Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
The hardest thing to get used to is the vacillating. Before this was full-force, I remarked that I struggle to know what action to take, and that still holds. We expend non-significant sums of energy trying to decide what to do with work and children and plans. With our daycare once again open, that disqualifies me at work for some of the partial compensation I was getting when taking days off to watch the kids. At the same time, is it really necessary or prudent to send them back yet? Probably not. How much do we still worry about our neighbors and our friends, and in what settings?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I am critical of lockdown policy, though not as someone that believes the threats to our lives or our liberties are overstated, or that the threats to our livelihoods are undersold. I am generally persuaded that they might not do as much as they are given credit for. Unfortunately, it seems the thing they are most efficient at doing is destroying goodwill towards actually effective policies. Reagan's stupid quip about the nine most terrifying words is true not because they represent tyranny with a smile, but because incompetence can burn down important bridges.
At my despairing worst, I fear in the re-opening we are to be left to the vices of the libertarian hordes. The condemnation of the closing of the Book of Judges becomes a commandment - "Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." We who are conservative are admonished to not come out of our homes if we are not comfortable, and we reduce ourselves to a perpetual Groundhog Day existence—we look out of our homes, see an unmasked shadow, and prepare for six more weeks of Covid.
Talking with a friend a little while ago, he and I share the same fatalistic assumption that eventually we'll all get it. Or it least if we shall not all get sick, we shall all be exposed. There is a certain temptation to give in, in that case, and figure we may as well spin the wheel and see if the ball lands on red or black for us. I am not inclined to bet against the house if I don't have to.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Very early on, I held out a vague sense of hope that there might be some deus ex machina, some Gandalph cresting the hill to turn the tide with the forces of light. Whether it would be warm weather killing the virus off or a miracle cure or treatment was immaterial to the hope. Hell, we could just try splashing the infected with glasses of water we'd left around the house. Worked once, at least.
It never occurred to me that this would functionally be the same as the official plan. There was, for a little while, the lockdown and the "flatten the curve" mantra. One could have been forgiven early on if one expected that to act as a brief retreat or timeout to formulate the next steps. Those, of course, never really came. The White House released a guide to re-opening that it has since sought to actively undermine when it is not ignoring its existence.
I think of American exceptionalism. We're the ones that make the movies about being down and out and coming back at the last moment, roaring and victorious. We're also the ones of whom Otto von Bismarck reportedly said "God has a special Providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." We seem terribly excited to put God and the Chancellor to the test.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
(Something something sphinx of cement and aluminum.)
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
A few of my friends on Facebook shared a meme with a cowboy riding into the sunset, talking about missing the America they grew up in. I suspect the meme would have got about the same reactions with or without the virus, but what has been changed is seen in sharper relief with it. Our experience during the pandemic is a considerable departure from our expected way of life, and everyone calls it "new normal," but the experience has also heightened our sense of just how much has changed. We find that the foundation has slipped from under us, and the walls are not as square as they were in the blueprints.
What then, comes the anxious question, comes next?
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?