April 17, 2020
Dear Interested Readers,
It’s Getting Old Already, Let’s Find Ways To Persist
I’m giving up the idea of offering analysis about President Trump’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is some debate about whether Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, or some other person of wisdom first said:
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
There is no point in making the argument that this president has and continues to fail us. He does it every time he steps in front of a camera. He has done it so many times that there seems to be no real negative consequence for him. There are no words that I could say or write that would convince a person who still supports him of his incompetence if he has not convinced them himself by what he says that he is a liability that equally threatens all of us.
My last post was about the big challenge of the moment which is: How do we safely move from confinement to business as unusual without sliding back into even greater losses? My only new offering on that subject comes from the European Union which shares the same problem and has published a thoughtful analysis that I hope someone in the Trump administration is reviewing although it is basically similar to the suggestions that were reviewed in Tuesday’s post. The Europeans echo the suggestions of our experts. They talk about three criteria:
- Epidemiological criteria showing that the spread of the disease has significantly decreased and stabilised for a sustained period of time. This can, for example, be indicated by a sustained reduction in the number of new infections, hospitalisations and patients in intensive care.
- Sufficient health system capacity, in terms of, for instance, occupancy rate for Intensive Care Units, adequate number of hospital beds, access to pharmaceutical products required in intensive care units, the reconstitution of stocks of equipment, access to care in particular for vulnerable groups, the availability of primary care structures as well as sufficient staff with appropriate skills to care for patients discharged from hospitals or maintained at home and to engage in measures to lift confinement (testing for example). This criterion is essential as it indicates that the different national health care systems can cope with future increases in cases after lifting of the measures. At the same time, hospitals are increasingly likely to face a backlog of elective interventions that had been temporarily postponed during the pandemic’s peak so Member States’ health systems should have recovered sufficient capacity in general, and not only related to the management of COVID-19.
- Appropriate monitoring capacity, including large-scale testing capacity to detect and monitor the spread of the virus combined with contact tracing and possibilities to isolate people in case of reappearance and further spread of infections. Antibody detection capacities, when confirmed specifically for COVID-19, will provide complementary data on the share of the population that has successfully overcome the disease and eventually measure the acquired immunity.
If those three criteria are in place, then a careful release of constraint is plausible. Even though we are talking about getting back to business in the next month, we will not adequately meet any of the criteria by that time.
Given my frustration with the lack of patience in our leadership which is now being reflected through public demonstrations of his “base” and others who are more terrified about the possibility of personal economic loss associated with rising unemployment and the loss of businesses rather than the loss of human life, I am more interested in talking about the heroism that we are witnessing in this moment from care providers. I wonder about how we are coping with the confinement. I wonder about what we will learn from the analysis of our experience, and how we will apply that information in the aftermath of COVID-19.
I was delighted to discover that the Kaiser Family Foundation has begun to publish the stories of fallen healthcare heros in the fight against COVID-19. You might want to review the stories that they have documented so far. Just click here, and then click on the faces at the bottom of the post. If you want to follow the series, sign up for the continuing reports. We owe these caregivers the respect of hearing the stories of their sacrifice. Reviewing their heroism is a better use of time than listening to the president’s rants in his “news conferences” that are constructed to protect him from any responsibility for anything that is not praise worthy.
As I was thinking about my frustration with reporting the “facts of failure” associated with the news of COVID-19 and the need for a positive focus because we still have such a long road ahead, it occurred to me that one great source of strength is art. All art is a balm for our bruised souls. Television has recently been renewed as a positive experience by the effort of various artists to use their talents as a way of lifting everyone’s spirits. I see other efforts to tend to our souls. My minister is not only heavily involved in the effort to offer daily meditations that remind us of our spiritual connections, but he is also leading the effort to make the financial resources and the the facilities of the church open to the benefit of anyone who might need them. Through his efforts and leadership we have obtained a license from the state to develop and sponsor a childcare support for the children of medical professionals and first responders.
As I was pondering the many ways that we might look for the strength and purpose by pausing to reflect on art and the using that inspiration to generate the energy to engage in addressing the needs of others, I reminded myself of the many times my song writing son’s weekly contribution has given me a lift. Occasionally, I have passed along one of his songs to you when it spoke to me. One joy that has come attached to the inconvenience and stress of the pandemic is that my son and his wife escaped Brooklyn and have been living in our guest house for the last month. We have been walking a few times a week in between his office meetings on Zoom. During our walk early on Wednesdhasay afternoon, I asked him if he could help me come up with a few of his tunes that spoke to this moment. He agreed to try. Yesterday morning I got a quick note from him as an email even though he was working from our guest house about thirty yards up our driveway.
