Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. (Desmond Tutu)

Sitting on my deck in my usual early May (71˚ day/43˚ night) evening outfit of down jacket and flip flops, needing some succor from corona-madness, searching the stars for that moral arc of the universe MLK spoke of—long, but bending toward justice—it occurred to me that we need three things to survive difficult times of unknown duration: Hope, humor, and the faces of those we love. While we’re waiting for that long arc to bend, I offer you something of each.  

Hope: The Associated Press Keeps the Lights On

It reads like an apocalyptic political thriller. Okay, maybe more of a pandemic potboiler. Anyway: The good guys try desperately to get the truth out, slugging their way through a mind-numbing series of roadblocks set by the bad guys, who are equally anxious to bury that truth. It’s a real story though, one with far-reaching consequences—one we might never have known if it weren’t for the power and integrity of a free press. As The Washington Post reminds us daily: Democracy dies in darkness.

Thanks to the Associated Press, democracy, however hamstrung at the moment, is still kicking at those who would turn out the lights.

April 30: With more than 55,000 Americans dead from COVID-19, TheRUMP announces the end of federal social distancing guidelines. Over. Done. Time to re-open. Open everything. You can always drink a gallon of bleach if you’re worried.

Heads are scratched. Hmm. What happened to the CDC? Weren’t they supposed to issue some kind of rules for when and how to go about this re-opening thing? Well, yes they were, and yes they had, in fact, created such a document, a 63-page report: Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework. Detailed recommendations for making site-specific decisions on when, how, and whether to open businesses, schools, religious houses, and other public places. Advice for when to shut down again in the advent of inevitable COVID-19 flareups.

But a (not-so) funny thing happened on the way to releasing this important doc with its emphasis on coordination among state and local jurisdictions (because COVID-19 bleeds rapidly across borders in an America on the move). The report appeared to be stuck in that cyberspace pipeline where documents float in obscurity until they magically disappear. Instead, the White House issued its own Opening Up America Again guidelines. With recommendations to re-open public places and businesses in accordance with federal and local “regulations and guidance”, whatever those might be. Oh yeah, and maybe monitor employees for COVID-19. If you have tests. If it’s not too much hassle.

That might have been the end of it if the AP hadn’t gotten curious about the CDC’s uncharacteristic silence and done some digging. If they hadn’t granted CDC officials anonymity to speak truth. If they hadn’t followed a flow of internal emails. But they did. And here are the highlights of what they found: 

April 10: CDC director, Robert Redfield, shares the guidance doc via email with the WH task force, a group that includes not only TheRUMP, his assistant for domestic policy Joseph Grogan, Deborah Birx, and Anthony Fauci, but also epidemiology “luminaries” Jared Kushner and Kellyanne Conway.

April 14: CDC officials send the doc to the Office of Management and Budget, standard operating procedure for agencies seeking “final WH approval for documents an agency has already cleared.” [My italics]

April 17: Ignoring the CDC report, the WH releases the plan mentioned above. It’s up to state governors and local officials to figure out this re-opening stuff.

 April 24: Redfield resends the CDC doc to Birx and Grogan. Would they please review it so it can be published on the CDC website?

April 26: All is still silence from TheRUMP admin. More pleading from the CDC. More waiting.

April 27: An OMB staffer passes along a message from the WH: “They have given strict and explicit direction that these documents are not yet cleared and cannot go out as of right now. This includes related press statements or other communications that may preview content or timing of guidances.”

April 30: The CDC finally gets word from TheRUMP’s Task Force, just hours before the federal guidelines on social distancing expire. In an email, Quinn Hirsch, from the WH’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), tells the Department of Health and Human Services—note the circumnavigation here to avoid the Task Force directly addressing the CDC—that the guidelines need to be “more cross-cutting and say when they should reopen and how to keep people safe.”

Huh?

“Fundamentally,” Hirsch writes, “the Task Force cleared this for further development, but not for release.” CDC Chief of Staff Kyle McGowan laments the guidance report will “never see the light of day,” three unnamed CDC officials tell the AP.

May 7: BOMBSHELL. The AP publishes 17 pages of the CDC’s 63-page report obtained from an unnamed federal official. White House reaction is swift (if less than honest). A mad scramble ensues to fast-track approval and release the guidance. At least some part of the guidance. Or something similar to the guidance. At any rate, the AP obtains an email that confirms the WH ordered the CDC to refile the shelved report just hours after the story broke.    

May 8: Gobbledygook is employed to explain this sleight-of-hand switcheroo. When asked what happened to the original CDC report, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx said, “No one has stopped those guidelines. We’re still in editing.”

And more gobbledygook … It was a “touchstone document,” one federal official said. More of a blueprint for “other groups inside the CDC who are creating the same type of instructional materials for other facilities.” Yeah.

In a statement, circulated by the WH—possibly with a bit of arm-twisting?—Redfield is quoted: The process is “an iterative effort to ensure effective, clear guidance is presented to the American people.”

May 13: Senator Charles Schumer (NY-D) calls for the immediate release of the CDC’s full report. “America needs and must have the candid guidance of our best scientists unfiltered, unedited, uncensored by President Trump or his political minions.” Sen. Mike Braun (IN-R) blocks Schumer’s resolution, saying the CDC’s guide would bog down the economy.

May 14: The CDC releases new guidance docs on reopening—a series of watered-down, one-page mini-reports. No mention is made of reopening states in phases after prescribed benchmarks have been met. After a sustained decline in COVID-19 cases. Many states re-open with abandon.  

May 20: The AP reports that U.S. health officials have “quietly released” 20 new pages of reopening guidelines. The new pages provide more detail, but the language doesn’t mandate. Instead, it suggests: as feasible, if feasible. “This administration has shown time and time again that it has a problem with science,” an unnamed veteran CDC official tells CNN. “We are giving them science and they don’t seem to want it. We are allowed to release what they allow us to release.”

