Optimistic Pessimism

Today, I expect the worst from the covid-19 pandemic and look for the best. Nearly a million and a half confirmed cases and ninety thousand dead, fourteen thousand dead in the United States, twenty dead in our own rural county. And more to come.

For whatever reason, our wealthy and sophisticated country is not responding well. We don’t seem to be able to organize ourselves. Shortages and gaps in medical supplies are appearing in the country that invented supply-chain management. Testing is faltering at the source of testing technology.

As a world leader, we are stumbling. What else can be said? The number of cases in the U. S. is more than double that of the country with the second highest count.

The only way we have to stop the deaths is to shut the country down, and we struggle to do it. Americans cherish their freedom and do not take kindly to interference. Some insist on their right to assembly when not assembling is to avoid the death for themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, their countrymen. In the country that is of the people, by the people and for the people, the people cannot save themselves.

What do I see that is good in this? Yes, healthcare staff, nurses, and doctors are valiantly giving their lives to save the victims of the virus, but sacrifice is not bright hope. Volunteers distribute food to the distressed and help in many ways, and philanthropists donate billions, but this is only more sacrifice. The necessity of sacrifice drives me to despair, not hope.

Then what good do I see? Change. Change for the better paid for with staggering suffering and cost. Hundreds of thousands of good people forced to die alone with a tube jammed down their throat. Myriads of others who will survive with lame spirits and weakened bodies.

You may lament the shattering of the economy, but I see an economy that was already broken with unseen cracks. We were living in a condition that we now know humans cannot survive. The death toll from the virus testifies to this. If we lived differently, flew around in airplanes less, did not live in cities stacked in layers, looked out for our neighbors instead of competed with them, used computer networks, the mark of the new century, to protect ourselves from pestilence and bring us together instead letting them divide us, the emergence of the virus would have been a minor event. A temporary statistical variation that only epidemiologists and public health specialists would notice.

But the pandemic isn’t minor. It is a catastrophe because we have been doing it all wrong.

Now we know.

Will we have a better world when this is over? I think so. World War II was a horrible event, more destructive than the pandemic. After the war, many people were dead like today, but cities were also flattened, industrial facilities devastated, and resources destroyed.

Yet, the world that emerged from the war was more prosperous, more pleasant, more humane than ever existed before on the planet.

After the pandemic, we will have the dead to bury and grieve, but our resources and infrastructure will be intact, and we will have learned much about the weaknesses in our old ways. We will know new ways to work, to live, to cooperate.

Already, the network has been strengthened in just two months to support the new loads and will continue to get stronger. We’ve learned to get together electronically in ways that the virus can’t disrupt. And we will learn more. New ways to work and distribute goods. Our communities will be stronger and more resistant to stress.

Rebuilding will be rapid because we will have so much to rebuild with, and like the aftermath of the war, the world will improve in ways we do not yet comprehend.

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