Life or Death

We are a death-denying society.

We think, “Death is bad, life is good.” 

Moses gets the word from Yahweh. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) fresco, Sistine Chapel. Public Domain.

Even God says: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20). 

The Lord of Hosts tells us to choose life over death; who are we to argue?

So we try to live, as high on the hog as we can, and we do everything possible to avoid death. Even some impossible things, to avoid death, we attempt. We try to shut death out of our houses, out of our schools, out of our clinics, out of our hospitals, out of our emergency rooms. We try to shut death out of our mortuaries and cemeteries, preferring a quick cremation, followed by a “memorial” service that focuses on reliving our happy memories of the—uh, that is, you know, dear old Uncle Jack, bless his soul.

The Grim Reaper waits. Image by doom156, licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Most effectively, we shut death out of our consciousness. The Grim Reaper is barred from the threshold of our thoughts. We live in uneasy assurance that there is no such thing as death. Death is taboo.

Yet, AS IF BY SOME MIRACLE, people keep dying. 

A Gentleman in a Dustcoat Trying

They die a few at a time, here or there. They die of heart ailments and strokes; they die of cancer; they die of accidents; they die of murder; they die of suicide. Sometimes they die unaccountably: I once read about a man who jumped off a four-foot-high platform at a county fair, and at the time his feet hit the ground he was dead. The coroner could only scratch his head. 

Whatever the cause, by age 120 or so, we achieve one hundred percent mortality.

COVID-19. Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, Center for Disease Control. Public Domain.

Once in a long while there comes a great epidemic, or a pandemic. You might say the very definition of such an event is that it taxes our resources as a whole society, not just as an individual or a family or a town. 

Now we have COVID-19. We have mobilized against this pandemic at a scale, in a timeframe, and in specific ways by which no disease in human history has been resisted. 

In America—I can’t speak for other societies, but yes, in America—we have mobilized chiefly, it seems, to deny death its victims. 

Through a panoply of means, some new and some time-tested, we fight this dread disease. The dread thing about this disease is its death toll.

 You don’t hear people saying, “I sure hope I don’t catch the COVID, it’s a pretty rough thing to go through.” 

Those who recover occupy none of our attention, regardless how harrowing their escape. All the emphasis is on preventing death. 

If it were just one among the crowd of viruses that constantly assail us, claiming a few lives here and there, nobody would make a big deal about it. But COVID-19, because of its novelty (as in “novel coronavirus”), is statistically forecast to sweep through the world, taking millions of lives from populations that start with zero immunity to it. 

At this writing it has claimed about 42,000 Americans, but who knows what the coming months may bring?

According to our trusted experts—and I do trust their expertise—our most effective weapon against the onslaught has been “social distancing.” We seem to have dramatically reduced the death toll by staying away from one another—a method that has dealt a dire blow to our national economy. But that method has worked. 

All our physical distancing and other measures have slowed the progress of the disease, not stopped it. We have deflected the incidence of death from COVID-19; we have not banished death altogether. Remember the early days, when our experts first recommended these measures. The slogan was, “Flatten the curve.” There was no thought of eliminating the disease altogether.

The point of all our efforts was simply to reduce the caseload to what our hospitals and medical professionals could handle.

It has always been in the cards that a lot of people were going to die from this disease. 

So What?

There is a reason, Dear Reader, that I belabor this obvious point. 

Now that we have blunted the coronavirus attack, our leaders work on means to bring back the economy. This is no trivial concern. It will take a complex strategy, with a well-calibrated balance between, on the one hand, fostering more freedom of movement for productive endeavors; and, on the other, protecting the most vulnerable from exposure to a highly contagious disease organism.

It is not just the president who wants to get the economy working again. Responsible politicians of both parties and executives of businesses large and small share this urgency. They bear a heavy responsibility to restore the systems and mechanisms that provide us all with food, clothing, shelter, transportation, entertainment, education, health care, social satisfaction, and all the other things we require—including paychecks—before additional damage is added to what those systems have already sustained. 

DeForest Kelley. Public Domain.

