Tactical Urbanism

It seems that the new world might benefit from tactical urbanism.

Don't you love that term?  So active and edgy.  Although I'm not sure it's a very enlightening descriptor.  But you decide - here are a couple of definitions:

...an approach to city building that uses temporary, affordable, and easily-implemented solutions, often starting small and piloting more permanent change.
Pedestrian Plazas. Parklets. Pop-up Bike Lanes... flexible and short-term projects to advance long-term goals related to street safety, public space, and more.

No doubt we all noticed that there were lots fewer cars on the road when we were shut down.  That allowed people who lived in neighborhoods to make adjustments to the roads and spaces in those neighborhoods, using, among other things, traffic cones, sidewalk chalk and homemade signs.  There are more people - especially children - at home, and we all need more space in order to maintain our distance.  So people in many cities are taking matters into their own hands, and changing traffic flows, adjusting lanes, and often closing off streets to vehicle traffic entirely, with our without their municipality's blessing.

At this point, there's no evidence to suggest that these changes will become permanent. "These guerrilla tactics are not meant to be long-term, but can help disbelievers imagine other possibilities and raise awareness of the debate. "  This is kind of important, because streets, highways, neighborhoods - cities in general - have not been built to serve the best interests of the majority of residents.  Or, to put it more accurately:  Cities are designed for cars, not people (Robert Moses, anyone?).

Many cities are doing their best to redesign their transportation systems - a difficult job, considering the solid, interconnected infrastructure that already exists.  Turns out that where essential workers tend to live is not well-served by efficient public transport, and the workers that the highways were built for are all working from home.  

So we can file this one in the "Will we forget all about this pressing need once things return to normal?" folder.  Of course, that will depend on the normal we return to.  But urban (and, to some extent, suburban) transport has been outmoded and unfair for a while, and if we ever get around to infrastructure week, this would be a great place to start.

10%

I'm hoping that this post becomes a place-marker, and doesn't devolve into a 1,000 word behemoth.  I want to say something simple and then say something more complex later, when there's more to say.

The point is this, and it's a point about the school thing (bet you didn't know that the school thing post wasn't long enough):  there are kids who depend on school for more than learning today's lesson.  For about 10% of public school students, school holds their lives together.  It may be the structure, the safety, the food, the socialization, the connection with unrelated adults who believe in them (the key to resiliency), but without school, their lives will fall apart in many ways.

If we don't fully open all schools, the damage will be incalculable.  But, of course, if we do fully open all schools...

I suspect that there are volumes to be written about this.  I'm keeping watch, and will report back.

Font Purgatory

It's obvious that I still don't have control of the fonts.  I have no idea what to do.  I often spend as much time screwing with the fonts as I do writing the post.

If anyone read this blog, maybe I could get some help.  Until then, all non-readers will have to put up with font purgatory.

Randy Newman and the Golden Horde

This is a long one. It's mostly Randy Newman's fault. It's also a depressing one, which is my fault. And yours. And everyone's.

I did eventually start watching “The Black Death” on Amazon. It's a Great Courses title which is really quite good, if you don't mind the 23 half-hour lecture format. I probably won't finish it because it's an Amazon teaser, slated to disappear on July 1.

Last night's episode, tracing the route that death took from Asia to Europe, told the story of Caffa (now called Feodosiya), a Crimean city on the Black Sea. 

In the mid 13^th century there were a lot of Genoan traders in Caffa, largely because the city was built near the mouth of the Don River (of “Quiet Flows the...” fame, for all you Nobel Prize for Literature fans). Just as an aside, there were a lot of Genoan traders everywhere in the 13^th and 14^th century. It's probably not a coincidence that, shortly thereafter, another Genoan ended up in the Americas.

Anyway, in 1343 a conflict broke out between the Genoans and the Mongol occupiers in Caffa. This conflict apparently began as a barfight. It escalated to a siege, by the Mongols (actually called the Golden Horde), who laid siege to the heavily fortified Genoan compound.

