Surviving This Pandemic Isn’t Enough
My partner’s been making a verbal note every time he comes across a sign of hope. He calls these signs “seedlings.” A friend’s listless nonprofit finds a new purpose delivering boxed meals to isolated elders in an immigrant community. Seedling. A man runs bare-chested along a road beside the ocean, waving aloft a blue flag with a picture of the Earth. Seedling. We meet a group of our neighbors, who gather at a safe remove in the long yard we share, for what has come to be called “BYOB social-distancing happy hour.” Seedling.
My partner knows, more than many, how bad a spot we’re in. He’s worked in emergency medicine his entire adult life, most of it as a tech, usually one of the first people you see when you arrive at an emergency room. As the disaster coordinator for an urban hospital, he spent weeks in FEMA training in Alabama, drilling for an eventuality exactly like this pandemic, learning how to retrieve the right medication from a cage that notifies the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when it is opened.
He’s not in an emergency department anymore, thank goodness for me. We moved across the country to California last year, to the Bay Area, and for the first time in his life, he’s taken a job that does not place him among the first responders. Yet he’s still primed to see that the federal response has not gone the way it’s supposed to. One of the unquestioned premises of my partner’s training was that the federal government would have the best answers on what was unfolding and what to do. This makes the daily White House briefings difficult to watch, knowing now that the only thing possibly more lethal and more viral than COVID-19 at this moment is a president’s lie.
Lately, I find myself thinking about the book, by Emily St. John Mandel, which has enjoyed a resurgence amid the pandemic, for good reason. I have enjoyed postapocalyptic novels for the bulk of my life, and is one of my favorites. The focus of the book is a troupe of performers called the Traveling Symphony, who go from town to town in a hollowed-out world and furnish the residents with delight and enrichment through art. One side of the lead caravan carries a motto from an old episode of : “Because survival is insufficient.”