It would be foolhardy simply to drop all the new practices we have adopted and go on a binge of “pre-pandemic normalcy.” If anyone seriously proposes this, they ought to think more thoroughly.

And if anyone seriously thinks that loosening any of the present restrictions is irresponsible, they also ought to think more thoroughly. 

How often have we heard it said that no cost is too great to save a single human life?  Quite often, to my recollection. Remember, in our society, death is taboo. Consider the refrain oft-voiced by the late actor DeForest Kelley, playing Doctor McCoy on the original Star Trek series: 

“Dammit, Jim, there are lives at stake!”

Yes, Bones, there are. 

There are always lives at stake. No matter what we do, or what we don’t do, lives are at stake. People will live this way, or that way; people will die this way, or that way.

Seldom are we given a simple choice between life and death. Commonly, we make hundreds of microchoices—to walk or drive, to eat a fish or a steak, to floss or not to floss, to wash our hands or leave them unwashed—each decision tending either to promote life or to hasten death, yet no single decision dispositive. 

Right now, a particular subset of microchoices is forced on us by the disease— commended to us as mandatory or at least highly beneficial. In weeks to come, those choices, one by one, will become antiquated and irrelevant. 

Life will go on. In the midst of it, people will go on dying.

Not you, any time soon, Dear Reader, I pray.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

To Fathom, or Not to Fathom?

4 April 2020, Day 25 of the Global Pandemic (According to WHO—or is it WHOM?):

My bandanna slips, baring my nostrils to the world. 

The knot behind my head is too loose; but it feels indecent, somehow, to untie and re-tie in public. So I shove the cloth up over my nose, clamp it there under my bifocals, snag a cart, and head into Hyvee. 

Say there, Pardners, hands in the air! And give us all your yeast and toilet paper. (And lupines, don’t forget lupines.)

Just a quick in-and-out, to pick up a few essentials. I push the cart into the liquor department, heading for the red wines. OOPS! Blue arrows have been taped on the floor, making each aisle a one-way street. Of course. This is so shoppers won’t accidentally come within six feet of each other. 

In nautical terms, they want us to be unfathomable.

A very sensible precaution, in my view. I push my cart down the wrong aisle, all the way  to the back of the store, then swing around an end-cap, and voilà! Red wine. 

Is it the same instinct that impels so many fellow citizens to stock up on toilet paper, which has reduced us to drinking cheap wine? I  pick up a couple of ten-dollar red blends for those special, romantic dinners (take-out beef bourguignon in a plastic tray, with baguette, from La Brioche) and a gallon jug of burgundy for all other occasions. With bottles rattling in my cart, I follow the blue arrows up the aisle to exit the liquor department. OOOPS! A man stands there, buying beer at the liquor department register. He must not need any dry groceries. 

No Fathoming Allowed

A big, round sticker on the floor says, “MAINTAIN 6-FT DISTANCE.” There is not room to go around the man, whose large purchase may take some time to ring up. I reverse course, go the wrong way down the red wine aisle, wrap two aisles over to the next outbound lane, and then full steam ahead. 

But, soft! What light down yonder brandy aisle breaks? It is a twenty-something woman, idling, eenymeenying between Korbel and Christian Brothers. Will it be this one, or that? She picks up a bottle, shifts her weight from one hip to the other, puts it back. Maybe . . . another brand entirely?

Back down the aisle the wrong way again, two more aisles over, and I gallop out of the liquor department to freedom. It’s a good thing liquor stores in this state have plenty of aisles.

I head for the main part of the supermarket. OOOOPS! My bandanna slips down again. Why is this so tough? If a moron like Liberty Valance could do this, certainly I can get the hang of it. I shove the gaudy rag back over my nose and clamp it even firmer with my glasses. For good measure, I twist the knot in back once and tuck it under itself. That’ll do it, I’m almost sure.

Now for the groceries. This store has a complex floor layout; even with its extravagant overhead signs, I often struggle to find what I am seeking. Today, that struggle is squared, or maybe cubed, by the blue arrows on the floor. Two or three times I find myself going the wrong way. It’s hard to remember not to just turn up, or down, the aisle where you suspect your item may have been hidden.