For those of you who may not know the story, my youngest son had his first band in junior high school. He was always the organizer, the singer, and the songwriter. Eventually, he progressed from being a bassist to having the skills of a “multi instrumentalist.” His college band developed some momentum, and after graduation from Skidmore College they moved together to Philadelphia where the grandmother of one of the guitar players had left an empty house when she moved to a nursing home. The band was named Lightning Bug. They had T shirts and CDs that they sold when they played a venue. They were having great success that had made them the subject of some reviews in local arts newspapers. They got enough recognition to get a little airplay on a local radio station, but then it all came to an end when my son developed a polyp on his vocal cords just as they qualified for the finals in a “battle of the bands” sponsored by a Philadelphia radio station.
His recovery required surgery and a lot of vocal rest and rehab. In the interim all of the band members moved on. Almost ten years ago, after he recovered, rather than starting a new band, he challenged himself to put a new song on the Internet every Monday. Most of the time it has been a one man band. He calls it Mount Everest Weekly. He plays all of the instruments and sings all the parts except when he has a guest artist. He does all of the recording and editing. That began 491 Mondays, almost ten years of Mondays, ago. His music has evolved over the years as life has moved on and he has had to budget his creative time with grad school and with work. After graduating with a master’s degree in communications with many honors from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at NYU, he now works as a manager of digital marketing for a large national non profit, Pro Scholas, that trains disadvantaged youth for careers in IT. If you clicked on the link, you have seen his work. Click on New York at the top of the site to see all the markets that they serve. Music is now his avocation, but he still uses his art to say a lot about life. His response to my request was:
Hi Dad,
I actually found this pretty challenging. Many of my songs seem to paint the experience of isolation as a choice that people make, which means that hope comes from making a change. This moment doesn’t really afford us that option. Trying to thread the needle through those themes, these are the songs that I found. I’m not sure that any one of them really speaks to the Covid moment, but I think each has a kernel that might.
http://www.mounteverestweekly.com/songs/week-21-do-the-best-you-can
http://www.mounteverestweekly.com/songs/week-38-wouldnt-you-saywouldnt-you-know
http://www.mounteverestweekly.com/songs/week-62-is-this-the-shape-of-things-to-come
http://www.mounteverestweekly.com/songs/week-148-nothing-ever-goes-to-plan
http://www.mounteverestweekly.com/songs/week-308-moonshot
Jesse
If you visit the website, you will see that each song comes packaged with a short essay and a picture. In the essay with the first song, “Do The Best You Can” is a good place to start. It is a song about “feeling hopeful despite feeling hopeless.” I think we can relate to the feeling of “having no idea where you are or how you got there.” His words are:
I am very pleased to present a new song called “Do The Best You Can”. This is a song about feeling hopeful despite feeling hopeless. It is a song about having no idea where you are or how you got there. It is about trying to understand something really big, and conceding that merely trying to understand is going to have to be good enough. It is about wanting to reach out to another human being, but being a little bit afraid to do so. It is about the desire to be understood. It is about staying the same even when you are trying to change. It is about trying to believe you are strong. It is about trying and trying and trying. It is about humans and love, and it’s probably a little bit about wondering what God is. It is mostly about being alive and how that is scary and wonderful. It is about doing the best you can!
You can read the lyrics while you listen to the song, but my favorite lines are the lead in. I have bolded some lines for emphasis:
Ever get the feeling
If you shut your eyes you’ll burst into flames?
And thinking of another way
You linger on what must stay the same
and then:
You’ve been a night machine
You’ve been a killer
Yeah you’ve been a mirage
You’ve lived to please
You’ve lived to find your meaning buried deep in a cause
The second song, “Wouldn’t You Say/Wouldn’t You Know” is about being surprised by the way things turn out. I think that most everybody has had that feeling many times over during the last few months. He sums it up with: The emotions range from resignation, to acceptance, and onward toward resolve. Perhaps this is a song for all of those who saw the stock market as evidence of our greatness.
This is a song about things not going exactly as you intended them to go. It is a pretty simple song, existing within just a few guitar overdubs, a couple of vocal dubs, and an exceedingly simple drum loop that I made in the span of about ten seconds. I have a penchant for doing things in a complicated way, but since the sentiment behind the song was so simple, it seemed natural to keep the instrumentation simple as well. The words describe the emotion that comes with having to make new plans when the ones that seemed so perfect suddenly just don’t work. The emotions range from resignation, to acceptance, and onward toward resolve. It is basically saying “better luck next time!”
It begins:
Wouldn’t you say that sometimes you can’t really know
How things turn away, catch you blind with all of your hopes
And you just can’t get your way if you don’t really try
And wouldn’t you know
Things look great
Then they don’t
And wouldn’t you say that you’re here by a choice of your own?
