And where is that? In unchartered territory to be sure, yet the long lines the, food shortages, the numbers of sick and dying seemingly higher all the time seems to me to be something we’ve all seen before. As in every disaster movie Hollywood ever created.
Some of us don’t need to pay ten-bucks to a theater to live the entire disaster experience. Ask anyone living on the Gulf Coast, the Eastern Seaboard and Hawaii. They’ll tell you it’s one thing to survive direct hits from tornadoes and hurricanes; it’s quite another thing to survive their aftermaths. That’s where you witness faith, strength, patience and true humanity.
I was going to write a post about my week in Ireland, but that seems so irrelevant in light of everything that’s happening all around us. Having traveled at this time, I saw it happening around me. In Ireland where we took off for the states early this past Sunday morning, I saw it in the faces of beleaguered airline employees and how completely messed up our tickets were. Everything was rectified eventually, but obviously it was fouled up from a staff member who like his other co-workers, had been operating on fumes.
Heathrow, just outside London is a much larger airport. No lines there but the security seemed tighter and more people wore masks, but it didn’t deter. We still ate and drank like any tourists would hoping to catch the next flight out that would get us back on US soil.
Our second to the last leg on the trip home was at O’Hare. That seemed Orwellian. That Chicago airport was scary. Cops in the jetway as we exited, certain people (depending on the country from which they had just left) went to several different lines. We had been inbound from Ireland. At the time only a few virus related deaths had been reported there. So, I supposed we we’re deemed “safe”.
After going through customs, we were made to stand in rows and rows of lines, waiting to see and be seen by CDC experts. No social distancing there. We were packed in there like sardines, dodging coughs and sneezes beside us, in front of us, behind us. Only a few people wore masks, other held scarves, magazines and books up to their faces. I kept my head down trying to both deflect the sneezing and coughing and to prevent myself from passing out due to the heat. It was 40 degrees in Chicago at the time. The airport heaters were on and standing among all those people wasn’t helping. People with MS have a difficult time with heat, regardless of the time of year.
As I stood in line, I watched others ahead of me talk extensively to the CDC people, getting their temperature taken, their throats looked at. My face was red, clammy, I was sweating profusely. I looked like I was very sick or trying to smuggle in two pounds of crystal meth in my bra. I knew…JUST KNEW…that I’d have a fever (even from an unrelated illness) and be forced to quarantine at some crummy Chicago motel with bad TV programming and even worse bedding.
Finally, it was my time to meet with the CDC expert. She was dressed head to toe in HazMat garb and adding the final touch to her ensemble was a plastic spit/splash guard that covered her entire masked face. She asked where I’d been, if I’ve ever been to Iran and when she started writing down my answers on the where have we been sheet of paper the airline gave to us to fill out before landing. She was trying to decode my insipid handwriting so I asked her about her unusual name on her name plate. She told me it was Nigerian and went on the explain it’s meaning and how it’s always mispronounced except when she’s back in Lagos. Bing, bang, bong, chat a bit and Bob’s your uncle!!! That was it. She then told me everything was fine and that I should get my luggage.
That was easy. Twenty four hours earlier at O’Hare, there were thousands of people who stood in the CDC lines for more than nine hours. My wait was right at an hour…maybe.
In Ireland, the parents of the some of people’s I’d brought with me had either misunderstood Trump’s first speech about the virus or were getting their news from truncated stories on crawls across their TV sets, all the while my stock portfolio was hemorrhaging. It was 2:30 AM Dublin time. They wanted us to wake up, get dressed, screw everything else and head to London’s Heathrow immediately. These are people who should know how difficult that would have been and how operating from a point of panic places you a much more vulnerable position. Panic is why four rolls of Charmin is selling for $50 a pack.
None of our hotels carried American news. At any given time, we were getting everything from one of several different RTE (Ireland’s national TV entity) and that seemed to be on a continuous loop. They’d carry a few BBC news programs, but both of which were too anti-Trump to convey any real info about what was happening back home.
I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do—I can’t help but be bothered by the math here. By that I mean, the number of affected and dying still don’t add up to the response. Just my opinion. Just my observation. In Ireland, I was accused of being “cavalier” about the virus by one of my very own guests.. I wasn’t then, I’m not being cavalier now. I understand how a microscopic virulent strain can wage war on humanity. I’m no epidemiologist, my knowledge of infectious diseases is nil, but still some of this is defying logic. In the beginning, I didn’t completely get the extremely rapid spread of this and the human response to it. I still don’t. Closing stores, restaurants, shutting down festivals worth huge amounts of money that would have gone to the host city and the organizers, the kids participating, closing borders, registering with Google to find a nearby place to be treated. All of this as the economy taking a nosedive.
As a reporter, I covered AIDS, Ebola, all the various Chinese bird flues, even the smallpox scare after 9/11…many of these illnesses meant almost certain death to those who contracted them, yet I don’t remember this kind of federal response, so rapid, so emphatic.
I’m having a tough time grappling all that is and will be.
What a difference a month makes. Thirty days ago, once successful small businesses will soon file for bankruptcy because of having to shut their doors due to a national economic disruption. The once glowing unemployment rate along record high stock market numbers are in the final swirl before flushing.
In the beginning, this felt biblical. Now it feels….I don’t know….man made. Intentional. On purpose. Well-hatched. I’m not a conspiracy buff, but in this day and age, you can’t remove the politics from anything, at any time and dictated from both sides of the aisle. If Trump’s enemies couldn’t get him any other way, turning this Corona fears (whether it was bought and paid for or an accident that completely played into to their hands) , this can very conveniently make Covid-19 Trump’s Katrina a thousand times over.
If Trump wanted to prove to American citizens what life would be like living in his version of a Democratic socialist state, this would give us all a flavor-filled taste of what life would be like with Bernie or Joe at the helm.
But what about the loss of life? Acceptable losses. In tradecraft, that adds plausibility. You might think I’m nuts to think our own government could do such a thing. My response is that you’d be crazy NOT to believe the things our government is completely capable of doing.
Some are of the opinion this is China’s continuing its effort to cull the herd. They’ve done horrible things in the past, even limiting the number children a couple can have. Population control matters to them. Little else does. But some think it was a Chinese attempt at population control that got out of hand and spread and spread rapidly. From huge, well populated first world countries to small, remote Island nations that technically have no real means of acquiring the infection. Yet, some residents are sick. Very strange but true, but it all feels familiar, somehow.
I remember living in Houston after it took a glancing blow from Hurricane Rita and I remember the after effects of being in the crosshairs of Ike. Life stagnated after those storms hit. Food lines, gas lines, a very in-your-face police present, curfews, reports of looting. The heat, humidity, mosquitoes which presented problems all their own. The agony of losing everything and the defeatist feeling of having to start all over again, in one’s 60’s. It’s the fear of the unknown, having your lives disrupted. The anxiety involved wondering if anything will ever be okay again. This feels like that in many ways.
The ubiquitous “they” say, it’ll get worse before it gets better. And then it will disappear as stealthily as it arrived. I don’t know. I wish I knew something certain. did, but I don’t.
I’m told by eternal optimists that a new day will dawn, that sun will come out again just as it always has. Okay, but isn’t it a bit ironic and odd that the sun WILL come out, but with its typical yellow-colored circle around it.
That, of all the nutty, coincidental things in the world, just so happens to be called a corona.