That same day, the AP also reports that “Republican political operatives are recruiting ‘extremely pro-Trump’ doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks.”

This is far from the final chapter, but without a free press, we would never have known about any of the WH’s machinations to bury the original CDC report. Without a free press, we would not know that some states are under-reporting COVID-19 cases—endangering their citizens—to boost TheRUMP’s ratings. Without a free press, the whistleblowers and inspectors general being fired at a brisk clip would “disappear” in anonymity. A free press shines a light into all those dark corners—and we are on serious overload here—a hope that democracy may yet survive. 

Humor: Red Hair is a Funny Thing

The thing you should know about red hair is that it’s a very specific color. Paraphrasing (liberally) Tolstoy’s happy/unhappy families trope: Brunettes are all like, but every redhead is red-haired in her own way.

Back when COVID-19 was new—new to us, at least, the U.S. having a rather solipsistic view of world events—Good Groovin’ Buddy (don’t ask) and lifelong friend, Mimi, made an arresting observation on Facebook: We are about 2 weeks away from knowing everyone’s true hair color. Lots of good-humored bon mots greeted this post, but glancing at my calendar, with its crossed-off appointment at a hair salon now shuttered, I realized the time for some definitive action was upon me.

A trip to the supermarket turned up a dozen or so “touch-up” color kits, all in the blonde or brown range, except for a box of something called “ultra violet.” Hmm. Not quite that desperate. Masked and gloved, I moved on to CVS with the same results. I now had about an inch of gray.

Thing #2 to know about redheads: Red hair does not gray gracefully. No salt-and-pepper sultriness, no ashy-blonde mystique. For redheads, it’s more Margaret Thatcher battleship gray.

So, I made one last foray, to Walgreen’s this time, and there I found a touch-up kit that “matches dark auburn shades.” Voila! Feeling pleased with my persistence, I bought both boxes they had and advised the cash register dude to order more.”I’ll be back!” I assured.

I feel compelled here to point out that “matches” is a word with almost as many shades of meaning as there are shades of red.

Anyway, that was March 23, and for the past two months now, I’ve been sporting a two-toned looked. From the roots out—about four inches—my hair is not unlike those incredible descriptions of wine: A hint of wild berries, with undertones of passion fruit, and a neon finish. After that, it’s tired auburn, sun-bleached and sort of blehh. But in the “curious” era of COVID-19, I find I don’t care. I have more essential things to attend to, like staying alive. Vanity is an anachronism that belongs to a world we may or may not ever see again.

During a Mother’s Day Zoom confab, my daughter asked why I don’t just buy a full hair color kit and do my entire head. Excellent question, and I have an excellent answer: To date, there are no full color kits in any shade even bordering on red (except the above-mentioned “ultra violet”) in my local “essential businesses.” So, I cycle and walk and food-shop in the public sphere with my head of many colors. Like my parents’ long-ago two-toned mauve-and-ivory Chevy Bel Air, it’s destined to become a classic.

Happy Faces Save Lives

When my husband had a liver transplant ten years ago, I camped out for a week at his bedside in the hospital, absent only for a quick bite in the cafeteria or a brief catnap in the visitor’s lounge. In the following weeks, I made the 90-minute drive twice daily, going home each night for a shower, a snooze, and a cat feeding before returning to the hospital. Ed told me he listened every morning for the sound of my step in the hallway. “Love is the greatest healer of all,” one of his doctors said. “The medical profession knows that.”

But now, on COVID-19 wards across the country, family members cannot visit. And caregivers’ smiles are buried behind whatever mask/scarf/headgear arrangement they can rig, while ER doctors dress in something resembling hazmat suits, their faces helmeted and shadowy. Virus-infected patients, struggling to breathe, see no human faces at all. And faces matter.

If you’ve ever had your car break down during rush hour on a busy road with no shoulder (I have! I have!). If you’ve ever been trapped in a flood, or awoken to the smell of something burning and realized it’s your house or apartment building. If you’ve gotten lost in some remote area, with no map and no cellphone reception. Then, you know the tremendous joy and relief at seeing the faces of those who arrive to help: To safely direct traffic around you until the tow truck comes. To airlift you from rising waters or rescue you from fire. To guide you back home. Faces. We look to them for love, for understanding, for shared laughter. When we’re in deep trouble, we seek faces for reassurance, hope, help. And in extremity, when there is no more hope, we seek faces to not be alone in our final moments. That’s what makes Robertino Rodriguez’s “smile badge” so brilliant. And so life-saving.

In April, Rodriguez, a respiratory therapist at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, posted on Instagram  “Yesterday I felt bad for my patients in ER when I would come in the room with my face covered in PPE. A reassuring smile makes a big difference to a scared patient. So today I made a giant laminated badge for my PPE. So my patients can see a reassuring and comforting smile.”

A full-face smiling photo of the caregiver behind the mask. Such a simple concept, yet so profound. The idea quickly went viral in the medical community.

 “These patients come in with a cough, shortness of breath, or fever and the question on their minds and everyone’s mind is, ‘Do I have COVID?’” says Peggy Ji, an ER doctor in Los Angeles. “I can only imagine how intimidating it is seeing a team of nurses, respiratory therapists and doctors entering their room in full PPE gear…” Ji now wears a cheerful Polaroid of herself to help her patients connect with the human inside the “walking spacesuit and mask in front of them.”

Derek DeVault, a Los Angeles nurse, saw Rodriguez’s post on Instagram and immediately recruited his co-workers to do the same. “[I] thought it was a beautiful way to bring ease to our patients during this stressful time,” DeVault noted on Instagram, beneath a photo of himself and his colleagues sporting their smile badges. 

