The 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic

As I write this, it is late March, 2020. It’s been a while since I last shared my thoughts. And If the truth be told, it’s been a depressing few years, here in the desert. My life has taken some turns which I would not have wished for; the job I now have is not the one I was hired for, almost two years ago. Over the intervening span of time, it has been changed, tiny bit by tiny bit. The conditions under which I am required to perform it continue to become more demanding, and I have had to learn to live with the repeated threat of it being taken away from me if I do not find a way to do it both faster and more perfectly. Soon I expect I will be required to work from home. I have not had to do this before, and I resent being forced to allow my work to intrude into my home, my sanctuary, my retreat. This will make it even more difficult to do this job.

And yet, I name the Name of God, and try to live my life as my Master tells me to. I fail, of course, but I am forgiven. I have accepted this disappointing chapter in my life because it is a tenet of my faith that God is in control, and He has a plan for me. Since time began, He knew I would be working here, at this time in my life, at this time in the lives of those around me, and in the history of my country and my planet. And so my faith requires me to believe that, like Joseph and Paul and Daniel, I must walk the sometimes-difficult path which has been set before me by my King, and find a way to live as He commands, or as closely to it as I can manage, so that I may be obedient to Him and to bring him such glory as I am able. So I do my best to accept it, and pray every day for His Will to be done in me, and through me, and not my own will.

Some times, some very dark and very early mornings, that prayer is harder to pray in my heart than at other times, other brighter, sunnier afternoons.

I recently came to realize that as miserable as this job is, at least I still have one. Right now the Coronavirus Pandemic, CoVid-19, has gripped the world. It swirls invisibly around us, threatening us, intimidating us with it’s unknown aspect. Because of the nature of the infection, and because of the poor choices of our current President, Donald Trump, we have wasted 2 months of valuable time, and are just now beginning -beginning- to prepare for this test of our nation which is already upon us, and among us. We are being told to practice something entirely new: Social Distancing. I suspect as you read this in the weeks and months to come, you will be quite familiar with it, but right now, it’s new, and we are as a nation (and a world) grappling with how to wrap and bend and twist and wrench our lives around it. We are, many of us, finding ways to adapt to the idea of spending week after week after week, stretching into an unknown number of months ahead, physically separated from other human beings.

No gatherings of more than 50 people are allowed, and most recently even groups larger than 10 people are being discouraged – or simply prevented form occurring at all by police and authorities, depending on which city or state you happen to live in. This means no professional baseball, basketball, hockey, no March Madness, no audiences at TV shows, no evening news teams on the same set with each other. It means many, many radio and TV programs are being broadcast by formerly high-gloss hosts and anchors and reporters from their basements, or their living rooms, or their kitchen tables.  No schools, no high school proms, no graduations, no St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. In many states most places where people formerly gathered like bars, restaurants, stores, coffee shops and clubs are all but closed. Stores limit the number of patrons who can be inside to handfuls at a time. Restaurants and dining establishments offer drive-thru and pick-up orders only; their lobbies are locked, the tables and chairs stacked mutely in the corner, or out of sight entirely. Businesses large and small will go under. And the people who formerly staffed these places, stocked the storerooms, waited on customers, rang up their purchases, cleared their tables and cleaned their glasses…they don’t have jobs anymore. By the grace of God…I do.

But despite all of this….we have yet to see the full effects of the virus. Statistics guess that before the virus is through with us, maybe a month or more from now, perhaps as many as two-thirds or more of America will eventually become infected. Due to timing and luck, I am in one of the most at-risk categories: 60 or older, with underlying health issues. These same statistics estimate that the vast majority of folk in my group will survive. But approximately seventeen out of every hundred will not.

That’s a frightening percentage. The kind that can keep you awake at night.

I’m used to seeing odds expressed in chances of winning the contest as one in a million or a hundred million….not in seventeen out of every one hundred other humans just like me – gone.

No funerals, either.

