In these days of self-isolation, social distancing, and a greatly reduced number of activities available to pass the time, various forms of fatigue are an ever-present risk. I’ve succumbed to baking fatigue, reading fatigue, TV fatigue, opera fatigue, and writing-blog-post fatigue. (Calling something you have gotten bored with a “fatigue” gives it so much more gravitas, don’t you think? Plus it’s no longer your fault—it’s like a syndrome, which you picked up from working so hard.)
One of the most prevalent characteristics of everything we do these days is caution. It’s no suprise that everywhere, “caution fatigue” is on the rise.
Caution fatigue is defined by Wiktionary as a “desensitization to alarm signals, caused by lengthy or frequent exposure, and resultant slowed or absent responses to new alarms.”
We’re certainly saturated with alarm signals, with levels of sickness and death from covid that seem to break records every day. Nothing of our former lives, it seems, is without danger—not working, playing, visiting friends or family, not even mundane tasks like reading the mail or gassing the car.
I need only to look out the window at our little beach to see the throngs of non-mask-wearing, non-social-distancing swimmers, sunbathers and partiers increase every day. The virus is still here, moreso than ever if one thinks about it, but they’re just tired of thinking about it.
Kathleen told me once of a accident she saw, where a woman pulled out from a stop sign in front of an oncoming car, and was immediately hit. When asked why she pulled out when the approaching auto was clearly visible, she said, “I had been waiting at that stop sign for a break in the traffic for like five minutes. I just got tired of waiting.” That poor woman was suffering bad from caution fatigue.
I can see how caution fatigue could have some evolutionary survival value. If any situation is unavoidable, now matter how depressing or dangerous, perhaps it’s better to be able to step back from it, try your best to function without focusing too hard on the tiger in the room. Maybe it’s a variant of the instinct that is seen in everything from humans to flatworms, that tells you that if something doesn’t work, eventually you’ll have to try something else. Even so, we’re hardly at the point yet where we can’t go on as medical experts say we should. Four months without seeing a movie or eating my favorite Nick’s sausage is annoying, but it’s hardly cause to abandon all common sense, yet.
I am hoping that the country will be hit with a new wave of fatigue soon: “denial fatigue”. It must be hard to continue to deny the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears concerning the seriousness of the pandemic. I’m really hoping that those working so hard at denying it will soon tire of their labors, and start behaving in a way that will make living in a post-covid world safer for me.
Even in parts of the country where the number of cases is still just in the hundreds, and the number of deaths is in the tens (like my own home county), one can’t really avoid seeing the signs everywhere—shops are closed, masks are required in grocery stores, public buildings and parks all literally bear large warning signs.
Sure, it’s easier to deny the evidence when you are surrounded by like-minded people, and you haven’t been personally impacted by the threat. You may be able to dismiss the warnings by as conspiracies by foreigners, or scientists, or worst yet foreign scientists to make you believe something untrue. But not to believe even your own doctor on an issue of your health and safety, what an effort that must take! Surely many covid-deniers must be close to worn out from the hard work of covid-denying!
So that’s how I get through a day when it seems so exhausting to take care not to get infected—I hope for a time over the rainbow, when others are equally tired of denying the need to distance, to wash, to mask. I really think that when everyone does it, being careful will become easier and less fatiguing for all of us, and maybe as an added side benefit, less people will sicken and die!
thought it would be interesting to see how the coronavirus pandemic compared and contrasted with famous pandemics of the past. The most famous pandemic I knew about was the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, so I started looking around for books about that. I especially wanted books written around that time, where the disease was a current event, rather than a historical analysis of a distant calamity.
The first book I found was America’s forgotten pandemic: the influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby. It came out in 1976, so didn’t meet my criterion of a contemporaneity, but at least it was a book I could get ahold of, from the trusty Internet Archive, my go-to source for all old books.
Trouble was, the thing was so dense and so dry that I just couldn’t get into it. I’m sure it is very scholarly and informative, but it wasn’t at all what I was looking for in light epidemic reading. So I kept searching. The second book I found had more of a reputation as a good read (it’s touted as a “New York Times Bestseller”), The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry. Sounds like a thriller from the title! And it’s available digitally from the local library!
Unfortunately, I guess a lot of people stuck at home had the same idea, so the best I could do was get on the wait list for a copy of the epic story. I am currently at position number 69 on the list. So while waiting for my turn with this e-book, I decided I had to expand my search further back in time. This time, I struck pay dirt, in A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame.
This is the story of the Great London Plague of 1665, written “by a citizen who continued all the while in London”. Daniel Defoe published this book in 1722, more than 50 years after the plague. Indeed he was only five years old in 1665, but he claimed that he was publishing an actual journal of someone (perhaps his uncle) who lived through the plague. The debate continues to this day whether this is a book of fiction or not.