Dr. Joseph Varon, chief of medicine at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, and his staff all have smile badges attached to their gowns when they interact with patients. Giving patients hope, Varon believes, is half the battle, and a friendly face can accomplish that. If a patient loses hope, it doesn’t matter how many medications they receive, he says, “they’re going to go. So my goal is to avoid losing people to this coronavirus any way we can.”

I started this section with the story of Ed’s liver transplant. How I stayed by his bedside day after day. How he listened each morning for my footsteps in the hall. What I didn’t tell you was how much I needed to be there, too. Needed to see his face. To hear his breathing. To hold his hand and feel that connection—physical, emotional, visual—unbroken.

Ed’s doctor was right: Love is the greatest healer of all. And it’s just possible that when we help heal others—by giving them hope, by making them laugh, by standing with them though masked and social-distanced—we heal ourselves.

I leave you with a song I’ve been listening to over and over lately. Somehow, it addresses so much. May it offer you some kind of succor, too.

Stay hopeful. Stay well.

There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing. (Robert Burns)

April, being my birth month, is the time I usually regale you with the Big Stuff I’ve learned travelling life’s bumpy road in my eternal quest for grace—which I define as that ability to remain calm and carry on no matter what. And without overdosing on the antacid tablets.

This year, I’m focusing less on the bumpy road and more on the GIGANTIC pothole that threatens to swamp us all. I think even Thomas Paine would agree we don’t lack for soul-trying times. As The Nation headlined its March 13, 2020 issue: “Our Worst Crisis Since 2008 … and We Have an Idiot at the Helm.” No **** Sherlock. Which is an apt comment, as I sit here penning this in March, because the Corona virus madness has made toilet paper the new holy grail. You may search far and wide without finding a single roll.

 Could someone please pass the antacids?

Anyway, I was driving along the other day, immersed in concerns of pandemic proportion as well as my own pathetic little pile of personal troubles, when the Eagles’ Take It Easy came on the oldies station: We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again. Instantly, my heart lightened. I’m alive. I’m OK. And this is the day I have at hand. Don’t muck it up worrying about stuff beyond my control. As I pulled into a Taco Bell parking lot to jot down that transformative line, something like grace descended.

We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again. The winning part’s easy. It’s the losing part that poses the challenge: how to cope in these troubled times.

Perspective is Everything

While researching my WWII novel, I came across an arresting story in one of my sourcebooks, London 1945. Author Maureen Waller describes a scene in a north London cinema. Though 28,000-pound V-2 rockets had been falling in the area for three days and nights, the locals still flocked to see the new film. As a revolver fired onscreen, one of the actors cried “What was that?” A wit in the audience responded, “Only a bloody rocket!” It made me laugh. It made me think. The tenacity of life—the green shoot that rises from the slender crack on a granite cliff in a barren landscape. Over 80,000 Londoners were killed or seriously injured in WWII. Every night, they went to sleep not knowing if a bomb would fall on their house. Not knowing if they would ever wake up again. And yet, life, however changed and rearranged, continued.  

If you live in North America or western Europe and were born after 1940—which is most of us reading this—you have lived a life relatively free of disaster on a grand scale. Not in a war zone or under some violent regime. Our tragedies have largely been personal, and though that doesn’t minimize the pain they caused the people who experienced them, the scale has been one of the individual, not the universal. As Humphrey Bogart famously said in Casablanca, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Well, now we’ve got much more than the problems of three little people (though it is, indeed, still a crazy world). Now, we do have to keep calm and carry on, as all those Brits did in WWII England—minus the congregating in cinemas part—because, literally, what else can we do?

Chuck the Crystal Ball That Never Really Worked—It’s Still Not Working

In mid-March, I was trying to calculate whether or not we’d be able to take a planned mini-vacation to Portsmouth in May. Would my son be able to safely fly here for a visit in late July? Could we even count on finding laundry detergent when the current bottle ran out in two weeks? And then I stopped. Because no one knows.   

The bottom line is: We have to stay in the here and now. The here and now is all we have. It’s all we can rely on. It’s actually all we ever have, but pre-pandemic life gave us the illusion we could make plans and have reasonable assurance things would unfold accordingly. Well, now we can’t. Trust me, for someone who dots all her Is and crosses her Ts, who mentally fast forwards to consider every contingency and prepare, this does not come easy, but there simply is nothing ahead any of us can know with certainty.

And that includes the pundit alarmists out there who predict the virus will go on for years, erupting again and again. That our country and the world will never be the same. Our way of life is gone. Forever! While there’s no denying, TheRUMP and his profiteering pals have mucked up the rollout of everything from test production to desperately-needed masks and ventilators—resulting in a huge spike in COVID-19 cases and needless deaths—forever is a very long time, and history is proof that even the awfullest awful disasters come to an end. Bubonic plague. The flu pandemic of 1918. The Great Depression. World War II. Ironically, we tend to overlook the big lesson these dark moments impart because we see everything in the past as over and done, but living through a disaster in real time is always the same. For those who suffered prior global catastrophes, there was no certainty in the present. There never is.

As for the doom-and-gloom about our way of life disappearing, the world is always changing. Our way of life is always changing. The noun “crisis” comes from the Latinized form of the Greek word krisis, meaning “turning point in a disease.” A moment when things could get worse. Or better. Opportunities arise at such crossroads. Out of the Great Depression came the Social Security Act. After the 1918 flu pandemic, many countries adopted free universal healthcare. Though (sadly) the U.S. did not do so—opting instead for employer-based insurance plans that left many uninsured—it did consolidate the field of medicine to include the sociological as well as the biological and experimental. The concept of public health was born and, with it, epidemiology which studies the patterns, causes, and effects of disease.

This is a crisis, and with it comes the opportunity to rethink the way we live.

Joan’s Theory of Relativity

A good friend from my younger days used to talk about her mom, Joan. If you complained about something in your life, Joan would remind you of all the people who had it worse. My friend called it Joan’s theory of relativity. It made us laugh back then, but it underscores a valid point.