Part of me wonders what life will be like over the weeks and months to come, as Spring slowly turns to Summer, because that’s how I’m wired. I want to learn new things, to watch history unfold. How will our government adapt to this New Reality? How will we? What will go back to “normal”…and what will not? I’m on the front lines again, as I was for Watergate, and 9/11, and the dawn of computers and the Information Age. But part of me also longs for less – less details, less complexity, less fear. Simpler times where I can deal with what I want to, or am able to, and then let the rest go where it will. But -at least so far- I haven’t been offered that choice. So I continue with a job I dislike more each day, and at the end of the day I head home to watch the slow-motion train wreck that my nation and my world have become. And I will try and maintain my faith in God, that He is in control, that He has a plan for me, that He loves me and will not forsake me. May His Will be done.

Ending Points and Starting Points

My teenaged son left home this morning.

I got up early, before the sun came up, to see him off. I watched his mother organizing his departure, the two of them trying to think of everything he should bring with him. After too short a time, we hugged, and then the two of them drove off into the night to deliver him into the care of others. It wasn’t an overly emotional parting.

Until after he was gone.

He didn’t join the military, or head off to college. He rode out to take an unpaid accountant-cum-manager position with five other young men; a rock band, embarking on a national tour of mostly local dives, in a stretch van, pulling a trailer filled with musical instruments. On their own for a minimum of a month. Possibly for four months, if things go “well”.

. . .

When I was a young man, a year or two older than he is now, I took off on a somewhat similarly hare-brained adventure. The woman who would later consent to be my wife and I drove across the country one cold January. We took nearly four weeks to do it, out and around and back. We were young and crazy and in love. It was an adventure, and I do love adventures. I expect our parents were quietly horrified then in much the same way I was this morning, although they weren’t my first concern back then, any more than I suppose my fears were in my son’s mind this morning.

I understand the allure of the open road. I have heard that call many times myself. I still hear it. Though my ability to send up an answering cry has been muted by age and the weight of responsibilities, I understand his young desire to see what’s out there. But the times in which we’re living these days are not as open and welcoming as they were thirty years ago. There wasn’t the fear then, or the desperation with which we all live and even take for granted now. People weren’t constantly afraid of losing their jobs, didn’t wonder where next month’s rent or mortgage payment or grocery money was going to come from, hadn’t yet begun to feel the constant queasy stress that grows out of continuing to fight the good fight because you don’t know any other way, even while a part of you knows you’re not winning anymore, and you haven’t been for some time. We didn’t see each other as potential competition, or even as enemies, back then. Times are different now.

My son’s version of this journey differs from my wife’s and mine in at least one other important way: We were the masters of our own fate, as much as two people can be. We were in charge. We shared the driving, we shared the decisions, we shared our souls, and we answered to no-one. We were all we had. But we were also all we needed.  We didn’t have a large amount of money, but we had planned and budgeted so we had enough for gas, food and lodging each day.  My son and his mates have ten dollars per person, per day, to pay for all of these things, an amount obviously insufficient for the task.  My son is intelligent, but he is still young enough to place no value on experience.  His fate is largely in the hands of the band members, people he hadn’t even met until four days ago. They are all involved in a business relationship; while friendships may grow out of their shared hardships, none exist now at the beginning of their odyssey.  Once upon a time, I was a member of a band. I understand the lifestyle. The thought of my son’s fate intertwined with the choices and preferences of these footloose musicians, still young and bulletproof, none of whom knows him and any of whom could potentially harbor ill will towards him…..frightens me.

In addition to the possibilities for adventure, my son took advantage of the opportunity offered to him as a potential career step.  He knows he will learn an incredible amount, both about himself and about the business of touring and managing a band.  There is no better teacher than experience, and he will gain an enormous amount of that.  At times, I fear he will gain more of it than he wishes, but that, too, is part of the adventure.  It has been said, and I also believe, that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes.  I have prayed many times in the past week, asking Almighty God to protect him.  If it be His will, bless him with success also, but first and foremost, grant him protection, as he has now both grown out of and physically passed out of my ability to protect him from the hardships life can inflict on him.