The London plague of 1665 was certainly a whole different kind of catastrophe than our coronavirus epidemic. A quarter of the city’s population died from the plague that year. Much of Defoe’s story is grim and sometimes horrifying (there are descriptions of pain and despair sometimes to the point of insanity, and lots and lots of dead bodies, if you are horrified by such things), but the book also brought out some thought-provoking parallels to our own pandemic.
The unnamed Narrator of the story started his experience of the epidemic as we did, stuck in his house, afraid to go out for fear of catching the contagion. Initially he passed his time like we did, in some ways: baking bread and trying to hoard-buy meat and supplies.
This difficulty and danger of getting food and supplies was mentioned, but they had their own version of contactless shopping—if it’s too risky to go to the store yourself, just send a servant:
When I first read this, I was grateful that we now have the internet and online ordering and contactless delivery, so I wasn’t put into the ethically questionable situation of sending my servants out to risk their lives for chores that I wasn’t willing to risk mine for. It was hard to suppress the realization that there wasn’t really much moral difference between using people employed by me to perform these risky tasks and using people employed by Amazon, Fedex, or GrubHub, but I did my best!
There were a lot of parallels in the socio-medical response to the plague. The medical experts then, like now, warned the population of the dangers of asymptomatic transmission of the disease:
Social distancing was practiced widely, although the protocols were a bit different, such as the rule (thankfully not needed now) that one should cross the street rather than stepping over a dead body on the sidewalk. I expected to read something of the ancient equivalent of the face-mask, that bird-shaped contraption that plague physicians wore with the beak stuffed full of perfumes, but I don’t recall there being any mention of it.
The almost sacred spot reserved in our daily rituals for hand sanitizer was filled back in 1665 with an assortment of perfumes, aromatics, and smoke-generators. There was scholarly debate about just the right kind of fire to build to create the proper prophylactic smoke haze. Pitch, sulfur and gunpowder were all popular combustants. (This debate isn’t as pointless as it might sound. The plague was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was carried by fleas, which in turn were carried by rats. Smoke or other smells that repelled insects or other pests probably did increase the safety of a household.)
The narrator wrote movingly about the economic hardships. As always, these fell squarely on the poor. Massive unemployment was caused by businessmen responding to the epidemic by shuttering their shops and staying at home, fleeing the city, or dying.
That the poor were able to find food and work at all, the narrator gives effusive credit to the Lord Mayor and his Aldermen, who undertook their jobs with courage and compassion. The book describes the city government’s work at this time chiefly as distributing charity for the poor, maintaining the public order (such as by locking infected people and their families in their houses), and taking over the task of burying the dead from the overwhelmed churches.
The book tells many stories of the noble work of the Lord Mayor and his staff fighting the plague and its effects. Of the work of the national government (what he calls “the Court”), the narrator is charitably brief. (What parallels one might draw with the current pandemic on our country, I leave to the reader.)
My poor recollection of the history of science received a lesson in this book. The microscope had been invented 75 years before the London plague, and men of science had become acquainted with microbes. The risk of contracting the disease from someone with no symptoms was already well-known, and physicians and scientists of the time attempted to design a test to be able to tell if someone was infected but pre-symptomatic, a side story I found chillingly parallel to the efforts of our own medical community.
The Narrator, and apparently all the intelligentsia at the time, recognized that the plague was a biological contagion, and was spread by natural, rather than magical, means. They also were certain, however, that the plague was a warning sent from God to tell Londoners they must return to the proper Christian path. They saw no contradiction in these two beliefs—as the Narrator put it,
Then as now, the workers on the front lines of the battle against the disease were rightly praised as heroes. The Narrator includes clergymen in his list (indeed, they are the first group he calls out). As now, clergy played a crucial role in the comfort of the afflicted and their loved ones, but they played an even more crucial role back then as the interceders requesting supernatural help on behalf of the Londoners (which, the Narrator reports, was occasionally provided), and in shepherding the citizens back to the necessary proper path (which they were happy to return to, at least for as long as death was all around).
The story draws to the close with the end of the London plague, to the great jubilation of the survivors. Sometimes, the Narrator complained, their celebrations were too early and too carefree, when the grip of the plague had dissipated (the death count was down to “only” 1800 a week!) but not vanished entirely.
Daniel Defoe’s Narrator says he wrote his journal for the edification of any who find themselves in a recurrence of the plague. I don’t know but that the book holds a few valuable lessons for us even now, 350 years later. Plus, it was a fascinating story. If you’re curious, you can find it at Project Gutenberg, here. (It’s currently Daniel Defoe’s most popular book on the site, with more than twice as many downloads as Robinson Crusoe!)