Suddenly, the plague breaks out in the Mongol army. A huge (but unknown) proportion of the army dies in a few days. It devastates them in short order, and they organize a retreat.

And here's the point of my story. Before leaving, the Mongols loaded thousands of the plague-wracked bodies of their comrades into their trebuchets and, in “the most spectacular incident of biological warfare ever,” flung them over the walls into the Genoan compound.

Thousands of corpses with bloody pustules raining down on a trading outpost. Thousands. Imagine that.

As you might have guessed, it is generally agreed that it was the Genoan population of Caffa, fleeing this horror, returning to European ports in the Mediterranean, who brought with them the Black Death and the destruction of up to half the population of Europe.

The point I want to draw out here is this: the Mongol soldiers loaded their friends and comrades' bodies – friends and comrades they had just watched die horribly – and, knowing that they themselves would probably die horribly in a day or so, flung those bodies at a bunch of foreigners so that they would die horribly too.

These were human beings, just like you and me. I'll leave it at that for now.

Next up is Randy Newman:

When Karl Marx was a boy, he took a hard look around

He saw people were starving all over the place while others were painting the town

The public spirited boy became a public spirited man

So he worked very hard and he read everything until he came up with a plan

There'll be no exploitation of the worker or his kin

No discrimination 'cause of the color of your skin

No more private property; it would not be allowed

No one could rise too high; no one could sink too low

Or go under completely like some we all know

If Marx were living today, he'd be rolling around in his grave

And if I had him here in my mansion on the hill

I'd tell him a story t'would give his old heart a chill

It's something that happened to me

I'd say, Karl I recently stumbled into a new family

With two little children in school where all little children should be

I went to the orientation; all the young mommies were there

Karl, you never have seen such a glorious sight:

As these beautiful women arrayed for the night

Just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and queens

And they'd come there with men much like me - froggish men, unpleasant to see

Were you to kiss one, Karl, nary a prince would there be

Oh Karl the world isn't fair - it isn't and never will be

They tried out your plan - it brought misery instead

If you'd seen how they worked it, You'd be glad you were dead

Just like I'm glad I'm living in the land of the free

Where the rich just get richer, and the poor you don't ever have to see

It would depress us, Karl, because we care

That the world still isn't fair

                                                   (c) 1999 - SKG Music, LLC 

Tongue firmly in cheek, Newman lays it out like it is: the world isn't fair, and the haves make sure that there are enough have-nots to keep their own larders full.  If you know a better articulation of this, you're free to substitute it.

So, to the point: the new world will be constructed by Mongols and Randy Newman. Which is to say, whatever it is that resulted in the decision to infect Cassa (or to murder six million Jews, or to cut off enemies' feet in Rwanda, or to distribute smallpox-infested blankets to North American indigenous peoples) is still lurking in the complex consciousnesses of those who will forge the new world. It's still there, in all of us, somewhere. And there's no doubt that, for those who benefit from the unfairness of the world, maintaining that injustice and greediocracy will be the highest priority.

So, it seems, those of us who want to overcome the human urges to destroy and prevail – we need to be doing a lot of purposeful and difficult work, starting now.

Where do we start? 

The School Thing

OK, the school thing. It seems to come down to this: Unless it turns out that it's perfectly safe to run public schools like they've always been run, any alternative is going to have a really substantial long term impact on the new world.

You know how I feel about running schools like they've always been run, but let's for a moment pretend that we won't make fundamental changes based on what we now know about learning and children that we didn't know in 1900, when the current system was new. We're going to pretend that because that's the way it'll probably happen.

They way we run schools is to get as many children in a room as we can, up to the limit that the union enforces. Sometimes that's ten, sometimes – too often – that's 30. Almost every one of the hundreds and hundreds of classrooms I've ever been in have been the same size, regardless of what they're being used for. So: lots of bodies in close proximity. Lots of activities, movement, contact, talking, shouting, laughing (nearly all of which, in normal times, is a good thing). Often a non-trivial number of runny noses and kids who are sick but came to school anyway, for any one of a number of reasonably good reasons. And all these students moving around the school quite a bit during a typical day, coming into contact with a large proportion of the adults who work there.