And this is the other emotion wrapped up in this parting, for me.  I recognize that this trip will most likely signal the end of my son’s childhood, certainly in the way he views me as his parent.  No longer will I be Dad, the protector, the buffer between him and the Real World, the arbiter of what he can and cannot, should and should not, do.  Once he returns…..if he returns………….I will be a fellow adult.  My role will have become that of adviser, and no longer that of middle-of-the-night comforter, tosser of balls, chauffeur to league games, vocal supporter from the sidelines, provider of video games, slayer of orcs and leader of the hunting party, prodder to take his schoolwork more seriously, questioner of whether he’s been drinking tonight………….

I will be none of those things, anymore.  I will no longer be his hero.  I will be something less.  Less capable, less wanted, less consulted, less needed.  I will no longer be his teacher; I may be the one who taught.  Or I may be the one who failed to teach.  But my role, in those ways and so many more, will be for most intents and purposes…..

Ended.

It is a truth that tears apart the heart.

It is a truth, though.  It is the way things are supposed to progress.  You raise your children, and then you don’t.  You set them free, and then they have their own life to live, their own course to chart, their own mistakes to make and triumphs to achieve.  I understand this, and I accept it.  But it greatly saddens me to live through this transition.  I know that my overall relationship with my son isn’t over (God willing).  We will continue to be part of each others lives for many years to come.  But my role will have changed.  I will see him less and less, and I will be diminished by that emptiness, that growing distance.

And so, I strive to grow past my aching sadness. I sense that change is in the wind.  My role with my son, in many ways, is moving through an ending point.  But also a starting point, as I embark on the journey to find my new place in his life, and as he works out the questions of, as George Carlin once put it, what he’ll do for fifty bucks, and what he’ll do with fifty bucks.  I also begin a new and different post-child-raising era in my own life.  As I find new activities, new pursuits, to fill the spaces that raising a child used to occupy.  My relationship with my wife will change, and that is also a starting point.  My son is of course passing though ending points and beginning points as well.  The educational portion of his life has ended, and now begins the experience portion.  His career is beginning, possibly the first of many different careers.  He’s learning how to live and get along with other people in an (extremely) intimate environment, something he’s never had to do before.  He may have many things he has to give up in the weeks to come, many new choices, habits, skills he picks up along the way.  Decisions he must start paying the price for.

Change is in the nature of all things, save for God.  We usually have little choice but to go through the changes that are presented to us.  We learn, we grow, we may mourn what we leave, or are forced to leave, behind.  But we change.  And so my son and I are changing.  I wish him the very best the world has to offer, and hope I can help him through the times when he has to face unhappiness.  Because dealing with both is a part of being an adult, and that is now his lot in life.  In the fullness of years, I have learned that as both a father and as a person, there are times in life where I must step back, and let fellow adults about whom I care make their own choices, for better or ill.  My son is now a member of that group.

I was blessed with a first-born son, I have had the privilege of helping to raise him, and I am now proud to know the young man he is becoming.  The very best of luck to you, son.  I love you.

Risk Is Our Business

I recently read an article about leadership, and the author used Captain Kirk, from Star Trek, to illustrate his points.  He quoted Kirk’s famous declaration, “Risk is our business.  That’s what this starship is all about.  That’s why we’re aboard her!”

That’s always been one of my favorite quotations.

Yes, Star Trek was hokey sci-fi, and in retrospect it seems almost childish.  But to look at it from only the vantage point of the times in which we currently reside is to miss it’s importance.  Star Trek inspired a generation, who went on to achieve many truly amazing things; cell phones, GPS systems, The space shuttles, the International Space Station, computers that can speak and listen, the internet, feats that are impressive in this day and age.  But it didn’t accomplish that task alone.  It had real-world help, in the form of NASA and the space program.

