Days of the Virus: 100 Days

As of 4pm yesterday afternoon (June 22, 2020), my wife, mom and I have lived one hundred days in semi-quarantine, leaving the house rarely, seeing almost no one else in person, and then only at a distance.  Like other billions of humans across the planet, we have been privileged to make a nest of fear and to hide in it.

Millions -- in the United States at least -- have made a different response.  Many of us have adopted the argument that if one's own chance of surviving COVID-19 are high, that one can do as one pleases because one is only risking harm to oneself.  Of course, this assumption has been demonstrated to be patently false, but the abstractions required to apply that fact to practice seem to be lost on those blindly congregating as if in the few months of collective hibernation the virus had disappeared.

Indeed, our collective cabin fever seems to be forcing us out of doors and back to each other.  Not only do we see myopic expressions of entitled rage, but protests and uprisings by the legitimately aggrieved seem also to be accelerated by the energy held in check until recently by the pandemic.  In this time of great press, caught between the threat of an invisible carnivore devouring us from the inside and using us as living incubators for its spawn on the one hand and the struggle to respond mindfully to the darkness of centuries-suppressed violence in our culture being brought bold-face into the light on the other, it can be hard to know what to do.

My answers are not perfect, but this is what I'm doing:

First, I believe we all have a responsibility to be of service.  My family is my first concern and my promise to my father to support and protect my mother in her age keeps us sequestered.  I am only of use to her, my wife, my children, and my community if I am well enough to be so.  This applies, too, to my patients who depend on me to be available and clearheaded to support them as they navigate their own crises.  Therefore, I attend to my own mental and physical health as an expression of care and service.

Minimizing my exposure to the virus supports my ability to care for those whom I care about, but it also has the prosocial function of keeping one more human out of the loop of contagion.  For every person who contracts the virus, between one and three others are likely to get it; even if the first person has no symptoms, the fact that they can pass it on is a critical issue.  I work to keep from becoming that vector, not just for my mom, but for the community in which I live.

Too, it is important to be a voice for facts and for collective and long-view thinking:  I strive to speak and act based on what science tells us -- stay home if you can, wear a mask if you go out, wash your hands, keep away from others.  I stand for these actions and require those around me to do so as well.

In the face of the eruption of anger over and new awareness of our country's original sin of racism, I work to educate myself about my whiteness and others' blackness.  What I learn, I share with others, especially those things that others don't yet see.  I invite white family members and friends to explore what it means to be white; with white patients who are struggling to process the outcries and pain they see, I guide their questioning toward the perceptual lacunae that privilege creates; I listen to friends and people of color, to learn to hear and to understand their experience, working especially to remember that my own experience can lead me to misunderstand theirs.  I set boundaries with and push back against those in my life who fight -- knowingly or not -- to keep hold of their ignorance and to contribute to our collective amnesia.  These I believe are the most important things I can do.

There are other things, too.  I make art; I try to process the pain I witness and my own in a public and, hopefully, respectful and empowering voice.  I give money to organizations working toward the solutions that make sense to me and encourage others to do the same.

I also imagine a future.  From here, it seems to me unlikely that we'll see the far side of our current crises in another hundred days or even two.  Along with everyone else, I feel the weight of quarantine, the unique, unanswerable, dull throb of being a social animal in isolation.  Yet, if we keep our heads and, ironically, stay connected across our bubbles, I can imagine a future in which we exceed our current selves, are more willing, and safer for our better trust.