We are told that we will defeat the coronavirus with masks, personal distance, hand-washing, testing and contact tracing, and anything less will not be enough. So unless the virus is pretty much completely defeated, we can't start school in the fall and still pretend that we're keeping everyone safe.

So – unless the virus is defeated by September 1, there will be millions of children out of school – at home, we assume – who would normally be in school. “Normally” will be a fond memory. We haven't heard much about how the new normal will be achieved, although it will no doubt involve online classes, split sessions and other systems, none of which include all children being in school all the time.

How long will the new normal last? Long enough to leave a lasting impression on the new world? Some folks have written about the permanent impacts that this spring's endless recess will have, but none of them offer any evidence that suggests they're doing anything more than speculating for clicks.

Kids at home mean supervision. Parents? Someone said today we could retreat from the two-job family. That would leave a mark. Older siblings? Or will they be out looking for the jobs that their friends' parents had to give up? Reimagined and vastly expanded daycare?

Virtual classes and split sessions probably mean less learning each day. This wouldn't be a really big deal for children of upscale and well-educated families, who already supplement their children's education, or send their children to private schools which could easily double tuition and halve enrollment. Who wouldn't put off buying that second yacht in order to send their children to a safe place like that? But generally, less learning, less direction, would have to lead to bigger gaps between the haves and have-nots.

Would we be forced to pare down our teaching and learning to what is most important? This would require the education world to figure out what education is for and what the best possible outcomes are, something that's never really been done. Pressure to teach more in less time might result in a new paradigm for public schools, leading to a system that actually prepares children for the real world. Sure it would.

I just remembered that my original thought about this post was that it would be short and simple: less school time, more home time for kids, big impact. That's still the point, and it's still going to be a very big deal. The more you think about it, the more extensive and complex it gets.

Big impact. Stay tuned.

Real Estate in PJs

We live in a small city of around 7,000 in a large rural region of our state (that population will double if the students ever come back to our two colleges). Lots of small local businesses. Our son works at the tiny digital services company that will, among other things, build and maintain your website if you're one of those small businesses that wants one.

A completely unexpected boom is occurring, apparently, in 3-D tours. This is the feature you find in online real estate listings (Zillow calls it a “3D Home Tour”); it allows you to do a virtual walk-through of the house with 360 degree views of each room. It requires a set of digital 3D photo equipment which is, apparently, very expensive.

The firm's owner took a lot of good-natured heat a few years ago when he bought the equipment to do these tours. There was sporadic demand, but it just didn't seem like a cost-efficient investment (but what a cool toy!).

But now that we're all working, learning, and shopping from home, suddenly everyone wants customers to walk through their homes without having to take a chance on infection. Buyers love to shop for real estate in their PJs. There's a half-time intern who is, apparently, doing nothing but digitizing real estate in 3D.

The interesting thing is that our son – and, I assume, the rest of the staff – is convinced that this is the future – through the pandemic and out the other side. People have already gotten used to it, and will continue to expect it.

This is purely secondhand and anecdotal. The world is finding ways to make an astounding number of processes and activities virtual, because it has to. There's no reason to think, in any of these cases, that we won't revert to the in-person option as soon as this is all over.

But here are some folks who are involved in the business, using real-time evidence, to predict that at least one of these processes will be a part of the new world. Not speculation, or wish-fulfillment, but real customer demand and feedback in the real world.  

It's the only one I've found so far. We are so far from understanding anything about the new world.

UPDATE - 7/11/20:  We are members of Historic New England, a collection of a few dozen remarkable historic houses located throughout the northeast.  They just received a CARES Act grant to do the same kind of 3-D tour of a few of their houses that the real estate people are doing here (and everywhere, I assume).  I'm pretty sure that these online tours will not go away in the new world.