If you’re healthy and have no symptoms of COVID-19, you’re having a wonderful day. Go read a book. Or write one. If the weather’s good, take a walk. Do some gardening. Whatever the weather, dance in your kitchen, bake chocolate chip cookies, take up the bongos.

And do something for a better future:

1) Protect the 2020 election by writing or calling your U.S. reps and senators. Let them know you support voting by mail in all 50 states;

2) Join an online group to protect the environment. Many orgs are now working with activists through the Internet, advising on how to take effective actions from home;

3) Money is uncertain for many of us now, but if you have $5 or $10 to spare, there are numerous good causes out there: Feeding America; Direct Relief; The American Red Cross; Team Rubicon (an NGO service organization that puts veterans to work providing disaster relief); United Way Worldwide. (For full descriptions of these and other charities, checkout this WaPo article.)

The Humane Society International could use your help, too. Hundreds of thousands of pets have been abandoned around the world in the mistaken belief they can pass on COVID-19. Both the CDC and the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department have issued statements that no evidence exists that companion animals, including pets, can spread COVID-19. 

If you’re doing a self-quarantine because you’re feeling a bit squishy around the edges, you’re maybe not having such a good day, but hopefully you can draw some comfort from listening to your favorite music, reading (great time to reduce your TBR pile), binge-watching old movies you love or streaming new series, and connecting with loved ones by phone or social media. Do take very good care of yourself. We need you.                                   

If you have COVID-19, you’re probably not reading this, but if you are, know that we are all pulling for you. That millions and millions of people across the globe are rooting for your full and speedy recovery. You have every right to be angry—the White House’s mishandling of this pandemic is cruel and inexcusable—but anger is a poor healer. Get well and take your revenge at the ballot box in November.

And that’s Joan’s theory of relativity.

Patience

The only place I venture out to these days is the supermarket, where I try to buy enough to last a full week. Or put another way, I go weekly and whatever I forget, we do without. When I went last week, the store was in full insanity mode. Aisles stripped bare of every basic as people piled their carts high with multiples of whatever they could grab. I kept thinking They must all have a platoon of giant chest freezers in the basement. You know, the kind where they discover the victim’s body on murder mysteries.

But things were calmer today (although for some inexplicable reason, butter and yogurt are still on the MIA list). Gone was the frenzy, and in its place, a new patience, bordering on generosity, had descended. People acknowledged each other with a nod, a smile. Maybe we are realizing that we really are all in this together. And that we can’t know when this will end or exactly what shape it will take in the months ahead.  

Ahead of me in the self-checkout line was a woman with two small children. The children were being, well… children, so the process of emptying her cart and bagging her items was something like watching paint dry. I told her to take her time, no stress. We all have enough stress. And I realized I wasn’t just being polite. I meant it. In this new world, what is the rush about anything for anyone who’s healthy? As I watched the kids, excited by a pack of modeling clay they were getting, my heart went out to them and their mom—to have young children or an infant at this time has to have its scary moments. Like may be a lot of them. My kids are grown and I’m still concerned. As professor and author Elizabeth Stone famously said: To have a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. 

Grace?

So, my annual birthday cake and champagne bash for the neighbors won’t be happening next week. The incredibly delicious cake Ed usually orders from our local bakery (lots of frosting!) won’t be happening—we’re limiting all outings to the supermarket and pharmacy for now. But I can always bake one from scratch. And we can hold the celebration when all this is over. Whenever that is. We’ll see. 

Is that grace? Maybe. I only know that my job—our job—in this difficult hour is to endure.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably run across my “mantra”, the Rumi quote that hangs by my desk. It is especially apt in these times:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances, That’s not for human beings. Move within, But don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Winston Churchill put it even more simply: If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Until the moment you’re not here, you are here. Whatever the circumstances, this day, this hour is your life. It is precious.

Stay well. And live.     

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer. (Paul R. Erlich, biologist/author)

On a wintry day, temperature hovering just above freezing, leaden skies overhead, I found myself sitting with about 150 other people in my regional Social Security Admin office. Waiting. And waiting. The little slip of paper with my customer service number growing damp and creased in my palm.

In setting up access to an SSA online account the week before, I had encountered a disconcerting roadblock: We have no records that match this information. Try again. So I did. Again and again.To make a long, extremely frustrating story short, every which way I tried—former hyphenated surname (marriage #1), current unhyphenated surname, birth date with zero preceding a digit, birth date without the zero —failed. We have no records that match this information.

Oh yeah? Then explain to me, please, why I’m sitting here with the annual notice you sent in 2018, reporting every year’s social security deductions from my earnings for decades!!!      

Ah, modern life.

This Facelessness We Face

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. (Albert Einstein)

Thirty-five years ago, the movie Brazil, brainchild ofMonty Python’s Terry Gilliam, painted a Munch-ian (think The Scream) portrait of near-future life that is as terrifying today as it was then. A well-oiled featureless orb of a bureaucracy with no edges, nothing one can grasp. An impervious, slippery thing that eludes our efforts to interact with the institutions that shape our lives.

We’re pretty much there:  

Phone bots demand we “say or enter” our answers to pre-determined questions, which often fail to address the reason we called. When we attempt to respond, these bots rap out a snappy “I didn’t quite get that. Can you try again?” And then hang up on us.  

Emails direct us to links that don’t work. When Microsoft took over Skype, I had a $10 phone credit—not a lot, but I need the dough more than Bill Gates, so I clicked on the link the Microsoft message assured me would allow for the transfer of my money to their new Skype system. Another long story short: the link made no mention of transfers or phone credit. No further link to customer service, no phone number. Bye-bye ten dollars.

Online support systems launch our requests for help into deep cyberspace (we used to call this the “circular file”). Three years ago, when my email account was behaving erratically, I left Google a message on their “support” page, you know the one that invites you to “Describe your issue or share your ideas.” Never heard back from them.   

