171. War and Pandemic 2

In four years of World War, from 1914-1918, over 5 million people were killed, 116,500 of them Americans. In basically two of those years, 1917-1918, some 50 million people world-wide, and 675,000 Americans, were killed by the Influenza. 

 

It’s true that the War and its aftermath—the celebration of the Armistice—coexisted with the Influenza, and that they intermingled, borrowed deaths and casualties from each other. Nevertheless, the differences in the numbers are shocking. 

 

But not as shocking as the photos and videos of bombed out cities in Ukraine, of apartment houses, hospitals, theaters, houses and neighborhoods reduced to eye-stopping rubble. Not as shocking as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Gallipoli,” books and movies that dramatized World War I. 

 

Wars have heroes and villains, display boldness and cowardice. Zelensky is a hero, Fauci is not.  Putin is a villain, the gaggle of anti-vaxxers and Covid minimizers pathetic, but not, in most minds, the embodiment of evil. And it’s true that in war one side’s heroes might be the other sides’ villains, but history often shines light that is bright enough for each side to discover its own heroes and villains after the war is done. 

 

War is history’s sharp turns, when new nations emerge—as they did after WW I—and new and sometimes surprising alliances grow—as those of the US and Japan, the US and Germany did after WW II. 

 

Disease is history’s slogs, the long hauls that depopulate and weaken peoples and nations, and allow others to emerge stronger. The patterns of changes that The Plague wrought on Europe, or the impacts of the Influenza on the post WW I World are fodder for academic treatises, but not clear enough to teach in the standard history texts. Rarely and only briefly best-sellers.

 

Our time is like this. We don’t know what the outcome of Russia’s war on Ukraine will have—but we already have our heroes and villains, with more to come. 

 

And we don’t know where Covid 19 will go, how it will seep across nations and continents, but do know that it already has stolen more lives than the last decades of regional wars. It’s heroes are quiet ones, dressed in lab coats and hospital smocks, but we are too busy embracing “normal” life’s return to pay them much mind. Their stories will eventually be told in books, but not best sellers. 

 

War will always top the best-seller charts. 

  

170. The Pill

The Pandemic has become a light and almost refreshing diversion from the horrors of war. Yes, people are still getting sick—and some are even dying. But the numbers are down so far and went down so fast that people across the country are breathing more freely again. And breathing without masks and trepidation at not wearing masks.

 

I think it was buried somewhere in President Biden’s speech, but  that free testing will now be accompanied by a free pill to those who test positive. The new Pfizer pill is apparently successful at warding off the worst impacts of the virus. This is the clincher. Even if I get the disease, there is now an easy way out.

 

That pill reminded me of another, of “the pill” that came into the world in 1960. It was an apex moment in contraception. Other methods of birth control, which had been common, especially among wealthier Americans, were prohibited by a series of “Comstock laws” beginning in the 1870s. They gradually loosened, and in the 1940s Planned Parenthood emerged as a vocal advocate for family planning, and in the 1950s, the Rockefeller founded “Population Council” started preaching the gospel world-wide as an antidote to overpopulation. 

 

It seemed that the pill had arrived just in time to solve problems, from family poverty to international resource scarcity. In the bargain, it would make another oft-practiced but increasingly distained and prohibited practice, abortion, unnecessary. 

 

Not quite. The pill came in 1960, but the purity movement stubbornly hung on. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that government could not stop married couples from practicing birth control. It wasn’t until the 1970s that restrictions for unmarried women were lifted. 

 

The liberalizing movement continued with the fight for abortion rights—the pill had apparently not fixed the birth control problem completely—and in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that a woman had the right to control her body, including the right to abortion. 

 

Purity movements continue to fight abortion rights, and to advocate for specific definitions of family, the world’s population continues to grow, and starvation and wars beset us at this historic moment. It is doubtful that the Covid pill will completely stave off a virus that continues to weave its way around the world, continues to impact health care systems and local and national governments, and the lives of millions of ordinary people. 

 

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169. Pictures of War--and of Covid

Pictures of war are always dramatic—even the sad ones. They run the full range of emotions, from the battered and beaten bodies, the maimed and the dead, to the triumphant entries of American tanks into Paris and Baghdad. In between are the slogs of war, the muddy battlefields, forced marches, the rests in foxholes and cigarettes lit with Zippo lighters. 

