Well, where to begin? Should we begin at the beginning — with the overpopulation, poverty, lack of education, filth and communist secrecy that produces diseases like COVID-19 in China? I’m no fan of President Donald J. Trump, but I have no problem with him calling this the Chinese disease, particularly as Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks nothing of kicking American journalists out of China in a further attempt to mask the severity of the virus there and his own negligence in his delayed response and sharing of information. (If Xi is helping the world now with masks and respirators, as Christiane Amanpour of Amanpour & Co. keeps going on about, really, it’s the least he can do, given that his country created the crisis. Praising the Chinese for “helping” is like thanking an arsonist who burned your house down for offering you a place to live. I mean, honestly.
Or should we just begin with Xi, Trump and the absolute failure of Alexandrian leadership — leadership from the front — that has now cost valuable time in testing for the virus? Had we in the U.S. had a test in place in January when the first case broke — on Jan. 20 — we would at least have had the lay of the land. As it is, we don’t know what we’re facing, which has sent the markets reeling. Their downward spiral is further exacerbated by the shutting down of economies to “flatten the curve” so that not everyone is hit at once and health-care systems are not overstressed. But realistically, how long is that going to last before it crashes the world economies? Will people ultimately weigh economic concerns against public health?
We don’t know. But there are some things we do know. We know that civilization is just a veneer that lies above nature, which is ever ready to bubble up and reclaim its own. We know that we are interconnected in ways we hadn’t even imagined. That’s why it’s stupid for these kids who are partying in Florida on spring break to be out and about. Even if they don’t get sick — and there’s no guarantee the virus won’t hit them — they can be carriers infecting the most vulnerable. But they’re too immature to do anything but live in the moment. Doubtless, they’ve never read John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” in which Lucifer tells Beelzebub that “The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell.” The great joy, the great challenge is where you are right now.
These kids are just another example of OPS — other people’s selfishness, which is what got us here in the first place. They’re also a reminder that character is destiny and the test of that character is adversity. As the virus continues its inexorable march around the world, some have risen and some have sunk. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has been credited with quelling fears in his country by speaking directly to his people. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been hailed for his decisive action, his ability to muscle to a desired result, often irritating in good times, serving him in bad.
On the other hand, New York City Mayor, and gym devotee, Bill de Blasio has been criticized for leading from behind, lagging in closing the nation’s largest school system, albeit in part because New York City schools serve vulnerable students in special ways, with breakfasts, lunches and afternoon programs. As for Trump, well, he’s been a mixed bag — undercutting the health experts with overly optimistic, false hopes about drugs, suggesting that the states fend for themselves for supplies as the federal government is not a “shipping clerk” and growing testy when NBC’s Peter Alexander asked what he would say to scared Americans. Here’s what he did say:
“I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.”
Say what? When Alexander the Great and his army of 35,000 (roughly the size of the New York City police force) went up against the Persians and their army of a quarter of a million, he told his men that it would be OK, because they had something the Persians didn’t. They had him. Here’s what Trump might’ve said, what I would’ve said:
“We’re facing tough days ahead medically and economically. Right now it seems as if nothing is certain. But there’s one thing that is certain and that’s my devotion to you. I’m going to see you through this and, as is often the case after illness, we’re going to come out stronger and better than ever.”
You don’t have to be a leader, however, to contribute and bring people together amid self-isolation. Yo-Yo Ma is offering “Songs of Comfort” videos. Broadway star Laura Benanti is asking kids to perform outtakes from the high school musicals they won’t be getting to present, at #SunshineSongs, and “Hamilton’s” Lin-Manuel Mirada is listening. And Italians are serenading one another across balconies. It reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem “The Tuft of Flowers,” in which a solitary mower encounters the titular tuft left by another mower. It concludes with these lines:
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
’Whether they work together or apart.'