80. The election is over; the pandemic is not

Last night ended it. The months of divisiveness and acrimony that led up to the November vote, two months of lawsuits on behalf of the president, and the political posturing by those chasing his flame and electoral base all came to a strange end. There were heroes—those who physically protected the Capitol and our legislators, and those, like Pence and McConnell, who rose to the occasion and steered congressional bodies and the country back to a road of normalcy.  

Yesterday’s most important outcome might be the coming together of public leaders and bodies to work towards righting the country and addressing current crises. The Election has been the constant noise in the wheel of the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic fallouts. And the election has prevented us dealing with the thorny issues of systemic racism, sexism, and economic inequality that the pandemic has so dramatically exposed. 

 

In 1918, the Armistice that ended the bloody and destructive World War that had decimated a generation of Europeans and thrust the US into world affairs also frustrated recovery from the Spanish Flu. A “first wave” of that pandemic had followed troops from Kansas to England and the European front, and spread its death viruses (which we didn’t know were viral at the time) across the world. It then came home with the troops, and, with its second and third waves reaching into 1919, killed over 675,000 Americans—in a population of 103 million. Over half of the 116,000 Americans who died in the War were victims of the flu. 

 

Tragically, the War and relief at its end sent the country into a strange kind of denial; the celebration at war’s end overwhelmed the flu’s continuing death march. People hugged and kissed and celebrated on the streets, threw away their facemasks, and in general forgot the flu and let it play out its own deadly progress. 

 

The election season that has warped our national response to the current Covid-19 pandemic is now over. The strange and violent day in the capitol and the reconvening of Congress and the careful enunciation of votes, state-by-state, brought a collective sigh of relief. A chastened Vice President Pence handled ballots in measured tones, and results were announced to a relived nation. Once “objecting” senators sat on their hands.

 

The election is finally over, but not the work. Pence and Congress can look after the 25^th amendment and assess impeachment. Biden and a new team—and the rest of us—must now put the Pandemic behind us.

 

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53. Surge

Yesterday, Election Day, there were 108,000 new Covid-19 cases and 1201 deaths recorded in the United States. Oregon numbers continued to climb—near 600 cases again, and rural counties, long quiet in this pandemic, are showing upticks. Wallowa County recorded three new cases yesterday. The Wallowa School is still half shut down due to at least one official and more unofficial cases.

 

Why? Is this a normal uptick with colder weather and more indoor activity? Are immune systems compromised with fall colds and flus partially to blame? Is back to college—and back to school—responsible for moving it around? Could all of the close gatherings around electioneering and the election have contributed? 

 

I will remind people that in 1918, when the Spanish Flu, or Influenza, was circling the globe and the Great War was coming to its awful conclusion, war’s end in the fall of that year sparked a huge wave of disease and death in this country and across the world. The virus, which had baffled health experts on all sides of the war and in non-combatant countries, gathered strength in fall, worked its destruction in league with pneumonia and other diseases, and exploded with the celebrations of war’s end. 

 

US citizens danced in the streets after the November 11, 1918—some irony in the date—signing of a peace treaty. Soldiers came home, loved ones went to meet, and the virus danced the people towards 600,000 American deaths. Masks, quarantines, and other measures that had been carefully put in place to slow the disease in its earlier days were abandoned with relief from a greater evil—or so the people thought. 

 

What do we do? Common sense and the experts tell us to: ONE, wear masks; TWO, keep our distances; and THREE, restrict our travel. For the next three weeks, citizens in Greece will have to announce intentions by cell phone before leaving their homes! Let’s not go there. 

 

But let’s do the obvious, and now that the election is over, can we take all of the politics out of it?

 

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38. And now the fires…

For months that seem like years we’ve watched the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the protests, listened to Dr. Fauci explain and the President deny the rage of the coronavirus, counted the miles from New York City, then Portland, then Hermiston and La Grande as the disease crept closer. And now the fires.

I’ve been reading about 1918 and its influenza, its war (that would “end all wars”) and how writers now are finding that time again and wondering why it has been so little written about. The influenza I mean. It was gobbled up in the War and the Armistice they say, but now they write that President Wilson had it, and that the Peace that was worked out in Versailles suffered from his disease. That maybe the settling of that War—the huge reparations charged Germany and the carving up of the Middle East by the Europeans with their own national selfishness and little of the interests of the people in mind—would have been different without the Influenza. 

The Influenza was maybe carried initially by a duck to a soldier in Kansas and then to camps and ships to Europe and then tangled up with the War. More soldiers died of the flu than of the fighting, and in all over 600,000 Americans died. Germans too, and some say that the flu helped our side; some say it infected all.

The flu jumped like fire, like our coronavirus jumps now, and “compounded” its effects when it touched war. I think the fire is doing that now, while we watch it rage across California, Oregon, and Washington. It’s chasing evacuees into tight spaces, moving with them and firefighters across the West. And if this flu is like 1918, it will, like fire, go out or underground to emerge again in second and third waves. 

We won’t be able to sum the losses of this season’s fires until the snow flies and they are all out. But we’ll know when they are out and start planning for next year. The virus is trickier. Spot outbreaks here and there. Does it travel with heat or with cold? Will it mutate? Will there be a vaccine, and if so when, and will people take?

Today there is smoke hovering over our valley, reminding us that all of it is close by, just a sudden wind or a few small breaths away.

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31. Gut punched--or not

I don’t remember grade school or high school lessons about the impact of measles and smallpox on the Native Americans when the first Europeans arrived. I remember the picture of Squanto, the corn, beans, and pumpkins, but the stories after that were all about Indians hunting and gathering, not farming. Columbus “discovered” America, Cortez conquered Mexico, and Pizarro the Incas. 

My college textbook for the required “Western Civilization” class—which I still have—gives only a few sentences to the plague of the Middle Ages, an epidemic disease that killed a third of Europe’s population. 

I don’t remember learning that The Great Warming—950-1250—had anything to do with the Vikings settling Iceland and Greenland, or that the Little Ice Age—1300-1850—froze Greenland and its settlers in, and contributed to starvation in the British Isles and sent indentured servants to America.

History isn’t about weather and sickness, but about discoverers, kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, generals and admirals…  Or was. 

But we are living in the middle of two incredible world events—global warming and a Pandemic—that are impacting the actions of presidents and prime ministers, popularly elected politicians and dictators, and the lives of people and families across the world. 

In her book on the Spanish Flu of 1918, Laura Spinny reminds that there are no monuments in London or Washington D.C. to that pandemic, that “Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively… as millions of discrete, private tragedies.” 

It strikes me that climate change and the current pandemic are such individual tragedies. If your island is sinking into the sea or your reindeer are dying, if you are a doctor in New York City or a member of the Navajo Nation, your world is crashing. 

The rest of us live in New Jersey or Idaho, wear masks or we don’t, eat out or not, watch the Johns Hopkins numbers of sick and the dead climb, and watch videos of melting icebergs. 

As surely as the plague or the Little Ice Age, these things affect us all; but we find it hard to come together with coherent attacks on things that haven’t gut-punched us personally. We’d better learn to.

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