The next song expresses a thought that keeps rolling around in my mind, “Is This The Shape Of Things To Come?” Jesse’s essay focuses on what we can’t know, but what troubles us. It is not hard to updated the idea to these times:
This week’s song was written in anticipation of an unknown future. The words are a play on the old concept that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Is the shape of things to come the same as the shape of things as they are now? Do people change? Do fortunes change? Does the country change, or are we merely playing out roles in a repeating history on a loop? Can anything or anybody ever change if we are too cynical to believe that it can? I like this song. It feels a little off, but in a way that is appealing to me. I also like the weird little guy in this week’s artwork, although I find him unsettling. He’s like a creepy little cartoon hipster made of blood. I hope he isn’t the shape of things to come…
Is this the shape of things to come?
Is this the ground we walk upon?
Is this the way we live and die and carry on?
Is this the day we hoped would come?
Change what you would. What’s the use?
and further on:
And who would have thought
That the shape of things to come
Would just reveal the things that never change
“Nothing Ever Goes To Plan” is not about the latest strategic plan of your practice or hospital or what the president was telling us in February. When Jesse wrote it he said:
Nothing ever goes to plan. This is about as true as it gets. So since I’m ever in pursuit of truth, I wrote a song about it. We spend so much time planning our lives. We bother with the minutia, we come up with contingencies, we sweat the details, we look to the future, and then we do something else. Almost always. Sometimes what you do resembles the plan quite a lot, but living is way more contingent upon improvising well then on executing precisely. This song is a pastiche of various experiences and plans that I’ve thrown away over the years. I won’t get into the particulars, because that isn’t really the point. The point is to distill the experience of living off book, to capture its kinetic reality. The end passage describes tossing and turning all night only to realize that whether you rest or not, the morning is coming. The world is indifferent to our plan. It has its own, and it is going to trump ours. The morning isn’t meant to be seen as a looming villain, so much as an unavoidable reality. The steady march of time is really the only reliable variable in any of our plans. Pretty much everything else is up for grabs…
The best lines:
Nothing nothing nothing
Nothing ever really goes to plan
Nothing nothing nothing nothing
and further along:
And everyone I know is like
It’s a solitary song
‘Cause a different situation’s
Gonna carry you along
Losing sleep out in the desert
With the sand against your skin
And then high above the structure
The predicament you’re in
The last of the quintet is “Moonshot.” It’s about developing an attitude for a better future. It was written in October 2016, the month before Donald Trump was elected president. In retrospect he seems to have sensed that there was a cloud on our collective future. It’s a song of defiance, a statement of intent. There is a sense of vulnerability and potential loss.
Real life has to be a group effort. Last century the brightest minds joined together and put humans on the moon. Perhaps those ambitious doers stayed up there and started a moon colony that doesn’t want much to do with us earthlings anymore. Our ambitions must have been left behind up there on that rock, because all we seem to aspire towards these days is making increasingly distracting gadgets and hopefully not ending civilization in the immediate foreseeable future.
If this appraisal seems bleak, start a team and build something. It doesn’t have to be a rocket to the moon. This weekend my wife and I got together with our team — a family of like minded philosopher queens and kings — and we built a rocket straight to our hearts. If our era is to be remembered as the end of cooperation as we know it, I refuse to be accused of going it alone.
Scream to the night sky
Like you’re all alone
Look around to see
A city block
Pray to your idol
That you crack the core
Pray to your lover
That the door’s unlocked
If there is no message for you in these words, I can understand. Each of us must discover our own sources of inspiration. We are on personal searches for meaning, but in a time like this we must also find a way to stay together as we face a difficult future. We don’t need strict orthodoxy of thought, but we must find a way to align our objectives so that we can support one another for what will be a much longer and more difficult road than the president can comprehend. I wish it were not so. The best expectation is for a more tolerable “new normal’ built on a combination of science, empathy, mutual concern, that evolves as a new “fellow feeling” that is built on the understanding that we all lose when anyone is left behind. Art and nature emphasize what is human and spiritual. Science can protect us and enable us to use that fellow feeling to our collective benefit and allow us to move forward together toward a distant goal.
A lot of families are spending more time together than at any time in the past. When I think back over my years with my boys when they were young, I remember playing a little game called “Shoots and Ladders.” The objective, as usual, is to get to the finish line first. Sometimes you get the advantage of a “ladder” that vaults you toward victory. There is always the risk of rolling a number on the dice that sends you backward down a long shoot. Some of the shoots can carry you from near victory to almost starting over. It’s a bummer to land on a shoot. In real life some of our shoots are just bad luck, others are ones that we fall into through “unforced errors.” Now is the time to avoid unforced errors. I fear that as we become frustrated with social distancing, and as our even more impatient leader encourages voices that come from individuals who share his underdeveloped ability to delay gratification, we may make a collective unforced error. I think using art, music, and contemplation of the sacrifices of the heroes among us to give us the strength to tolerate our confinement until good reasoning says it is time to move forward will help us find the ladders, and avoid the shoots.