In the past it was all men; women were in the nursing corps, dancing with soldiers at USO parties, handing out donuts to the troop trains. Beginning, in my memory, with the Israelis, women warriors have been part war. And here I should mention that long before women were allowed or encouraged to help make war, they were recording it in words and pictures. Margaret Bourke-White’s WW II photo-journalism opened doors that have led to our time, when we accept women war correspondents from Kabul to Kyiv. Jane Ferguson’s reports from Afghanistan during and after the evacuation were stunning. 

Pandemics are not so picturesque. There were early dramatic photos and video of EMTs hauling Covid-dead bodies out of New York apartments, and some sad footage of folks saying farewells to loved ones through hospital and nursing home windows. And then the pandemic pictures drifted off to interviews with Fauci and with overworked doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators. Like a droning white noise in the background.

Until last night, the closest thing to triumphal photos of the current pandemic were the flag-waving Canadian truckers, and theirs was divisive work meant to further divide, not to rally a broad public against a common enemy. 

Last night Joe Biden took the podium for his State of the Union speech without a mask, Vice-President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi flanking and behind him. They too were maskless. The room was full, a different picture than what we have been seeing for the last two years. Most of the Senators and Congressmen and women, the staffers and dignitaries, were maskless and smiling. I caught sight of my friend Pramila Jayapal smiling up close with the President—and remembered the TV cameras catching her hiding in fear in the balcony on January 6, 2021. 

We weren’t all happy with everything Joe Biden said—from left or right. But we all seemed to embrace the moment, to somehow realize that the worst of Covid-19 might be behind us, and that what most of us have done to ward it off—with masks, distancing, isolation, and vaccination—has been worth the effort. It was, somehow, a reassuring picture. 

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168. Yesterday’s News

The PBS Newshour last night focused on Ukraine, of course, but it was also the first newscast in over two years that I remember making no mention at all of the Pandemic. No news on infection rates, death rates, vaccinations. The truckers’ convoys in Canada and New Zealand, and one supposed to be organizing in our own country didn’t even make the Newshour. 

 

Wallowa County showed just one new case yesterday, and the state continues to show rapid declines in cases and hospitalizations. Mask mandates are moved forward, and re-openings are announced. Death marches on—expected as its path of ups and downs follows cases and hospitalizations. 

 

But Covid-19 has been tempered by vaccinations and contagions resulting in forms of “natural” immunity, and been swallowed by fatigue, boredom, anger, and now War. 

 

I’ll mark February 24, 2022 on my calendar as the day that Covid ceased being the number one concern of the population and our governments. It might come back, gnaw away at us one mild case, one hard case at a time. It will matter to the hard cases and their loved ones, but to the rest of America it is now yesterday’s news.

 

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167.. War and Pandemic

War and Pandemic

 

The threat of war in Ukraine has pushed Covid from the headlines. It makes me think about the Influenza epidemic of 1917-18 and the first World War, when Armistice celebrations at war’s end fueled an influenza surge.   

 

But there are so many differences between then and now: the vaccines, rapid communication, and the fact that this Covid seems to like older people best. Many of those who’ve died have been in nursing homes and assisted living places. Children and the young and healthy seem to do better with it.

 

Which is one reason that people are sliding into one form and another of “normalcy”—the power of prediction made possible by rapid communication and statistics being another.  States are announcing lifting mask requirements on the basis of statistics and hospitalization rates. Oregon’s indoor mask mandate will end on or before March 31; Washington’s is set for March 21. It’s amazing that these predictions can be as accurate as they are—Omicron peaked as we were told it would.

 

War still hovers—over and around Covid as did the 1917 Influenza. That pandemic’s special trick was to attack people in the prime of life, in their teens and twenties. It followed the troops, jumped the trench lines, and made its way around the world. Troops were great carriers, and when the men came home from war and the population celebrated, the Influenza virus did the same.

 

War, and near-war, seem to be everywhere. Not only in Ukraine and Belarus, but in Ethiopia, Syria, and Yemen. Meanwhile, refugees are spilling from their homes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and from conflicts and droughts in Africa and South and Central America. 

 

And the virus, Covid, snakes its way through all of these places, mutates and moves more quickly. Maybe it made a bad move with Omicron, increasing its infection rate but decreasing its severity. That, and the vaccinations, seem to be slowing Covid down. I wonder what it—the virus—will do to adapt? Will it be satisfied with “endemic”? Or will it mutate again, aim itself at younger people who can carry it further faster? 