Wouldn't It Be Great?

Man, there is a lot of writing about the new world. Everyone (including, as usual, me) has something to say. But, as noted below, “there are none – so far - that lay out a vision of the new world, or any part of it, with any clarity or insight.”*

So far, they seem to fall into a few broad categories:

• Here's how we've adapted to the quarantine environment. Wouldn't it be cool if we continued doing this kind of thing when it was over? (WFH, virtual everything)
• Something big is gone for now; we have a chance to build it back up from scratch. Wouldn't it be great if we took our time and did that thoughtfully, with input from everyone? (Tourism, restaurants, cooperation in general)
• We've gotten away with shutting down for now, but the ideas we have for opening up are never going to work. Wouldn't it be great if we could just ignore reality? (public schools, professional sports)
• Nothing will change and everything will revert to the way it always was, because [insert preferred psychological and/or economic theory here]. Wouldn't it be great if somehow it could be different? But it won't be.
• Here's what I have wanted to happen in the world for a long time. Wouldn't it be great if the pandemic, in some unexplained way, somehow brought this dream to fruition?

I keep reading this stuff so you don't have to. If any clarity or insight shows up, I'll be right on it. In the meantime, keep thinking creatively. There's a whole continent out there, ready to be created. Let's get on it.

* - I've always wanted to quote myself.

Shambles

I assume that everyone understands that the virus – or, more accurately, the various responses to it around the world – are having a huge impact on everything. With minor odd exceptions, none of these impacts are good. The economy is in a shambles;* massive numbers of people are still out of work and unable to pay for stuff they need; countries are going into untenable debt; the educational process for students from preschool to grad school is disrupted; months have gone by since any of us properly socialized, and there's no baseball. And so on.

What will the long term effect of each of these, and all of them in concert, be on the new world?

I find it incredible that no one seems to know, or even wants to speculate. I understand that part of this is the fact that we're still in the middle of it, and don't know how long all this will last. Guesses even regarding the duration of any of this are wildly divergent.

There are plenty of articles that are happy to list all these terrible things that are affecting everyone in the world differently. There are none – so far - that lay out a vision of the new world, or any part of it, with any clarity or insight.

I don't know about you, but I find this a bit chilling.

* - A long time ago, a “shambles” referred to a slaughterhouse.

The Old New World

In 1918, public health was a system largely designed to shield the middle and upper classes from the ravages of disease epidemics suffered by the lower classes – which the still-popular pseudoscience of eugenics told them were “inferior categories of human being.” Typhus, cholera and even bubonic plague were significant problems, and viruses were poorly understood. Influenza was not monitored; public health systems did not track or count it, so no one had any idea who had it or where it they lived. The pandemic hit them like the proverbial Mack truck.

Although the 1918 flu pandemic – which killed more than World War I – had little effect on economics or culture, it had a big effect on public health. No one wanted to go through that again. European countries began developing systems of universal healthcare, which grew into the national health systems we see in Europe today.* Public health achieved ministry status and began, for the first time, to complete with other aspects of government on an equal level. And, understanding that the disease doesn't recognize borders of any kind, and therefore international coordination seemed wise, they created the forerunner of the WHO right away, in 1919.

So we lived through a health emergency so awful and devastating that whole countries made monumental efforts to protect all their citizens, maintain vigilance through government agency, and coordinate efforts after a brutal and demoralizing World War. Imagine that.

The new world. Will it include universal healthcare? Even more importantly, will it include some kind of actual guarantee that we will all stand together, united, to defeat the next global threat?

Remember climate change? It's still out there. So are racism and income inequality.  We'll see.

* - It took the US more than a decade more to respond in this arena, and then it came up with today's employer-based healthcare – far from universal.

Let's Get Paleolithic

Two studies with European subjects suggest that we (or at least the Europeans) are/were getting more sleep during lockdown (fifteen to thirty more minutes per night), but one of the studies looked at sleep quality and that - contrary to most situation when sleep time increases - was significantly poorer.

