It’s so hard for Americans not to grasp for a silver lining during a tragedy. So engrained in us are the narratives of happy endings and second chances that even a global pandemic can’t dampen our zeal.
If anything, the human and economic toll of the coronavirus has heightened our desire for redemption. Things are bad, but at least the air is clean and there’s no more traffic. And is it true that the city has finally housed the homeless?
When it’s all over, some have hoped, Americans will see how essential it is to have socialized medicine. With any luck, maybe this virus will kill globalization. Your ideological tilt generally predetermines the brave new world you desperately hope this pandemic will bring.
My personal hope is that the coronavirus will finally destroy the distorted vision of reality that Americans like to call optimism.
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Three years after 9/11 shook the country, an independent commission concluded that the attacks had exploited four types of governmental failures, the most important of which was “one of imagination.” The strikes did not come out of nowhere. They were the result of a threat that could—and likely should—have been foreseen. America’s leaders underestimated the gravity of the threat.
In the end, the same will likely be said about America’s slow reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. It was not unforeseen. Last September, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, a group co-convened by the World Bank Group and the World Health Organization, warned that there “is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people and wiping out nearly 5% of the world’s economy.”
Presumably the report, which was funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, was sent to all sorts of officials at all levels of American government—federal, state, and local. I imagine that scores and scores of public servants in Washington, D.C., state capitals, as well as big cities across the nation glanced at it and said, “But what are the chances?”
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In his 1913 essay, “Tragic Sense of Life,” Spanish existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote that “It is not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it.” What he meant was that it is just as important to learn emotionally from a tragedy than it is to overcome it.
He urged us to recall the mythical tragedy of Adam and Eve, who became subject to disease—and death—after tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the biblical story, progress—whose tools help humankind to overcome illness—springs from original sin. Unamuno wondered if progress itself isn’t also a sickness.
After all, science doesn’t so much expel harmful germs and viruses from the world as it teaches us to accommodate our bodies to them through vaccination. That means that the modern notion of healthiness is more an artificial than a natural reality.
To Unamuno, suffering–physically or spiritually–is a prerequisite to love. It is only through the knowledge of suffering that we attain wisdom and discover the meaning and value of life.
“A prayer for mercy sung by a multitude tormented by destiny,” he wrote, “is equal to any philosophy.”
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San Francisco was the first big city in the U.S. to issue a shelter-in-place order to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. It preceded L.A.’s—and indeed California’s—by five days. It was 7 days earlier than New York’s.
I can’t help but think that Mayor London Breed’s quick action was informed by her knowledge of her city’s tragic history. Every April 18th at 5:12 a.m., city officials gather around Lotta’s Fountain at the corner of Market, Geary, and Kearny streets to remember the massive earthquake that struck the city in 1906 and left more than 3,000 dead.
Last’s year’s ceremony was Breed’s first as mayor. She arrived decked out in Victorian-era clothing. In her remarks, she spoke of how the earthquake and the fires it unleashed taught San Franciscans about resilience. They learned how to bounce back and rebuild. She could have also said that they also learned to remember. Tragedy is part of the city’s lore. And then, of course, there was another epidemic—HIV/AIDS–that killed more than 20,000 San Franciscans between 1981 and 2015.
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Plenty of ink has been spilled on the advantages—particularly the material ones—of America’s forward-thinking orientation. But rarely do we explore the downside of our aspirational culture. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., once called optimism America’s “national attitude.” But doesn’t it stand to reason that the land of glorious rebirths is also home to just as many painful deaths?
In some instances, America is good at remembering the dead, particularly when it involves revenge and racism. Remember the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, September 11th. Never forget. Vengeance is another national attitude.
Yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic “is going to be imprinted on the personality of our nation for a very long time.” Trauma will follow pain and loss.
How we choose to remember the dead this time could determine how prepared we are for the next pandemic. Remembering tragedy—absorbing it into our national story–could very well save lives in the future. But then again, I’m desperately searching for a silver lining.