 

Or will its impact pale or lose itself in the greater costs of war, refugees, and starvation. The word is that 1 million Afghans will die of starvation this winter. 

 

There are no vaccines for war or starvation. 

 

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166. Truckers

Years ago, during my time in Turkey, I had a friend who was British by speech and passport, but a roaming expat in reality. Another name he sometimes called himself was “colonial.” He’d grown up in what were still British colonies in Africa and India/Pakistan. His wife was Italian. When the colonies slipped away with independence, he’d continued to work for the Empire as an English teacher. He was teaching English through the British consulate in Izmir, Turkey when I knew him in 1969.

 

In November of 1969, reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story of a US Army massacre of as many as 500 Vietnamese men, women, and children. The event had occurred more than a year earlier, in March of 1968. The massacre had been stopped midstream by a military helicopter pilot who put himself between the troops and fleeing visitors. An early investigation white-washed the incident, but broader inquiries led to court martials, and a public soon split over the guilt and sentencing of Lieutenant William Calley. 

 

My expat British friend’s mother was still alive. She told her son that such things happened all the time in the colonial years, but that news of them didn’t get back to England for months and years, and by then the participants had gone on to other places, the incidents faded from public knowledge, and the dead and damaged were not English in any case.

 

Hersh’s story traveled the world, but the news was blunted by months of military missteps and delays. Calley was the only one of more than a dozen implicated in the crimes that was convicted. He served three or four years and was released.  I don’t remember names or stories of any of the Vietnamese.

 

Today, Covid stories travel instantaneously. Reasons for despair and disgruntlement cross the world: schools closed or disrupted; marriages troubled; rare reactions to the vaccine; the breakthrough cases; the mistaken identification of Covid as reason for death; the postponement of elective surgery; depression, anxiety, alcohol. 

 

And government—any government—and its mandates become the agents of personal distress. Some Canadian truckers, who are, like the rest of Canadians, largely vaccinated, took out anti-government frustrations by convoying and blocking border crossings. Rebel, confederate flags from the US flew in Canada. Truckers convoyed in France, and grow in Brussels and New Zealand. 

 

Truckers—a few of the tens of thousands of truckers in Canada and France and New Zealand—traveled, protestors waved flags and attracted the vaccinated and the unvaccinated alike under the banner of “freedom.” 

 

Their pictures and sounds traveled faster than Covid itself across the world.

165. Truth Telling

In my last one-minute blast I argued that the year-long sustained effort by mainstream journalists to tell the truth about the 2020 election, and to label Donald Trump’s lies lies at every opportunity, is making a difference. And I suggested that we do the same thing with Covid—that the mainstream press drop the big numbers and hospital staff losses, the hospitalizations per thousand and the deaths per thousand, and tell us the true stories of the unvaccinated, breakthrough cases, the afflicted health care workers, the nursing homes. That they go back to what they started on the streets of New York when this whole pandemic thing exploded. Do you remember the mobile frozen storage units brought in to house the dead?

 

There is the occasional whisper by a nurse or doctor that a dying patient wished he would have been vaccinated—and that others go to their deaths celebrating their freedom to choose. At least we’ve heard hints of that. Why aren’t we hearing the words and seeing the dying patient or the relative watching and waiting?

 

I want to hear from Washington State police trooper Robert LaMay’s wife or mother. LaMay was fired in October… “after failing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by the deadline set for state employees by Gov. Jay Inslee. Three months later, he died from the virus.” Along with more than 300 other local, state, and federal law enforcers who passed with Covid in 2021. I’ve not heard from a dying cop or a surviving spouse.

 

Truth-telling does make a difference: On Friday former Vice-President Pence broke with the former president: “Trump was wrong,” he said, in thinking that he—Pence—could overturn the election results. 

 

Most tellingly, NYTimes columnist David Brooks said on Friday that Evangelical churches are reconsidering and reuniting. The few who boldly spoke against the election lie, the minister who broke early with Trump over his “grab” video, the few church leaders who admitted that sexual abuse occurred in Protestant as well as Catholic churches, the churches who reached across color lines, are no longer cowering. Ministers and parishioners are calling it liberating.

 

Meanwhile, what do we do with the mask mandate riots in Ottawa? The reported hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers who have given up? Getting past the headlines to truth-telling is hard work.