Apparently, we all suffer from social jetlag. Who knew? Social jetlag is the discrepancy between our natural sleep cycles and our actual sleep schedules. Our social activity (including work) pushes the edges of our natural cycles. Not something we worried about when we were hunting and gathering. The more relaxed from-home work and school schedules, it seems, allow us to return – just a little – to those idyllic prehistoric days.

The decreased quality of sleep, the authors note, may come from, well, worry. “We think that the self-perceived burden, which substantially increased during this unprecedented COVID-19 lockdown, may have outweighed the otherwise beneficial effects of a reduced social jetlag." I, for one, can testify that, even though the virus has not appeared in any of my friends or relatives, and even though the more relaxed life under lockdown seems to agree with me, I worry. A lot. So there's that.

In the new world, if we can maintain a little (or more than a little) of that relaxed scheduling, without the worry of a global pandemic outside our door, that can be a particularly good thing. If you'd like to encourage this outcome, read the list of “major health and safety problems” that social jetlag can lead to, toward the end of the article.

There are those who say that a paleolithic diet will make us healthier; it seems that paleolithic sleep will certainly do the same.

The Baby Bust

Looks like the new world will contain fewer children.

The Brookings Institute predicts that around 300,000 to 500,000 fewer babies will be born next year. “Economics matters,” they note; births decline as the result of a damaged economy, and the numbers were arrived at after considering a variety of economic factors. They also looked at the data from the (inaccurately named) Spainsh Flu of 1918. That pandemic, as we know, had three distinct spikes in the death rate – and there were three distinct drops in the death rate nine months after each. The total drop was about 12%; during the more recent Great Recession, it was 9%. The Brookings numbers suggest we'll see a 10% drop.

So – no baby boom. CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains:

“Basically, the bottom line is this: when there's a storm warning, there's some data that suggests that the rate of pregnancies increase, but actually when destruction happens, like a tsunami, then actually your births go down,” Gupta said.
So there's a difference in what the impact on society is of any natural calamity or a pandemic – and the forecast suggests that this is much more serious than a tropical storm. It's a tsunami.”

A tsunami, indeed. Many people feel they cannot afford to have children in the best of times; when the bottom drops out... And with the strong possibility of a second wave in six months, who wants to be pregnant and sick?

What effect will the lower birth rate have? It will probably depend on whether the drop will affect some groups more than others. Will it be concentrated in some demographic, or distributed evenly? America's birth rate is already declining, as are the rates in many developed countries. The economic impact of these trends will be substantial – especially their effect on economic growth.

Something to look forward to.

The Progressive Future

I'm working on a post that sort of categorizes visions for the new world. In an article about the future of restaurants, Matt Goulding imagines the restaurant of June, 2022:

Prices at most places are a little higher, and portions a little smaller, but on the bright side, you can see where the money goes. Notes on menus and social media explain new wage distribution, health-care initiatives, and relationships with the supply chain.

I'm interested in learning how the human society I'm familiar with, and the economic system those humans have developed, would produce a result anything like this. Restaurants like this exist, but they are upscale and niche. What is it about our experience of the coronaviurus that suggests that this kind of thing will become significantly more common?

This goes in the category called “I've had this progressive idea that will really advance sustainability, income equality, and quality of life for everyone. Wouldn't it be great if it turned out that we rebuilt society based on this idea?”

PS:  Obviously, I've lost control of the font again.  Help!

Probably Not the Last on Tourism

I live in a tourist county – we've got the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the whole James Fenimore Cooper legacy – his father founded the eponymous county seat where all this takes place – and Abbey and I, in our idyllic retirement, participate in theater that works only because of the high level of tourist activity. As I think I mentioned, our county is unique in our region for seeing twice as much revenue from sales tax as from property tax. So the collapse of the tourist industry has been devastating – and will become more so as the summer progresses.*

Naturally, this is happening all over the world. One in ten jobs worldwide depend on tourism. Revenues from tourism have fallen, on average, 80%. No industry can survive that. How will it look on the other side?

