My perpetual inspirational calendar for May 10 — which was Mother’s Day — contained this quote from Daniel L. Reardon: “In the long run, the pessimist may be right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.”
Right about now we could use a little more of the optimist than the pessimist. Each day brings bad news with no sign of let up, even as states begin to reopen and the stock market holds its own. Indeed, it’s hard to be the optimist on the trip when the pessimist in us is regularly experiencing “the dark night of the soul” at 3 a.m., tossing, turning and hyperventilating — terrified for our ill loved ones and our own mortality; wondering if our jobs are in danger or if we’ll get another and, in any event, how we’ll pay the bills; despairing that the things, places and people we cherish will never be the same.
This seems particularly true in New York City, which will not reopen until June at the earliest. As with most places, things and people, what makes New York great is what makes it vulnerable — specifically, as The New York Times notes, its tourism, its mass transit system and its density. Meanwhile, many of its residents miss “everything,” as one cop put it, while others who can afford to are heading to the suburbs.
But this isn’t the first time New York — and by extension the nation — has faced adversity. The city was written off after Superstorm Sandy, the Great Recession, 9/11, the 1970s bankruptcy that prompted President Gerald Ford’s indifference and the Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”; the World War II blackouts and Adolf Hitler’s plot to bomb it the Great Depression; the anarchist bombings of the 1920s; the draft riots of the Civil War; and a burning during the American Revolution. And yet the city has managed to survive and thrive — learning from the past to emerge smarter and stronger. It is a place where people go to reinvent themselves. It will reinvent itself once again.
The pessimist says this time is different, that there’s no way to bring back the thronging cultural and sporting events, the restaurants and the nightlife that make New York, New York. But with masks, thermometers, testing and contact tracing there’s no reason that the city and the rest of the country can’t safely come back. The key to this is, of course, the testing that the now infected White House says we’re doing but that we’re falling short on. Also, everyone should wear a mask and glasses.. (Outside, I’m wearing a pair of sunglasses my late aunt wore after cataract surgery that also shade your peripheral vision on the sides.)
Yes, masks are uncomfortable while exercising and working outdoors, particularly in the heat. But they’re a small price to pay for everyone’s safety. Still, some feel they impede their civil liberties. That their not wearing one imposes on yours seems to be less of a concern. I actually saw a man on the news who had a doctor’s note saying he couldn’t wear a mask, because it frightened him. But he was in no way frightened of infecting others, he said. Selfish coward.
The demands of returning may actually help us recommit to hygiene and revamped infrastructure — two things that we are always sorely in need of. Just as new safety precautions were put in place after 9/11, public transportation may become more health-conscious. More people working from home should also take the burden off mass transit and those who must use it for work and may contribute to a cleaner environment as well.
Cleanliness, masking and social distancing will also remain important, because it will take years to acquire herd immunity through vaccination and the vicissitudes of future outbreaks, according to the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Trying to achieve herd immunity quickly by exposing masses of people to the disease, the school says, may work for an illness like chickenpox but not for one as multifaceted, contagious and lethal as COVID-19.
Here it might be instructive to consider a disease to which 95 percent of humanity is immune — leprosy. Much misunderstood, leprosy has been a fearsome scourge since ancient times, thanks to its disfiguring aspect — graphically captured in the Bible and the many iterations of “Ben-Hur.” Even today its terror belies its slow contagion, long incubation period and curability with a multidrug therapy. There are some 200,000 cases each year worldwide —roughly 200 of which are in the United States. (One of the last American colonies in which leprosy patients resided is on Molokai in Hawaii. They were confined there In 1866 under the reign of King Kamehameha V. And while that confinement was lifted by the state of Hawaii in 1969, a dozen or so elderly former patients have chosen to remain in community there.)
What leprosy — for which there was not a successful treatment until the 20th century — tells us is that the progress against infectious diseases is slow. We’re in this for the long haul.
But we can and will get through it — indeed, it might be the making of us — even if we don’t always have a good time on the trip.