You know where you were September 11th, 2001. You remember the exact moment. If you’re like me, you even remember what you were wearing (a Saz’s golf shirt and Dockers, as I was to be golfing later that morning at an outing bearing the rib joint’s name) when we watched in horror as the worst terror strike our nation ever endured on U.S. soil played out on live television.
If you’re of a certain age (old), you know what you were doing November 22, 1963. Many of we elderly types were in school when the first word came of shots being fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. Some say innocence died that afternoon. Nah. The day birthed something else that lingers today: a lack of trust in government. If it couldn’t keep a Commander in Chief safe on our own streets, what chance do the rest of us have? If it couldn’t get the story about what happened right in the first telling, why should we believe them moving forward? Vietnam and other situations would validate those doubts for generations moving forward.
So where in the pantheon of unforgettable dates will March 11, 2020 reside? That’s the night we heard the President declare new coronavirus prohibitions, sending global markets into a tailspin. That, as the NBA shut down and we learned Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hanks had a disease that we were just starting to grasp the seriousness of: COVID 19. Three things, learned in the course of about a 20 minute chunk of prime time.
The world hasn’t been the same since.
What have we learned the month and the day since? As this is written, it’s late Easter morning. What would be time for my first old fashioned at my sister’s house where we usually celebrate the occasion is instead a cup of black coffee next to the keyboard. I’m sure your traditions are similarly, um, changed.
If we can’t do anything at all, at least it’s a blessing to be home NOT to do it, if that sentence makes any sense. If you have to be stuck anywhere, let it be among family. We’re learning to talk to each other again–we have to, since there’s nowhere to go. We’re finding out that the large, square appliance in one corner of the kitchen is called an “oven”, capable of making meals we used to get elsewhere. Stores remain busy, not so much because we’re hoarding but because we can’t go to restaurants the way we used to. God bless our friends in the dining industry, trying to stay afloat with make-shift to-go operations. We can only hope they’re still around when we get through this–they, and so many other businesses hurting because of where we’re at.
We’re learning more about the toilet paper industry than many of us probably cared to. The “run” on t-p (pun intended) continues, and store shelves remain empty in most cases. Why? An enterprising journalist explained what’s happening on MSNBC last week: there are two kinds of toilet paper, made for two kinds of customer. There’s the White Cloud, Charmin and other brands we find in stores and then there’s the stuff mills make for institutions, like offices, schools, businesses, airports, etc. We’re using the same amount of t-p we did before the outbreak (this IS, after all, a respiratory illness, not a digestive one) but we’re now doing our, um, business, at home instead of at work or school. A spokesman for Georgia Pacific in Green Bay told us that and more during a recent Wisconsin’s Morning News chat, admitting ever-so-slightly that the pivot to making more of one and less than another may be something they’ll have to consider (see/hear the podcast dated April 11 here).
Beards and long hair are a thing again, just as they were when I was in high school and college in the 60’s and 70’s. Back then, we did it to make a statement and the cheese off our parents. Now, we’re shaggy because we can’t get haircuts, with beards something that hopelessly bored men do when we don’t have live sports to watch on TV. From the posts seen on social media, there’s a good reason many of us need to keep our morning appointments with the Foamy and the Trac II.
Speaking of digital links, who knew of Zoom before all this happened? Anyone? Now, we’re downright conversant in that, or Facebook Messenger or even Skype (remember Skype?). Yes, these technologies need to be practiced safely but wow–imagine where our collective sanity would be without them. In dire times decades ago, switchboards would crash as folks turned to the telephone to commiserate. Now, we have to deal with slower YouTube speeds while making sure a man cave busily streaming “Tiger King” isn’t mucking up junior’s wi-fi upstairs or Mom’s Candy Crush marathon (these are hypotheticals–nothing like this happened at the Mueller household).