Inspiration At The Pond
Last week I wrote about exploring the nature trail on the Clark Pond reservation. Over the weekend I introduced my wife, daughter in law, and son to the trail. About the time this letter hits the Internet, I will be introducing my old colleague and frequent walking partner, Tom Congoran, to the trail. We will stretch the hike to four miles by adding some of Messer Pond which is a little larger and surrounded by homes. The header today was taken along one of several brooks that run through the woods into Clark Pond. In past weeks I have shown you the pond from the air in winter and early spring. Below is a view of the pond from the shoreline looking toward Mount Kearsarge. It looks just like it did 200, 300, or 500 years ago. Perhaps it hasn’t changed much since the glacier melted ten thousand years ago. There are no houses. No electric lines. There is no sense of time except for a cell tower on top of Mount Kearsarge which is hard to see in the picture below.
My son, the song writer, was inspired by the hike, and his inspiration was reflected in the new song that he posted last Monday. I really liked the notes that he posted with the song.
When I began writing the lyrics for this song, I wanted to start with some good things that have been happening around me these days. I had a feeling the words may angle toward bittersweet rather than purely positive, but I was okay with that. I just wanted to start someplace light. So I thought of the peace of walking in the woods. I recalled the spontaneity of Rebecca giving herself a haircut in the middle of the night. I paused for a moment on the feeling of togetherness during Passover and Easter dinners shared with Rebecca’s family (joining from afar) and my parents in the same week.
Sure enough, the world crept into the song, and it became important to sing about other things. Of course the world is in tough shape outside my walls and beyond these woods. Of course people are fighting to survive both illness and hardship right now. Of course humanity is lonesome out there, and I am no exception to that even as I have my wife and parents with me.
Ultimately I came to a chorus that pays honor to Rebecca, whose company is everything to me now. I don’t mean to be insensitive to those who are pushing through this experience by themselves, but I have to sing my own song. It is right that this comes back to her.
Remember, time is slow and the future is uncertain, but this won’t be forever. Love to you all.
Click here to listen to the song, “Quiet Seasons.” The song suggests to me that there is much to enjoy in the stress of the moment, and it is important to remember that in some way it will eventually end. For me the best lines are:
All this is bound to end
And what will we tell of it then?
Will we say we held a line
Once all these days are lost to time?
Once all the quiet seasons are through
What will I have to say to you?
What will be left to say to you?
Thinking about the walk to Clark Pond, I remembered Mary Oliver’s poem “The Pond.” Mary Oliver died recently. Oliver was a person with whom I felt great kinship. As the obituary at the end of the last link says:
Oliver got a lot of her ideas for poems during long walks
Her death prompted me to return to her poetry. I bought her book, “Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver” to augment the few small volumes of her poems and essays that I had on my shelf. Ruth Franklin who reviewed “Devotions” for the New Yorker described Oliver’s work:
Part of the key to Oliver’s appeal is her accessibility: she writes blank verse in a conversational style, with no typographical gimmicks. But an equal part is that she offers her readers a spiritual release that they might not have realized they were looking for. Oliver is an ecstatic poet in the vein of her idols, who include Shelley, Keats, and Whitman. She tends to use nature as a springboard to the sacred, which is the beating heart of her work.
“…nature as a springboard to the sacred, which is the beating heart of her work” resonates with me. I know what Franklin is trying to convey in her respect for Oliver’s use of nature as a guide to the spiritual, to what can sustain us.
“The Pond” is set in late summer, but that makes no difference to me. The words can be changed to “early spring” and nothing important changes except there are no lilies yet on the water, but they will come. The poem has much to say about what is available at a peaceful pond like Clark Pond in any season. Half of the hike is to the pond, and half of the hike is back from the pond. All of the hike is through woods that I know would speak to Mary Oliver as it has spoken to me and to my son. The end of “The Pond” reflects the way I feel as I walk back from the pond.
All my life I have been able to feel happiness,
except whatever was not happiness,
which I also remember.
Each of us wears a shadow.
But just now it is summer again
and I am watching the lilies bow to each other,
then slide on the wind and the tug of desire,
close, close to one another,
Soon now, I’ll turn and start for home.
And who knows, maybe I’ll be singing.
My son’s songs and Mary Oliver’s poems are good foils for my fears and concerns about COVID-19. I offer to you a walk in the woods with friends/family, good music, and poetry from someone with wisdom as support for these difficult days.
Be well! Practice social distancing. Wash your hands frequently. Don’t touch your face. Cover your cough. Stay home unless you are an essential provider. Follow the advice of our experts. Assist your neighbor when there is a need you can meet. Demand leadership that is thoughtful, truthful, capable, and inclusive. Let me hear from you often, and don’t let anything keep you from doing the good that you can do every day,
Gene
