Suffering Spring

By David K. Shipler

                Daffodils came early this year, deceived by a premature spate of warmth, then slapped with reality by a cold snap. But now the most exquisite season in and around the nation’s capital has begun to take hold. The plum tree in front has blossomed along with the magnolias across the street. The cherry trees are at their peak, their feathery white petals blowing off and descending like snow flurries. The azaleas will not be far behind.

                It is a cruel spring of dissonance. It is like that crystal autumn day, September 11, 2001, whose beauty should not have allowed the terror and the death. It is like wartime Vietnam, whose stunning landscapes should not have made room for combat. This should be a soothing time of annual rebirth, with no place for the discords of illness and fear.

                Like a family in crisis, America and every other nation will learn good and hard lessons about itself. This will weld us or break us. We will find common purpose or deepened fissures. If we summon wisdom, we will discover what matters and what does not, who are heroes and who are not, who are leaders and who are not—regardless of their titles, positions, or pretenses.

                 Human beings rarely resign themselves to powerlessness. To flee from war, crime, or hunger, refugees uproot themselves and journey into risky unknowns. Against suicide bombings, citizens search for a semblance of control. They reach for tricks and tactics that seem rational, hoping to reduce the unwanted probabilities. In Israel when buses were being blown up, drivers tried to avoid stopping near buses at red lights. In Lebanon and Vietnam, canny locals stayed off country roads that felt too quiet. Smart cops in every tough city in the world learn to watch and listen all around them, to read body language, if possible to put an engine block between them and a suspect who might be armed.

                 The habit of staking a claim to some small territory of control is surely embedded in our animal survival instinct. Sometimes our methods are futile, often so against random violence. Sometimes they are illusory, giving us a sense of power more imagined than real. Sometimes they are practical, and therefore comforting, as we wash our hands while singing Happy Birthday twice, stop touching our faces, use gloves or paper towels to handle the gas pump, sterilize our doorknobs and kitchen counters, and look to the health professionals’ steady and factual advice. Thank heavens for Dr. Anthony Fauci!

                But there are limits to human powers, of course.
In the spreading virus and the falling stock market, we are confronted by microbes and microchips: the infinitesimal enemy and the computer-programmed selling triggered by downward spirals in prices. Both spin out of control and magnify the harm. There is a reason why a malicious computer program is called a virus.

                Then, too, we have enhanced and restricted our own powers by the ways in which we have programmed computers, developed policies, drawn up budgets, and elected governments. Globally, we have advanced science remarkably and have elevated superb minds to guide us and to research remedies. Simultaneously, we have indulged in anti-scientific myths about vaccinations and cures, and in the United States have elected a president who dismisses scientific expertise, spouts dangerously false assertions, and cannot seem to remember and repeat a simple fact. In an ordinary citizen, his mental disabilities would be cause for sympathy.

                Through our voting, we Americans have also decided against sufficiently robust funding for health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control. We have decided on a short-sighted government that does not prepare, even after its own simulation reveals startling gaps in medical supplies and interagency coordination. We prefer spats with China to cooperation. We send to Congress a Republican Party more determined to help the rich than the poor, even in an emergency. We adore and detest our president, unable to agree on whether he is a savior or a threat. We appear poised to follow the historical pattern in which a crisis raises a leader’s approval rating, as Pearl Harbor did Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s and 9/11 did George W. Bush’s. And the coming of spring, at this writing, has not cloaked the partisan rancor in our nation’s capital.

                The hope lies in the neighborhoods. Among the plum, magnolia, and cherry trees where I live, generous young neighbors offer to shop for the elderly, strollers greet each other cheerfully from a distance, old friends talk more now by phone and FaceTime, and that deep American tradition of caring thrives. To paraphrase Dickens: It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.