The utter facelessness of modern life often renders us voiceless. As the Ghostbusters theme song asks: “Who you gonna call?”  

How Did We Get Here?

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. (Lewis Mumford, historian and sociologist)

By the time I was born, the post-war (that’s WWII for the Gen Z crowd) economy of labor-saving gadgets was in full swing. Dishwashers. Automatic clothes driers. Frost-free refrigerators.

On a larger scale, technological advances made commercial air travel not only possible but relatively affordable, paved the Interstate highway system, and boosted healthcare for the entire planet with the mass production of antibiotics and the development of the polio vaccine.

Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, the march of progress continued on. Color TVs. Touch-tone phones. Copier machines. Heart transplants.

And on… Word processors. Flip phones. Affordable PCs.

Innovation. It’s a beautiful thing. Up to a point.  

If you can recall life before Facebook. Before bots supplanted flesh-and-blood customer service reps. Before every transaction of life—except possibly a trip to the loo—could be accomplished by a text, a tweet, or an app. If your memory stretches back that far, then you probably recall chatting regularly with your neighbors (all of whom you knew by name), exchanging pleasantries with the (real people!) tellers behind the counter at your bank, the butcher at your local supermarket, salesclerks, your postal carrier.     

In that misty, distant past, virtually all our interactions took place face to face with other humans, or at the most remote, with a real live service rep over the phone, not an algorithm designed to address the most common problems, but almost never your specific issue.

My headbanging experience with the Social Security Administration website illustrates this slippery slide into the faceless technological abyss, which was resolved only when I trooped down to my local SSA office and after half a day’s wait, spoke to a real human being. Ten minutes later, problem solved.

Humans avoid the computer error.

Cyberspace: Not-Your-Mother’s Neighborhood

Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. (Dan Brown)

Several months ago, a person I’m connected with on Twitter created an informal poll asking how much time people spent daily on social media. I was amazed—and let’s be honest, somewhat appalled—to learn that 6-8 hours a day was “typical” for many respondents. We’re not talking teens here. This group of several dozen Tweeters has a median age of about 45-50. Most hold full time jobs and many have families still at home.

How do they do it? Since the day drives a hard bargain—24 hours, not a minute more!—something must be sacrificed to get that 6-8 hours of social media. That something, I suspect, is face-time with other people—neighbors, friends.

According to a Pew Center Research poll, 29% of American adults know only some of their neighbors by name, and another 28% know none, whereas the average number of friends someone has on Facebook (2019) is 338. And the average number of followers a Tweeter has is 707 (2016), a number that’s up 340% from 2012.

While these FB friends and fellow Tweeters are real people (with the exception of the occasional bot), it’s likely most of them don’t live in our community. We probably didn’t go to school with them, or raise our kids in their neighborhood. They’re not likely to come to our 50^th birthday celebration. We’re not likely to attend their wedding. We click on a heart emoji to respond to their post about their child’s cute photo, then go about our day—our RL (real life)—without giving it or them another thought.      

Even family—perhaps especially family—suffers from members orbiting cyberspace. Couples dine out in total silence, both partners texting through the meal. Parents take kids to the park, to the store, to a café, where no one speaks while Mom or Dad check their notifications. Sometimes they bring a screen to keep the kid busy/quiet.

Ian Bogost, writing in The Atlantic, describes his experience with the social network service Nextdoor, an app (oh irony of ironies!) designed to counter the effect of all those other social networks that take us into cyberspace and away from our neighborhoods.

So, what do neighbors chat about on Nextdoor? Do they discuss their day at work? The kids’ experience at the local school? Who’s looking like a winner for the Yankees? The funny joke they heard on Colbert last night? According to Bogost, his Nextdoor neighbors have reported a fallen tree blocking a major road, someone seeking belly-dancing classes, lost cats and dogs. They also complain about a variety of things, especially the sending of “urgent” alerts by other neighbors in the wee hours.

Nextdoor’s VP of policy, Steve Wymer, told Bogost that pretty much the same topics arise everywhere: Service requests/recommendations and real estate discussions make up about 50% of the buzz. Noise complaints are another hot topic, and more disturbingly, the sightings of “suspicious” people, i.e., people of color in white neighborhoods.

Though one may learn the actual names of their neighbors on Nextdoor, it seems a poor substitute for a personal relationship. Regular face to face contact. The shared laugh. The visible smile. The sympathetic hug or pat on the shoulder. A neighborhood barbecue. The annual block party.

The Impact of Technology on Our Humanity

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it. (Max Frisch, playwright and novelist)

In my first “real” post-college job as an editor, the industry journals I read were white-hot about the coming thing, the revolution in the wings that would render us one happy globally-connected world: The Internet! How exciting to think we in the States would soon be able to “talk” to people in India, in China. What no one envisaged back then was how much we would stop talking to the people around us—the people we pass on the streets of our neighborhood, in our local park, the town beach. That while “chatting” to thousands of strangers on FB, we would avert our eyes and zip our lips when passing the actual people in our neighborhood, our community, avoiding all contact as if we were all continually riding a crowded subway car in Manhattan.      

Much has been inked about the spike in our stress levels and its possible sources: threats of gun violence, environmental poisons, climate change, racial and social/political divides. All this is very real, but I believe the biggest single stressor of all may be the social isolation we experience in Real Life.                   

Ask yourself: How much energy is consumed in NOT looking at or speaking to people we pass in our daily life?

Of course, technology is just a tool, and like all tools it can be used for good or bad. A hammer, for instance, can repair a broken fence. Or it can bash in your skull.

James Surowiecki, writing in the MIT Technology Review stresses that contemporary criticism of technology is not so much about specific technologies but about the impact of technology on our humanity. That “technology is central to the increasing privatization of experience [my italics], which in turn is creating a fragmented, chaotic society, in which traditional relationships are harder to sustain, community is increasingly an illusion, and people’s relationships to each other, mediated as they often are by machines, grow increasingly tenuous.”