Short answer: no one knows. I've read a lot about this, because the lives of so many of the people around me depend on the answer, but as yet, there is no clear path to the future. Most speculation involves folks who have had some good ideas about improving tourism and creating more sustainable ways for the tourist industry to protect and enhance natural environments and indigenous people. They project these ideas into the future, in a wish-fulfilling fantasy.

Tourism is a realm of human activity which has essentially disappeared, and as such might be put back together, in the new world, any way we want to. Will we base its reconstruction on long-term, agree-upon, sustainable goals, or on the quickest buck?

There is a kind of tension between two possible outcomes. One is return to status quo ante, and quickly. This approach takes into account the millions of workers who have suddenly lost their ability to buy food and shelter, and the massive pressure on governments all over the world to get them back to work. Endangered animals in Africa are suddenly threatened like they haven't been in decades – they are huge sources of readily available protein. People have to eat. The story is the same, with variations, all over the world.

The other approach suggests that the answer for the future is to make tourism really expensive. Christopher deBellaigue, writing in the Guardian, suggests that:

Tourism isn’t the right that many holidaymakers, whatever their budgets, seem to think it is. It’s a luxury that needs to pay its way.

He suggests that the greater cost would be structured so that the tourist sites themselves retain most of it, for maintenance of the site itself (natural or man-made) and development of more robust indigenous industry, craft and art. Day-trippers on tours or cruise ships generally buy very little at a tourist site, and much of that is manufactured far away. Venice loses money on tourism, deBellaigue asserts, and so Venice sinks into the lagoon.

So will the new world include a tourist industry that, like yacht racing and skiing at San Moritz, is the realm of the wealthy? Or will we return to economy-of-scale tourism that values cheap, and damaging, travel, overwhelming sites and leaving them without the means to maintain and repair, not to mention improve?

Isn't there a Plan C?

* - Our little baseballville destination is far enough away from highways and airports that visitors usually need to stay over and eat in our restaurants. So we get few day-trippers and our problems – and solutions – are not on a scale of those discussed in this post.

We Need Others

Pope Francis has some hopes for the new world. Yesterday he expressed the hope that we would “be careful” so as not to make “individualism the guiding principle of society."

“Let us be careful,” the Pope warned, “because, as soon as the emergency has passed, it is easy to fall back into this illusion. It is easy to quickly forget that we need others, someone to take care of us, to give us courage.”

I'm just going to leave that there for us to think about. Maybe write about it later. “We need others.” Are we learning this lesson?

PSA

Apologies for my absence. It's been a long time – good heavens, it's been two weeks. That time span almost exactly corresponds with a period of (mostly) unexpected socializing with family.

One of the advantages of sheltering in a big house on Cape Cod, near the beach and with with a view of the Bay and Provincetown, is that family comes to visit. There was a lot of that in the last two weeks, including our son and daughter-in-law and grandbaby, who came to stay for four days. Then a frantic day and a half getting the house ready for renters, and the long trip back to upstate NY.

In this world, this kind of socializing is done exclusively outdoors, often with masks, on the beach, on walks, on big decks. Or, in the case of our houseguests, it is done with people who have been really, really careful, for a long time, eschewing indoor gatherings and staying mostly at home. And we do that precisely so we can enjoy four days together without fear of infection.

In the new world? Who knows.

OK. I'm back.

Gap Year

We are sheltering for a while here in our house toward the end of Cape Cod, a house we rent out in the summer and enjoy (a lot) in the not-summer. The local consolidated High School covers the outermost four towns on the Cape – basically, the forearm and hand of the arm-shaped Cape. I was reading the bios of the graduating Seniors (it's been a long quarantine...) in the Provincetown paper, and I was struck by the number of students who had committed to take a gap year before college.