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” – A. A. Milne
I guess our main challenge in these days of pandemic is staying safe. But we seem to be equally challenged with keeping it interesting – despite the restrictions. This is where I am really grateful for all the Potomac River access paths we have in Piscataway Park, which I’ve taken to walking on a mostly daily basis. I’ve found it a little difficult to paint during this period, but after meeting with my art group I was inspired to haul my paints along on a walk and paint one of my favorite spots down by the river.
It has been hard this last couple of weeks to think of anything light-hearted to write about. Not because of the virus--for all the death and suffering, at least it's natural. No, I'm talking about the televised murder of George Floyd, and the popular uprising from this last straw, which brought to light even more brutalities captured on video.
I'm sick and saddened by racists who insist that the possibility of systemic racism in our policing doesn't even need to be looked into (I'm talking to you, Bill Barr), and by liars and sophists who claim that holding police accountable for their brutality amounts to mere "political correctness" (I'm talking to you, Jeff Sessions). And by those who have been made complacent by white privilege, who needed a global protest movement to awaken them to the need to address a problem that's been festering all their lives (I'm talking to you, Dorn).
Abuse of the powerless by the powerful has been part of the human condition since forever. Like it or not, the systematic abuse of non-whites is a cornerstone of the American story.
We can't change the past, but we must change the future. Changing our story hasn't been easy or gone unopposed, and won't be completed without more mis-steps and backslides, but it has to happen. If you believe that the system needs to change, take heart, and work to make it so. You are doing right!
If you believe that law and order is so important that the risk of an occasional abuse is justified, at least come to the table and work to minimize that risk, and ensure that all enjoy the benefits of law and order, and the risks of abuse aren't disproportionately passed to people of color. I did a post a while back (here) about the human tendency to want someone else to pay the price for our own good fortune. This started way back with human sacrifice, and some will argue (and I agree) that we are still practicing that today, under other names like Law & Order. We need to stop the sacrifice of human lives!
And if you believe that the benefits to you of a strong (even militarized) police justifies the risk of injury or death to someone of color, then you are saying that black lives don't matter to you as much as your own life and comfort, and you should carefully read your Bible or the Declaration of Independence, or whatever you draw your spiritual identity from. If you still aren't swayed by reason or compassion, then I hope you will be swayed by force of numbers this election day.
Thank you, I had to say that. Next time, I'll be back with another post on the lighter side of living each day in fear of the deadly coronavirus.
Thanks for listening.
Dorn
6/11/2020
BLACK LIVES MATTER.
– In which Dorn cruises down the back roads by the rivers of my memory.
Art courtesy Lona
ig Brother Zuckerberg is definitely still listening in. Kathleen and I were driving one morning recently, and Kathleen says out of the blue, “I think we should get an RV! I’m sick of staying at home, and an RV is really the only way we could safely travel around and see things!”. We were in my pickup truck, which has no internet or even a fully functioning radio, but somehow he heard, because the very next day on the internet was an unsolicited article from Bloomberg, “Scared Americans Desperate to Travel Are Buying Up ‘Covid Campers’”.
Jeff Green explains in the article:
Cooped-up Americans desperate to get out after months of lockdowns are dreaming of doing something—anything—that resembles a vacation. But a majority of them worry a second wave of the coronavirus is coming, and think politicians have pushed too fast to reopen. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to getting out of Dodge, the close-quarters of an airline cabin are a no-go. That’s where the “Covid camper” comes in.
Toad, Mole, and Rat satisfy their wanderlust in Kenneth Grahame’s classic The Wind in the Willows
Too true! Kathleen’s argument for a Recreational Vehicle made sense to me, as it apparently has done to stir-crazy covid shut-ins all across the country. Though how to implement such a step right now, when we haven’t even gone into a building other than our home since February, will take some thinking.
But there’s nothing to stop me from taking a trip down memory lane to times past when we’ve worked or played in mobile digs. As Toad says, “Oh, the open road!”
Back when Kathleen and I were first courting, we decided it’d be a lark to go camping on Assoteague Island. And by camping, I mean driving there in her new Chevy Vega hatchback with the back seat folded down, and when we were done frolicking on the dunes or whatever, we’d just sleep in the back. And it worked, in theory.
In practice, by the end of the day of fun and sun, one of us was completely bright red with sunburn (who knew that could happen?) and the other was covered head to toe with mosquito bites. And the back of a Vega hatchback with the seat folded down is (a) so cramped that two people couldn’t lay side by side in the back, (b) not really flat, and (c) hot, if you didn’t want to open the window and let the insects in. But we were young and in love, so everything worked out all right in the end.
Note on pictures: none of these are the actual vehicles from my past. In fact, they might not even be the same models. But they are a good likeness for what I see now in my mind's eye.
A bit later when we had settled into married life, we bought a big hulking used Jeep Wagoneer station wagon, which we called “the Whale”. One of its chief selling points was that our girls would someday be of driving age, and I thought it would be useful to have a car which when they said “Daddy, I need to borrow the car”, I knew they really needed it. The thing screamed Family Car—it even had fake wood exterior paneling, as I recall.