The Precious Fathom

I console myself by noting that half of the many shoppers seem to be entirely unaware of the blue arrows. Or maybe they just don’t care. Half of the shoppers, like me, conscientiously struggle to maintain that precious fathom of clearance. 

When you are in an aisle, you don’t want to take much time picking out your item. Other people are piling up behind you. Nobody wants to be responsible for squeezing past someone else and maybe exhaling at point-blank range. So you move fast, to prevent pile-ups.

I loop back around and skim the bakery needs aisle again, looking for yeast. It seems there is none to be had. Yeast is one of those things, like toilet paper, that new-minted survivalists feel compelled to hoard. 

OOOOOPS! My face covering slips again. Even the dim-witted Billy the Kid passed Bandanna 101 in Outlaw School. Why can’t I make it work? Quite a few people wear a scarf, handkerchief, or bandanna over nose and mouth. None of their face coverings fall down. What’s the matter with me? 

A few people wear manufactured-looking masks. They’d better not be hogging those special N-95s that all the medical people need. Are these people too good to wrap a sock or muffler around their head, like the rest of us? 

Quite a few people still wear no face covering at all. Just a day or two ago, that was me; but now I’m hip. Not that my bandanna will protect me from the virus; it’s meant to keep me from giving other people the virus. Not that I have the virus. How could I? I hardly go anywhere. But the good doctors on TV are now saying we should wear them. I’m not really infectious, but one should set a good example for others.

Grocery Workers: Essential, Fathomless

It may be casually noted that no store employees wear face coverings of any kind. Also, they frequently violate the Six-Foot Rule. That’s because they’re trying, desperately, to get the shelves stocked. A valiant young man arrives with a whole cartload of eggs to put in the case just as I take the last dozen. He’s doing his best, but he has lost sight of Social Distancing. Well, of course, these folks are official store employees. So I guess that’s all right, then.

Okay, no yeast. No Fudgsicles either, but as I recall, Hyvee always had a hard time keeping those in stock, even back in Pre-Pandemic Days. I’ve got most of the other stuff, including a 31.5-pound bag of Purina for Lacey and Midnight. 

At this juncture I feel compelled to note, just for the record, Dear Reader, that if one really strictly followed the blue arrows on the floor, one would be forever enmeshed in a sort of medieval labyrinth—stuck forever, like Charlie on the MTA—with no way to traverse to the cash registers. 

Taking my heart in my hands, I jump the queue—or, at least, violate the blue arrows—skirting around the whole produce section, steering a wide berth from any other shoppers, and streaking into the clearly-marked lateral blue-arrow lane near the check-out aisles. 

Here, there is more surrealism at which to marvel. A sign says: “DO NOT PUT YOUR ITEMS ON THE CONVEYOR. WE SANITIZE BETWEEN CUSTOMERS.” Sure enough, after the preceding customer clears the lane at least two fathoms ahead of me, the young man at the register runs the conveyor clear around twice, swabbing it down with something he squirts out of a spray bottle. At last it is deemed sanitary enough, and he says, “Go ahead.” 

Nothing to Sneeze At

I plunk my items down on the conveyor, leaving my huge bag of dog food in the cart. The young man tries to scan the dog food with his hand-held scanner as usual, but OOOOOOPS! He can’t cantilever it out over the conveyor far enough. Its cord is hung up with a bunch of other cords. That’s because the bracket that holds the hand scanner is cramped by the newly-installed plexiglass shield that is meant to protect me and the checker-outer— from each other, presumably.

Oh, what a relief! I may now sneeze to my heart’s content. There’s a sheet of plexiglass to protect the essential grocery worker. I have half a mind to give it a good blast—but, alas! no sneeze in me yearns to break forth. Better luck next time.

Forty-five minutes after stopping for a quick in-and-out, I trundle my cart out of the store and OOOOOOOPS! my bandanna slips again. But no matter, I’m in the open air. 

Where are Jesse and Frank James, when a guy needs a lesson in kerchief-tying?

#

Something tells me we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re not even in Wisconsin anymore.

Be of good cheer, Dear Reader. Even this cannot last forever.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)