Increasing privatization of experience. Our hectic skeds (would they be so hectic if we weren’t spending gobs of hours online?) create a ready market for convenience services. Daily Harvest, one of many such services, brings food right to your door: “No shopping, chopping, or prepping.” Similarly, supermarket chain Stop & Shop offers two “convenience” options: Food ordered online is either delivered to your door or ready for drive-by pick-up at one of their “click-and-collect” locations. But no shopping means you won’t run into old friends and acquaintances: your child’s former teacher or the woman who coached your daughter’s softball team.    

In his book To Save Everything Click Here, Evgeny Morozov argues that we must take control of technology—make decisions and set limits as a society—rather than allowing it to control us. It’s a valid and important argument, but in the seven years since Morozov published his book, our society, our world has splintered further still. While demanding (and voting for) some kind of accountability from Big Tech, we need to start talking to one another again. Go out into our neighborhoods, parks, and town centers to rediscover and reconnect with the people behind the faces we pass by every day.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

We get so wrapped up in numbers in our society. The most important thing is that we are able to be one-to-one, you and I with each other at the moment. If we can be present to the moment with the person that we happen to be with, that’s what’s important. (Fred Rogers)

Growing up, during my family’s annual pilgrimage to visit relatives in Ohio, my Aunt Marg often took me to the park, a short bus ride away. Each time we boarded that bus, she greeted the driver. “Hey, Oscar, how’s the family?” or “Oscar, did you catch the Reds’ game yesterday?” I liked that she knew his name, knew he had a family, knew he enjoyed baseball. It made me feel like we were part of something larger than two people on a bus, that we were part of a community with everyone on that bus.

At age 5, I was not a stranger to this kind of bonhomie. In my small Michigan town, neighbors chatted with each other while mowing the lawn or raking the leaves or taking a walk. They also banded together in emergencies. During one terrible winter storm—snow drifts to the top of our back door, impossible impassable roads—my dad and our neighbor, Wally, took my Flexible Flyer sled and headed into the sleet for the store a mile away where a helicopter was delivering emergency basics like bread and milk.  

It was neighbors I sold nickel subscriptions to for my first “newspaper”—a weekly two-page rag full of local “scoops”: Who’d just had a baby, who was painting their house a new color. When my best friend Mimi and I put together an acrobatic show (all the latest gymnastics we’d learned at school), it was neighbors who bought tickets. As Mimi and I tumbled rather gracelessly about our yard, I remember the women sitting in lawn chairs, chatting happily, pausing only to applaud our efforts. I later babysat for many of these families. They knew me, knew my parents, knew that in an emergency my parents would be available.     

This was my model growing up. You interact with your neighbors. You talk to people. And even if you don’t know someone, you nod and smile as you pass each other in the coming and going of daily life. It was a model that extended seamlessly into my early adult life. Our family was part of a neighborhood babysitting co-op who swapped childcare favors, held neighborhood potlucks, barbecues, and New Year’s Eve parties. My kids attended the family daycare of our neighbor, Judy, across the street. On a sub-zero Saturday night in January, when our furnace broke down, her husband Bob came over and helped me get that cranky old heatbox re-lit. The night severe gastroenteritis necessitated an ambulance ride to the ER at 1 a.m., it was another neighbor, Paul, who came over to stay with my one-year-old son. When Nina, one street over, traveled, we fed her cats.

In recent years, it has been disheartening to see how fewer and fewer people respond to a smile or a “hello” in passing, but the ones who don’t respond seem more puzzled or startled than annoyed. So I keep smiling, I keep saying hello. Because I don’t want to live in a faceless world. And sometimes the human beings behind those glazed-over “masks” respond in delightful ways: The day after Christmas, I was taking a walk on the bike path with my daughter, her partner, and my son. We encountered a cyclist and when I commended him for braving the ice-encrusted pavement, he laughed: “So far, so good.”  He later caught up with us at the cross-light. “It’s an amazing day, isn’t it,” he said. “More like late-March than December.”

We just feel better when we talk to one another, when we acknowledge each other. Even in that cattle pen of the social security office, once I started talking to the folks next to me, several more people joined the conversation and suddenly everything felt better, the time went faster. It returned our humanity to us. And when my number was called, I was grateful to explain my problem to the real person at the service window. After we got it straightened out, I thanked her. “You do your job very well,” I said. She smiled. A short ten minutes in which we shared a bit of human helpfulness, human kindness, human gratitude.

A small exchange. And a vital one.

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond…   (Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed over 600 musical works. Symphonies, operas, concertos, string quartets—whatever the form of music, he nailed it, starting at the tender age of five.  

Not a Mozart fan? Don’t tune out just yet. This post is not about the mighty Wolfgang or Shakespeare or Isaac Newton, though they will all be mentioned. This post is about something much bigger, much more profound, and when I say something is more profound than Will Shakespeare, you know IT MATTERS.

But back to the five-year-old Mozart, composing his first works. His sister, Marianne, remembered her baby brother standing rapt at her side as their father, Leopold, taught his daughter the keyboard. So attentive was the young Mozart, that Leopold began to teach him minuets. Marianne recalled the child picking out tunes on his own.

By age six, Mozart was performing for European royalty on a series of world stages. A three-year concert tour took him to Vienna, Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, and The Hague. On the road, he was introduced to many musicians and composed his first symphony. Joseph Haydn said of his musical contemporary: “Posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.”

That Mozart’s music endures and his influence has been profound is, of course, a product of his genius. It is also a result of the access he enjoyed to develop and mature that genius.

This was possible because he was already competent at both the keyboard and violin. He was competent on these instruments because his father, Leopold, was a minor composer and music teacher. Music was in the house. Instruments were readily available.

