life during wartime

Three weeks.

Three weeks seems to be about the maximum time we can handle an interruption to normal service. March Madness. the World Cup. By the third week of the Olympics, people were calling the local affiliates to complain about not being able to see their stories. And in 2001, it took about three weeks after September 11 before white women were complaining about having to go through the bag search at the airport.

This came to mind recently because of two separate bits of British media. One is Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Kitchen Disco”, a radio show based off her Instagram broadcasts with her kids during the early days of lockdown. The other is “Staged,” a mostly-two-handler wit David Tennant and Michael Sheen and their families made with iPhones and Zoom in the first three months of the pandemic. Both capture that feeling of the days when the streets were empty, grocery shopping was a commando run, sports had vanished from TV other than Korean baseball and the World Series of Bags, and normal service had been most decisively interrupted.

One of the reasons we failed after the attacks of September 11 was that we said we were at war without doing anything to reflect that. In fact, we were told not to change our lifestyle in any way. No cutting back on our gas use to take the money hose out of the hands of our Saudi enemy (who we refused to acknowledge were our enemies). No push for national service, let alone a draft. We were supposed to act as though 9/11 changed everything while simultaneously changing nothing. (When in fact, the only thing that was intended to change was to adopt the belief that only Republicans were fit to hold power. How you square that with being the ones on watch when we got bushwhacked I am keen to hear.)

By contrast, the pandemic was very much a war, and required wartime sacrifice. You can’t go where you would like. You can’t get everything you want whenever you want it. Normal service is very much interrupted, and we do not have a date certain for its restoration. Survival and victory are absolutely dependent on whether we can all pull together in a common cause against a foe that cannot be negotiated with, cannot be reasoned with, must be thwarted, and hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance. Covid-19 was the real 9/11, and once again, we absolutely blew it because no one was willing to live in wartime.

Well, the war is over. We lost. The wife and I have both shaken our bouts with the virus (hers worse than mine, although mine was worse than my first asymptomatic exposure last year). And yet, on April 11, California will formally surrender. The US as a whole follows in May. Even the elderly Asian folks at the Sunday morning farmers market aren’t bothering to mask up any more. We have given in and we have given up.

Which…I mean, my wife and I have had five shots apiece, and the SARS-COV-2 experience was no worse than a bad cold. Which was the point, I guess – use the vaccines to beat it back to the point where it was no longer a life and death situation. On that front, we succeeded, and I suspect the death rates for the unvaccinated are not dissimilar to flu deaths if we were to look back at this winter in a couple of months. So maybe we did manage to turn it into just another seasonal virus, but not before we clocked a million or more surplus American dead since 2020.

We lost something vitally important at the turn of the century. We had one political party revert its entire reason for being to preach that “you don’t have to care that there’s other people.” If something big enough and serious enough comes along, it can hit us hard enough to know better, and in our panic and bewilderment we’ll so what we’ve done since the cavemen: try to huddle along with our fellows and help each other grope out of the darkness for a bit.

But the bit only lasts three weeks.

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