When Star Trek premiered in 1966, this country was becoming more deeply involved in a war in Vietnam which we were losing, and which was bitterly opposed by a large part of our country, many of them young people.  The use of recreational drugs was spiraling upward at an incredible rate.  The nature of the relationships between men and women was undergoing radical changes, and no-one had any idea where they were headed.  Racism was openly practiced, often at an official state and even a national level, and young black men and women were taking their rage into the streets.  Good and decent leaders were being assassinated, and everywhere you turned there was chaos and unrest.

Into this turbulent situation in the late 1960’s came two science-related programs; one, Star Trek, was fictional but grounded in what might one day become the science of the future.  The other, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was real and yet very nearly fictional in the things they were striving to accomplish.  NASA was barely four years old when President John Kennedy launched the moon program in 1962 in his famous “We choose the moon” speech at Rice University, remarking that “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”  When Star Trek came on the air four years later in 1966, the US (and the world) was still trying to wrap it’s collective head around the idea that it was possible for manned spaceships to orbit the earth; it had only been done a handful of times -by anyone- at that point.  And yet during the three brief years that Star Trek was broadcast, the United States went from sending the equivalent total of a large dinner party’s worth of men into orbit in the early 60’s…to sending a team of Americans to land on the moon, and then returning them safely to earth.  Here were real-life heroes, men courageously risking their lives to push back the boundaries of exploration, to change the definitions of what was possible, and to for the very first time set mankind completely free from the world of his birth.  In the words of John Gillespie Magee, Jr.’s magnificent poem, “High Flight”, written in 1941 surely in anticipation of what was to come, “...Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.   Where never lark, or even eagle flew —  And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,  – Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

As we were sending massive rockets spaceward to orbit the earth, and then the moon, and eventually to plant men’s boots on another world, Star Trek was on the air, showing viewing audiences trying to cope with the craziness and the fear and the uncertainty of those years a glowing future where we had overcome many of the same ills that were right outside their door.  At the height of the Cold War in reality, there sat a Russian at the Navigator’s station in Gene Roddenberry’s imagination.  Next to him sat a Helmsman of Japanese background, less than a generation after Japan had been our hated enemy in World War II.  While blacks were rioting in inner-city America, a black woman was a respected bridge officer, and part of the Enterprise’s Senior Command Staff.  The same atomic technologies which terrified the world, by Star Trek’s time had been harnessed to provide an essentially-unlimited power source, which fed the mighty engines of the Enterprise and propelled her between star systems in a matter of hours, and provided power to the many miracles of science and medicine within her.  Diseases, the need to strive for money, the problems of over-population, of feeding the masses, of whether we were alone in the cosmos, had all apparently been answered by Star Trek’s time.  Best of all, perhaps, was the fact that we, humanity, were no longer separated by strife.  We had achieved the ability to go anywhere we wanted, and everywhere we went, we treated people decently.  We had finally become unified, in our quest to serve our brothers and sisters, to do the most good for the most people, and to Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.  Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

In a world torn open by fear and hate and lies, here were two different-but-similar ideas, one real and one not but both heading in the same direction ~ outward bound.  And they were both Good.  They inspired those of us alive at the time, and their legacy continues to echo down the years.  Many of the scientists, the astronauts, the engineers of today grew up in admiration of these two programs, and if you ask them they’ll tell you so.  These two programs have had a quiet but profound effect on the broader society of the United States. So when you think upon either one, try not to look with the jaded eyes of fifty years on.  Look instead, if you can, with the mind of a child, whose eyes shine with pride at his country’s achievements, and who sees past the amazing things that are, toward the wonders of what could be.

And so it is with these fond memories in mind that I humbly direct your attention to this tribute.  It is not my creation, and I take no credit for it.  I merely marvel at it, and bring it to your attention, so you can enjoy it, too.  (On a side note, the stirring music that underscores the latter part of the video is excerpted from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  The piece is itself a tribute, to the first lady of space travel, and is entitled “The Enterprise”.)