Ah, “Tiger King”–the Netflix gift that just…keeps…giving. A hastily crafted after-show is about to drop as I write this, certain to give us another 60 minutes or so of self-validation, of the feeling that maybe my own life choices aren’t so bad after all. Would “Tiger King” have been such a phenomenon had it not been for mandatory self-isolation? We’ll never know. It’s Joe Exotic’s world right now–we just get to live in it (while he does time for a murder-for-hire conviction–oops. Is it too late to say “spoiler alert”?)
Wisconsin once again proved to be a national leader, not in cheese but in moldy, inept politics. A pox on both parties for what happened at the polls this past week, and worse still, for their failure to avoid it in the weeks before Tuesday’s clown-car/dumpster-fire/s–t show of an election. A governor who sorely needs someone to tell him what his powers are (or what few remain after Republicans stripped him on many before he ever took the oath) and a legislature all-too-eager to look at two options and pick the worst one possible made our state a laughingstock–take that back. No one’s laughing because there’s nothing funny about people having to go out in the midst of a pandemic to exercise their right to vote. Instead of reasoned debate, logical discussion and a full bi-partisan examination of how to execute a work-around to in-person voting, we got Monday edicts from Tony Evers and predictable rulings from high courts at the state and federal levels. Now we wait for results, inevitable lawsuits and a possible spike in COVID 19 cases brought on by perfectly avoidable political hijinx. Between a Governor’s order closing bars/restaurants at the height of St. Patrick’s Day–akin to handing newlyweds a hotel key and then snatching it back at the door to the honeymoon suite–to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos telling us it’s safe to vote as he’s swaddled head-to-to in haz-mat gear, our state motto of “Forward” never seemed less in play.
Generations are sadly learning the hard way that the institutions designed to protect us are doing, in some cases, the opposite, or at the very least looking the other way despite many and varied warning signs. It happened in 2008 when Wall Street fattened up on questionable business practices. Oh, and it happened there before during the S&L crisis. Experts told our government Vietnam was unwinnable as the war slogged on. Our sleuths warned of a possible terror strike before planes went into New York skyscrapers. Washington was told of “the next pandemic” even as many (me included) were skeptical, claiming our typical seasonal flu had killed more people than a virus that seemed to be an overseas concern.
I’ve said in this space before that COVID 19 won’t break our society, but that it will certainly show us where the cracks are: in the inner city where African Americans are dying at a faster rate because of many factors, all of them known to us before the first case got confirmed. Our medical institutions are stressed to the max in big cities because of the overwhelming number of cases, a lack of PPE, a dearth of ventilators and a shortage of beds/ICU space. We await the checks that are supposed to stimulate our economy while small businesses struggle to hop through all the hoops needed to make sure they get promised support.
And yes, then there’s the toilet paper situation.
“Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd invoked Winston Churchill when speaking of what’s happening this Easter at the top of Sunday’s show. “Now is not the end,” Churchill said as World War II burned intensely in the fall of 1942. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
The words fit, don’t they? As we wait for curves to flatten and a resumption of life as we knew it, we need to consider what “normal” may look like, keeping in mind that it probably won’t arrive with the mere flip of a switch or Washington/Madison edict. “Normal” will probably be a gradual accomplishment, one that may come in stops and starts as the fight against an invisible enemy continues, one we won’t win until there’s a vaccine–and that’s not gonna happen today or tomorrow. Only then will we be able to speak of “the end of the beginning.”
Home. Not a bad place to be stuck. Its an Easter/Passover like none other in recent memory, in the midst of an April that follows a March in the middle of a spring we’ll never forget. It will change us. It will show us where the cracks are. It won’t break us, unless we allow it to.
“The end of the beginning.” May we be better people when it comes, better prepared for what may be next when it occurs. That keyboard-side cup of coffee has long since grown cold. Time for that old fashioned, raised in hopes of better days. May whatever holiday you’re enjoying be the best it can be under the circumstances. Keep a good thought for those working while we gather, for those who expose themselves while saving/helping/serving others. Don’t forget those who passed, or their grieving families/friends.
Let’s start expecting more from those who are supposed to protect us. No, change that. Don’t expect.
Demand.