This was possible because his father played violin in the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg’s orchestra and so had the necessary introductions to various courts.

This was possible because the family was able to travel for extended tours and made it a priority to do so.

That the 8-year-old Mozart could compose a symphony was possible because his father was able to transcribe what the child played.   

Shakespeare

Will Shakespeare wrote at least 38 plays and 154 sonnets, many of which have set the standard for excellence in literature. He also penned several narrative poems that achieved great popularity during his life (Venus and Adonis was reprinted 15 times before 1640; The Rape of Lucrece enjoyed eight reprints in the same period). His works have been translated into every major language and quite a few not-so-major languages—more than 100 in all, including Esperanto and Interlingua.  Four-hundred years after his death, his plays live on.  

Much has been made of Shakespeare’s lack of a university education (Marlowe, for example, studied at Cambridge) to discredit his authorship, but class and status—like the variable spelling of his day—were both more and less fluid than they are now, and differently assessed. By any measure of the time, Shakespeare’s family was comfortable. His father was a landowner and a glover with his own shop, a respected citizen who enjoyed a string of appointments to various offices in Stratford, including High Bailiff—or mayor, in modern-speak. His mother’s family was even more illustrious, prominent citizens of Warwickshire dating back before the Norman Conquest. John Arden had served in the court of King Henry VII, and the Ardens had connections to the Stanleys, a family with some claims to the throne. It was in Ferdinando Stanley’s theatrical troupe, Lord Strange’s Men, that Will Shakespeare made his debut on the London stage.

Even without an Oxbridge degree, Shakespeare’s education at the Stratford grammar school would have introduced him to Latin and its renowned authors: Seneca, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. His plays and the sources he used for them display a thorough familiarity with these writers. Perhaps most significantly, he grew up within easy distance of Coventry where he saw the popular mystery and morality plays that traveled the country. That his imagination was sparked by these theatrical productions is clear in his own use of language, themes, and characters.

But, what if Shakespeare had been born a girl in a time when only daughters of noble birth enjoyed an education, and then only under the direction of a tutor in the “safety” of home? What if he’d been the son of a poor laborer instead of a middle-class official, and thus apprenticed as a child to a tanner or feltmaker? Perhaps most significant of all, what if he’d lived too far from a major town to witness the traveling mystery plays, or had no adult to take him, or no free time to spend in leisure?  

Newton

Isaac Newton was born just months after Galileo died, the man whose ideas about motion Newton would expand on to form the foundation of modern physics. Newton also laid the groundwork for modern physical optics with his discovery that white light is composed of seven visible colors. Hoping to improve the refractive telescopes of his day, Newton developed a reflecting telescope that impressed the hell out of the Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of sciences) and made possible much larger telescopes without chromatic aberration. There’s a lot more one can attribute to Newton, but suffice it to note that his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687) remains one of the most important works in the history of modern science.  

Newton’s early life is far sketchier than Mozart’s or Shakespeare’s. His father, a prosperous but uneducated farmer, died three months before his birth, and his mother remarried two years later, leaving her young son with his grandmother while she moved to another village to raise a new family. For almost a decade, until the death of her second husband, Newton’s mother had little to do with him. His anger over her abandonment is succinctly noted in a list of his sins the young Newton recorded: Threatening my [step]father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.

When his stepfather died, the 10-year-old Newton found himself living with his mother and half-siblings, but the reunion was brief. He was sent to lodge with a pharmacist and his family in Grantham, five miles down the road, where he was enrolled in a grammar school. Having shipped him off, his mother soon recalled him to home to manage her estate, a job Newton hated and had no talent for. It had none of the interest or excitement of the Grantham pharmacist’s chemical library and laboratory where Newton had built mechanical devices to entertain the family’s children.

Whether or not Newton’s clumsy managing of the estate was a brilliant strategy of sabotage, an uncle persuaded his mother that Newton should return to school and prepare for university. When he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, his mother refused to pay, so Newton took a gig as a servant to cover his tuition. There, he studied Aristotle and Descartes before enrolling for a master’s degree.

When an outbreak of plague interrupted his studies, he continued to pursue his own ideas in math, physics, optics, and astronomy, developing what would become his three laws of motion. (The story that a falling apple suggested the idea of gravity to him appears to be true.)

When the university reopened, Newton quickly finished his master’s degree. Impressed by his student’s amazing abilities, his mathematics professor recommended Newton replace him when he took another job, a post Newton served in for a quarter century.

Isaac Newton enjoyed access to an excellent education because he had an uncle who intervened to get him back in school, and because it was possible to pay for that education by working part-time as a servant. Without that possibility, without that uncle and that education, Newton might have tossed aside the apple that bonked him on the head, never giving it a second thought. 

Access, as it turns out, is everything.

The Accidents of Life

The accidents of life—what we cannot control—can be divided into two camps: the advantageous and the not-so-advantageous. Some of these “accidents” are straightforward. Being born healthy, for instance. Or the relative position/class of one’s family. One doesn’t have to be born into great wealth to pursue one’s talents—Shakespeare’s family was solidly middle class with rising aspirations, as was Newton’s—but a certain financial and social stability offer advantages to developing children.

Though money was more of an issue for Mozart’s family, what the family lacked in bankable assets was made up for by Leopold Mozart’s connections to royal courts throughout Europe—connections he pressed to the max to launch his son. Connections that paid off because the young Mozart’s talent quickly gained wide fame, and the money the boy earned on the road helped sustain the entire family.

More variable, but equally if not more powerful in determining one’s odds in life, are where and when one is born. What are the prevailing attitudes about gender, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack of it), and education at the time of and in the place of one’s birth? What is the political situation—stability and general prosperity or social mayhem and war?

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—they were all men. In the Europe of their birth, women did not have access to opportunities that would help them discover/develop their true talents.

