Earlier this week I made a shopping run. The empty expressions of Walmart shoppers complemented rows of empty shelves. Many of the items on my list were sold out. I studied my fellow shoppers. Some wore masks. Some wore nitrile gloves. The few children that I saw fidgeted. Moms kept them close. One mother required each of her kids to keep one hand on the shopping cart. I listened intently, stealing bits of conversation. A group of three men laughed at a woman for wearing a mask. One mocked, “These people are fucking lunatics”. She was wearing medical scrubs and I wondered what she had seen and what she knew that these men didn’t.
On the way home I stopped at a Burger King to buy my wife her favorite comfort food - an Impossible Whopper with onion rings and a frozen coke. I was nervous about such unnecessary public contact. I eyed my zip-lock bag of paper towels soaked in alcohol as I rehearsed the sequence of steps to pay for and to receive the food with minimum risk. I placed my order and rolled forward in line. Just before it was my turn at the window, I soaked my hands with alcohol squeezed from one of the paper towels. The scent was nauseating and my hands instantly felt numb from the cold of evaporation. I turned up the heat and dried my hands in front of the vents. The heat felt good but it was too late. My fingers turned waxy white as a stinging sensation built in my fingers, a condition called Raynaud’s Syndrome that is familiar to many immunocompromised people.
The cashier was a young woman. She smiled broadly as I began to pay. She said, “The lady in front of you paid for your food.” I said, “I don’t understand.” She said, “This happened a bunch of times tonight. Someone pays for the person behind them and then that person pays for the person behind them and it goes on until the last person in line.” I asked if I could pay for the next person. She said that there wasn’t anyone else in line at the moment and that without knowing the cost of the next order she couldn’t tell me what to pay.
We are at war against two foes. We are at war for the fidelity of the definition of the word truth, and all that this implies. And on a different front, we are in a war against an invisible army of unseen, indiscriminate killers. The fronts in these two wars intersect. And like other wars, truth is both casualty and strength.
For a few days now, I have been trying to refill my prescription for Plaquenil, known generically as hydroxychloroquine. The drug tames my overactive immune system, lessening the damage and the resulting pain caused by my body being at war with itself. The pharmacy keeps pushing back the day when I can get a refill. Apparently Plaquenil has fallen victim to the same forces that made so many aisles in Walmart look like cold war era images of empty grocery stores in the former Soviet Union. Plaquenil is toxic and taking it requires periodic eye exams to ensure that a peculiar, detectable form of blindness doesn’t occur. In addition, drug interactions can be severe.
We will win the war against 2019-nCoV because we are mostly united in purpose without regard for our many differences. This war will be costly, brutal and will kill many but we will win. Perhaps we will grow stronger and better prepared for the next pandemic, despite the dark forces that would degrade our defenses or disarm us completely in this dynamic struggle that is both eternal and unnaturally amplified by our degrading environments, both natural and political.
The other war, the one fought with words, over the fidelity and meaning of sacred words, is one whose outcome is less clear and perhaps more dangerous. In politics, we have grown to harden our hearts against the other side, whatever that other side might be. One need look no farther than the pages of this site for evidence of division. Once we move beyond our intramural differences on the left, and into the realm of Trumpism vs everything else, the division widens to a chasm. In this war, no one rushes out to hoard anything except perhaps guns and ammunition for those so inclined. Sadly, for many, there is no driving desire to accumulate, much less treasure, knowledge, or ideas, or the fruits of reason. Information curated by librarians and reliable sources is rejected and replaced with noise that dulls our sensibilities and numbs our hearts, or worse, fills us with hate. Information is served up by hyper-partisan “news” and its metastasizing clones, and vast armies of AI trolls in a cycle of inexorable machine learning guided by malignant human intent.
Despite these dark times, I can’t help but hope and believe that we, as a nation, will ultimately win the uncivil war for the meaning of truth and the meaning of what is right, in a manner consistent with the values of democratic pluralism and the very notion of objective reality. The outcome is sure to be deadly and hard fought. The casualties will be measured by hard realities such as the number of children in cages, or the number of people brutalized for who and what they are, to name just two among many. This war will determine the quality and nature of the soul of America.
When I was at that Burger King, the woman in front of me didn’t care whether I leaned left, right or center. And the person in front of her didn’t care. And the person before that. We can commit random acts of kindness for strangers, not caring who they are, what they believe or where they’re from. I can’t help but believe that somewhere in the lesson that I learned at a fast food drive-thru lies one of the keys to our future.