wear face masks when outside had been issued four days earlier the number of deaths could have been halved (https://mol.im/a/8301305).

In actual combat, no matter how hard commanders try to limit casualties, they know deaths will happen. COVID-19 is a killer. We couldn’t change that. But competent leadership based on science and accepted medical practice could have reduced the terror, agony and loss of life so many families have experienced these last few months. 

Ebola Tackles Football

The quarterback of our daughter and son-in-law’s coed Brooklyn bar league football team went bowling last week and now the team’s season is all but over.

No, he didn’t wrench his arm out trying to make a 7-10 split spare. Rather, he’s a victim of the ongoing, somewhat overarching and sometimes shameful Ebola scare. You see, on the evening Dr. Craig Spencer went bowling at Gutter in Williamsburg, the quarterback patronized the same bowling alley. Dr. Spencer, you will recall, is the good doctor who volunteered to save lives in Guinea to treat Ebola patients and stem the plague, who unfortunately contracted the disease himself with symptoms displayed last Thursday. 

It is only natural to be cautious, concerned and sensitive. But people, including governors in our area, who are calling for and mandating quarantines for Ebola care workers, are feeding public panic by ignoring established medical science that Ebola is transmitted only through direct contact with infected body fluids.

At no time did any of Dr. Spencer’s fluids touch the quarterback. Still, he felt obligated to email his teammates and ask if they had a problem with his playing Sunday. All but one couple had no problem. If he played they wouldn’t, the couple wrote in an email to all team members save the quarterback. Without them the team had too few players to field a squad. They forfeited. Unless there’s a change of heart they’ll forfeit the last two games of the season, as well.

For sure, touch football is not on the same par of significance as the spread of Ebola. As I said earlier, caution, concern and sensitivity are required. Even if they were wrong, at least according to medical experts, the couple was entitled to express their feelings and act on them, regardless of how they affected the rest of the team.

But panic in the streets, at the airports, and on the ball fields must be balanced by attention to medical experts. Because of our federal/state system of government we lack a proper, uniform, central response to the challenge of Ebola containment, made all the more alarming because of the 24/7 media cycle in which we live. 

I don’t have an answer as to how we should react. But I worry about elected officials making decisions about science that are politically motivated. We’ve already seen some of their questionable (preposterous, actually) beliefs. Some continue to deny global warming. Or evolution. Or believe that a woman cannot become pregnant if raped. 

We live in the 21st century. Let’s start acting like we do. We are not living through a Stephen King novel. This is not the Middle Ages wracked by plague of unknown origin and remediation.