America’s Problem With Acceptance
By: Elizabeth Grey
Tags: Teaching, Health, Politics, Society, Covid-19

America’s Problem With Acceptance

We are not getting back last year. Let’s concentrate on surviving this one.

Image courtesy of Pixabay.

We walk. It seems we alone know the secret of the Old Croton Aqueduct.

We rarely run into anyone. It’s too cold in New York for many walkers. I call this time Cold Violet because the violets come up in the grass when I still need a coat.

The natural world has a sublime beauty, this time of year. The palest of greens inspire tenderness. I start calling it The Shire, and half expect Bilbo Baggins himself to make an appearance, inviting us in for a second breakfast.

It’s a mirage, of course. The thought of Tolkien is intermingled with another literary reference. The T.S. Eliot line,

April is the cruelest month

seems permanently stuck in my head.

My husband and I are taking our long, daily trek. It’s early April of this year. He just lost his job, and with it, our health insurance; one of the millions of people left unemployed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

As luck would have it, I happen to be particularly broke as well. I am a recent hire of the U.S. Census but know I won’t be knocking on doors anytime soon. Not with the quarantine in effect.

We walk so we don’t go insane with worry. We walk until we are too tired to care about financial disasters, or ending up on a ventilator.

I don’t like to be suckered. I am not letting the ache of early spring dazzle me. Another reason April is the cruelest month is it’s a good time to starve. Historically, farmers are out of winter supplies, and it’s too soon for anything to grow.

I think of Little House on the Prairie. Then, I think of my Aunt Sally, who lives on a prairie herself.

My late father and she had another sister, Bittie, the youngest of the trio. Like my father, Bittie was diagnosed with terminal cancer very young in life. She and Sally were exceptionally close.

Sally traveled to Florida from Texas to be with her. She walked into the hospital room. Bittie’s greeting to her was,

How in the cornbread hell did this happen?

Sally told me that Bittie did one round of chemo, and declared herself finished. There would be no more chemotherapy. Being sickened by medicine was not for her. They left the hospital.

We thought we had some time, Sally said. What we didn’t realize was that these were the good days.

I am with Sally and my cousin Jenny during the last three days of Bittie’s life. She quits eating and drinking to speed along her death, but her body won’t cooperate. I am stunned at the ferocity with which her body holds on. She isn’t breathing so much as panting. For three days, I think every breath she takes is her last.

Those good days were the ones early on when she was simply bedridden.

Right now, as we walk, the idea that we could lose our house is weighing on each of us. It’s too awful to speak about, but the fear is growing. I feel it.

These are the good days.

Suddenly, I make a decision. I open my mouth to tell him.

Look. We just have to survive this. That’s our only goal. We just have to stay healthy and live through it. If we lose everything, so be it. We start over.

That became our pact. Stay healthy. Live through it. So far, we have done just that. The decision was a good one.

I look back at that moment and know I received some real grace. I got lucky.

The ability to frame what is happening in the world as a simple challenge to our existence helps me enormously. I let go of hoping for a fancy future. I let go of ever being able to travel again. I let go of being a homeowner. I learned to stay in the moment, for real.

All those years of meditating never put me in the moment the way this pandemic does.

I know a lot of people are more than worried right now, about all the aspects of change thrust upon us. I don’t have a single friend whose life isn’t turned upside down by the coronavirus. Most of them manage just fine, but then there are the days that the anxiety feels like it might kill them.

I have a friend who was just widowed, during the quarantine. She’s now alone, after losing her husband of over thirty years. Another has two children in middle school, with no idea of where or what their remaining school years will look like.

Most of my close friends are teachers. A week ago, one of them was considering early retirement, as opposed to having to go back into a building with thousands of children. Her local school board narrowly passed a decision to let the first semester be virtual learning, so she’s safe for now.

These are some tough calls that teachers are being forced to make.

I am not a teacher, so I don’t have these problems. I couldn’t even teach kindergarten, now. I didn’t get a computer until I was thirty years old. As a member of Generation X, I am in the awkward adolescent section of human development.

I may have a bad moment or two, but I have given up fighting what’s happening. I know my life will never look like it did before.

I know these are the good days. It’s a very strange time in human evolution. I try not to take it all so personally.

Evolution is not a choice. We evolve whether we want to or not; it doesn’t matter if we are ready, or prepared. I doubt there was a single dinosaur all those millions of years ago who dreamt his progeny would be chickens.

We adapt, or we die. We surrender, or we are crushed.

However, I notice this is not a widely embraced idea.

If I told you the one thing I hear people say most frequently, whether it’s politicians or fellow citizens, it’s some version of this:

I cannot wait till things get back to normal again!

Normal, as the kids say, is canceled. There is no going back. It may seem painful to accept this. Fighting it is worse.

A mother at home, praying that she won’t be responsible for home-schooling two adolescents, is one thing. She isn’t responsible for her city, or state, or nation. Hoping that things will get back to normal will not have a negative effect on our society.

I expect better critical thinking from our leaders.

Every problem we face now, personally, and as a nation, has to do with acceptance. We are in the first wave of a global pandemic. The coronavirus didn’t come back — it never left. We must act accordingly. Old approaches will not work.

Hanging on to the past, especially last year’s economy, is going to get people killed. Insisting that we reopen too quickly has already had disastrous consequences. Pining for yesterday is not only pointless, it hurts us.

If it doesn’t bother you that people will die, please consider this: a refusal to deal with data-based models of infection rates will ultimately always be more expensive. Going back to the drawing board, time and time again is not a cost-effective strategy.

It would have been cheaper to cancel the Republican convention a few months ago than to move it from North Carolina to Florida. It’s canceled anyway.

It might have been expensive to shut down the entire nation for a month or two, then assess where we are. It might have been expensive to supplement the income of every American adequately or to grant Medicare to every unemployed person.

It can only be more expensive to do what we are doing.

Today, the powers that be at the CDC have suddenly changed their minds about the danger of children going back to school. It’s terribly disappointing to learn they’ve caved to Trump, but probably shouldn’t be a surprise, as they are under the control of the Executive Branch.

Of course, it would be better to have kids in school. Of course, they are missing out on socialization. Of course, it’s harder to learn online.

Do we really want to send these kids and my friends, their teachers — into school, just to have them close down again after too many of them die?

I do not know how in the cornbread hell we got here. But here we are. I would greatly appreciate it if my own government dealt in reality, and not fantasy. What’s important now is to make sound decisions based on science.

Instead, our president wants last year back.

To use another literary analogy, President Trump reminds me most of the Tennessee Williams character Amanda Wingfield, from The Glass Menagerie; only with none of her charm. It’s embarrassing to watch him pine for last year’s economy. It has nothing to do with the enormous problem at hand.

He might as well be wishing for seventeen gentleman callers on Blue Mountain. The longer he fantasizes, these good days will turn quickly to our worst.

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