Mozart’s sister, Marianna, the one at whose knee Mozart gleaned his first understandings of music, was a talented child. She received the same musical and academic education as her brother in childhood, and played for royalty on that first European tour. She often enjoyed top billing. So, what happened?

According to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, “from 1769 onwards, Marianna was no longer permitted to show her artistic talent on travels with her brother, as she had reached a marriageable age.” (She was fifteen.) While her brother continued touring the world, composing new works and meeting the great musicians of the day, Marianna stayed home, married the man of her father’s choice, and had children.

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—they were all native-born and white. In the Europe of their birth, people of color largely existed at the margins of society. And though some black men practiced trades or were musicians at court in 16^th century England, Queen Elizabeth I issued proclamations complaining of their numbers, writing in 1596 to the lord mayors of the larger cities that there were “of late divers blackmoores brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here to manie…” She ordered that such people “should be sente forth of the land.”

Ethnicity mattered, too. Animosity toward immigrants didn’t begin with TheRUMP.

“Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth … What would you think to be thus used? This is the strangers’ case, and this your mountainish inhumanity.”

With these words (from The Book of Sir Thomas More), Shakespeare spoke out against the hostility toward the French and Dutch Calvinist refugees who immigrated to England in the late 16^th century to escape religious persecution from Catholic home governments. Denounced by English locals as “aliens” and “strangers”, these newcomers were suspected of immigrating to steal their jobs.

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—they were all educated. Though neither John Shakespeare nor the senior Isaac Newton could write their names, their sons grew up in an England which was becoming keenly interested in educating its young (the boys, anyway) to compete in a world of increasing technical invention and colonial bent. Without education for the middle classes, Hamlet would never have been written. Newton could not have conceived his three laws of motion.

Where we are born, when we are born, and the prevailing attitudes about the worth of people “like us” matter. They determine whether or not we have access. Whether or not we have a shot at developing our natural talents, the opportunity to fulfill our potential.

Or whether we are doomed to remain an unopened gift.

Nothing Happens in a Vacuum: Human Intervention   

Many of us, perhaps most of us, would not achieve the brilliance of a Mozart or Shakespeare or Newton whatever our family circumstances, education, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or favorite ice cream flavor. But then again, who knows? So much of the world’s population has never had the opportunity to even try. Despite Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that “stuff  happens,” it doesn’t. At least not when it comes to encouraging human potential. It’s up to us to engineer access for all children in the world. Those of us who enjoy access must extend it to others. We must oppose laws/actions/candidates that deny or repeal access to anyone.

But what does that mean exactly? What is it all children need to explore their potential? A short list of the essentials includes:

1) Healthcare. This means not only access to doctors, hospitals, and medicine, but also clean water, nourishing food, and healthy living conditions both in the home and in the larger environment. I’m putting this up top because without good health, it’s difficult to survive let alone thrive.     

2) Education.  Globally, more than half of all school-age children cannot read, write, or do simple mathematics. Those children—617 million in all—face a daunting future. Many, if not most, doors will be closed to them. What is open to them is often unsavory in the extreme, both dangerous and deadly: Sex-trafficking. Slave labor in factories, mines, and workshops. Unpaid servitude in the private homes of the rich. Cannon fodder in this war or that. Many of these children are kidnapped. Some are sold by their parents for the price of a couple of movie tickets and a bucket of popcorn. If this sounds atrocious, it is, but desperate people do desperate things

Almost 50 years ago, the UNCF, (United Negro College Fund) rolled out one of the most famous slogans of any campaign: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” It is as true today as it was then. To prevent that terrible waste, all children must have access to high-quality education from pre-K through university or trade school as they choose. To quote today’s UNCF home page: “We can’t simply believe in equality in education. We have to create it.”

3) Materials. You do not become a Mozart without access to instruments. You can’t be a Van Gogh if paints and brushes aren’t available. The scientists and inventors of tomorrow need access to tools, computers, equipment. And everyone—not just the Shakespeares—needs books. On the shelves at home or from a well-stocked library or downloaded onto a digital device. Through books, a world of knowledge literally comes into a child’s grasp.   

4) Enriching Experiences. The more we see of the world, the richer our points of reference become, the more profound our insights. Travel, music festivals, art galleries, museums, exposure to other cultures, different views of the human experience—they feed our imagination, expand our sense of what’s possible, increase our understanding of the world as it is, and as it could be.

5) A Safe Environment. I hesitated to add this to the list, as the conflicts—wars and genocide—of other countries are often outside our control unless our government is directly aiding and abetting the violence (as the U.S. is now doing in Turkey and Yemen). But we can try. I’m from a generation that stopped the war in Vietnam. We can try.     

This post grew out of a question I’ve been asking myself for some years now: What about all the Mozarts in the world who will never see a piano?

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—none of them were born rich or of the ruling class, but they had the access they needed in their times, in their societies to explore, develop, achieve.        

We must provide that access to all children. We must nurture the scientists and teachers and doctors and artists and farmers and bridge builders of tomorrow. They are the architects of our future. The child who will find a cure for diabetes or Alzheimer’s. The child who will discover a method to regenerate Australia’s Great Barrier Reef , thus decreasing the risk of widespread ecological collapse. The child who will write the books/paint the pictures/compose the songs that reach deep into our frightened, hopeful hearts to reveal what we’re so scared of exposing—that we are all human and therefore terribly vulnerable.

These children. That child. She/he/they could save us all.

Access. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

NOTE: Quick update on human rights activist Scott Warren, who I wrote about in last month’s post “The Gift of Hope.” On November 21, an Arizona jury found Warren not guilty on all counts of “harboring undocumented migrants” levied against him by federal prosecutors after the geography teacher provided food, water, and shelter to two men traveling through the desert in 2018. Click here for details of the story. Happy holidays, Scott, and to all people of conscience and good will.