More than half were heading off for college (most to state schools or Cape Cod Community College), but nearly a third were taking gap years, or were not sure what they'd be doing. That seemed to be a lot, and I wondered if it were because there is so much uncertainty about everything at the moment – even whether a particular college will be in session in the fall. I did some Googling and discovered that gap years are suddenly the thing that you recommend to graduating Seniors.

I've always been in favor of a gap year, or even two. College provides a very narrow view of life in general, and, in general, is not a great way to prepare for life*. Some perspective can be very valuable, especially at that impressionable age.

All this got me thinking – potentially, thousands of graduating Seniors who would normally move right to college will, instead, be finding their way through the new world on their own. I can't imagine that this can be anything but a good thing.

I went to college because it was expected – the mid-century's American dream. There's still a lot of that going around (one of the students said in her bio that she was the first in her family to go to college). What if a lot more students made decisions based on what they found in the real world, and not what everyone told them they should do? What if they chose courses of study based on some real-world experiences – or maybe decided not to go to college at all?

If we all stop and remember how we ended up in the careers we pursued or are pursuing, many of us, myself included, would realize that a lot of serendipity was involved – the right place at the right time, stumbling onto an opportunity, one door closing and another one opening. Apparently random experiences that opened whole new worlds. How far were our careers from what we studied? Imagine if we had all spent a year or two wandering around a world we'd have to inhabit in the future, learning its ins and outs, and bumping into chance and opportunity and that random person or event that changed everything.

So the new world, which will be fueled, more and more as time goes on, by these graduating Seniors, might be more... what? Coherent? Satisfying? Will the new problems inherent in the new world be addressed by young people who have had a chance to figure out what's what?

I hope so. Best wishes, class of 2020.

* - In my experience, it's also not a great way to prepare for a career, but that's grist for another mill.

Hoax and History

Yesterday, while reading a 2-star review of a Great Course on Amazon Prime called “Black Death” (it's been a long quarantine) I came upon this:

...since many historians actually believe it occurred, we have their "expertise" to remind us of history. It never happened, at least not in the way they said it did …

Good heavens. There are Black Death deniers? Who knew?

Googling “black death deniers” led me to what seems to be a long-standing controversy regarding exactly which virus (or other malicious microbe) was responsible for killing half of Europe. A “plague denier” is someone who believes that the devastation – which, it turns out, everyone believes in – was not caused by the bubonic plague (Y. pestis) but by something else: an Ebola-like virus, anthrax, pneumonia, or marmot plague (I'll let you go read that). Giant gerbils are also involved, as are germs from space.  I am not making this up.

It occurs to me that we have pandemic deniers, right now, while the pandemic is going on. They believe that the pandemic is a hoax. It doesn't help that the President of the United States said just this as recently as late in February (and his son said the same thing in May).

So how will the history books treat the notion that the pandemic was a hoax? How will the new world look back on us at this point? The deniers will be laughed off the stage. Right?

Although the numbers of sick and dying in the US are currently plateauing, we are focused almost entirely on opening our economy. Thousands (tens of thousands? millions?)of Americans are doing, on a daily basis, what we are clearly told is dangerous. The virus is not responding, for the most part, and so their history books will read closer to hoax than to horror. If the dire warnings do come true, well, then this history will be much different. And so many more will be dead.

The new world needs to be ready for the next pandemic – actually, it needs to be ready for this one to return, if it doesn't turn on us now. The new world will need to draw both on the fear of sickness and death, and also on the confidence that we can stand against the virus – we need to draw on our history, the story of us meeting the virus and defeating it. Without the fear, we will not take it seriously. Without the confidence, we will not make the sacrifices necessary to get most of us to the other side.

So history matters. I am afraid that, if we are not able to tell this story of great danger and great resolve, that the pandemic will drift off into history, like the hurricane that didn't actually crash onto the land. And we won't be ready – psychologically or functionally – for the next one.

Another Ratchet

If we are working from home a lot more in the new world - and especially if we're more likely to be doing school and work from home, at the same time, in the new world - we'll have to fix this.