This was our vehicle of choice for our camping excursions when the kids were young. It was our first 4-wheel drive car, and we were immensely proud of that. I remember once we had gone on a jaunt to somewhere in Virginia, where they let you park and pitch your tent anywhere, and we decided that the best place was at the top of a grassy meadow only accessible up a 45° grade (I am exercising dramatic license here. I call the slope 45° to give my story credibility, but I distinctly remember it was at least 75°, maybe even 95°. Especially on the way down.)
(Our Jeep did not have treads)
We were too tired to think clearly when we arrived, but hell, we had 4-wheel drive, so up we went! By morning, we weren’t nearly as tired or careless, and the prospect of driving down the slope we drove up the night before was positively terrifying. But there was no way around it, so eventually we did it. We backed down, because (a) we couldn’t turn around or I was sure halfway through the car would start rolling down sideways, and (b) anyway I sure didn’t want to look down the slope we were driving on.
On the way back to civilization, we lost the rubber on one of the tires and had to limp back on the steel belts because we didn’t have a working spare (Did I mention I was still in my “foolish” phase? This was the same road trip where I hopped out of the car at one point to pick up a snake skin on the road to impress my woman with my man skills, only to realize that the snake wasn’t done using it yet).
My parents had taken us on several extended driving-camping trips across the country when I was a youngster, and I wanted to recreate something like that for our own girls. One year, back in the 1980s, there was one of those gas-shortage summers we used to get back then. But there were some signs that it wasn’t as bad out west. We reasoned that this was the perfect year for a driving trip, because (a) maybe there wasn’t really a shortage out there, and (b) everyone will stay home because of the gas shortage, and we’d have Yellowstone Park and the Rockies and the Grand Canyon all to ourselves!
So we did it. To maximize our out-west time, we flew into Denver, where we rented the biggest car on the lot for our trip. It was a shiny new Chrysler Cordoba with genuine Corinthian leather interior! We packed our family tent and all our supplies (which we had cannily mailed ahead to save on airline luggage) into the spacious trunk, along with the rented snow chains that were de rigueur wear for some of the places we planned on going. The thought of driving such a posh car through the rocky wilderness just added to the adventure!
The trip was a great success. We saw all the best western parks, we made friends with a chipmunk in Yellowstone that turned the Cordoba into his mobile home for a one-way trip to Arizona, when we finally flushed him out, and his hoard of our chips and sunflower seeds, during a trip to a laundromat. (Hey! I was obviously still not out of my foolish phase, and hadn’t yet heard of invasive species, or plague squirrels.)
The girls liked it for the most part, but sometimes bemoaned the lack of such amenities as curling irons and flush toilets. (This happened before cell phones were invented, so no one complained about not having one of those.) One of the girls’ favorite stops was late in the trip, when we were tired and dirty from camping and decided to just crash in a motel. With a pool! I can’t blame them for liking it. Though this didn’t occur to me at the time, for them a motel was as big a novelty as a geyser or a gorge. Bigger, since they had now already experienced those.
This motel stop presaged a new phase in our lives, where the kids got too busy to come along, work made for short vacation windows, and our bones grew increasingly achy. This caused us to transition away from camping and other mobile-house trips to vacationing at hotels, motels, farmhouses and hostels.
We returned to the caravanning life, sort of, when Kathleen’s job as a nurse included a regular mandatory on-call weekend, where she was required to stay within 30 minutes of St. Mary’s Hospital (which was about 60 minutes from our house). We got ourselves a beat-up old trailer, and set it up on a friend’s property down on Breton Bay, MD, 20 minutes from the hospital. Here Kathleen would stay when she was on call. Sometimes I’d stay too.
A third of a century later, my memory can classify those times as fun. The trailer was snug, even for just two. It was almost warm enough if you kept under the electric blanket, and staying there gave off an aura of adventure. If Kathleen wanted to make a phone call, she had to climb a nearby telephone pole à la Green Acres. (If you aren’t familiar with the Green Acres telephone pole meme, then you are clearly not old enough to be a Third Ager, and what are you doing reading this?) Incoming calls weren’t an option (still no cell phones), and more than one night’s sleep was interrupted by a knock on the door by the State Police bringing word to Kathleen of some medical emergency. Good times!
Let me close with a link to my favorite mobile-home cartoon, Mickey’s Trailer, even though I’ve shared this before (here). I’ve got to put it up again because (a) it’s just so good, it bears watching twice, (b) it perfectly captures the whole mobile home vibe, and (c) when I was young and my parents took us on those cross-country roads trip in our popup tent-trailer, one of my most vivid memories was going to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and seeing this movie short playing at the nickelodeon arcade there.
