How being pulled apart pushes us closer together.
Perspective is always lacking during a catastrophic event such as a global pandemic, but at least we can try for some good old fashioned empathy. With hundreds of thousands dead and millions impoverished, you’d think that would come easily. Reality has sadly proven otherwise, eliciting an emotion we actually still have in droves: surprise. Losing that, we’d surely be lost.
A high school chemstry teacher, Frank Cardulla, taught me a life lesson I’d only appreciate decades later: if you want to understand how a complex system works, reduce it down to its essential components, and then jack its conditions to the extreme. He’d ask: “What would happen to the pressure in a closed test tube if you raise the temperature by a millionth of a degree?”
We sat there like the clueless sophomores we were, wise fools who didn’t even know enough to be dangerous. Some of us guessed the pressure would increase, others that it would decrease, and a few assumed nothing would happen. Mr. Cardulla stared disinterestedly at us, rubbed his big, black, bushy moustache, furrowed his prodigious brow, and raised his caterpillar unibrow.
He rephrased the question with an approach: “The pressure change caused by a millionth of a degree difference is difficult to visualize. But the change caused by a million degrees is obvious. The end result is simply a matter of scale. So whenever in doubt, dial the change up to its extreme, and whatever you are trying to better understand will instantly become apparent to you.”
A global pandemic is exactly the kind of experiment where conditions throughout the country have been exacerbated to the extreme. The novel virus is a bunsen burner heating up America, building pressure that has impacted every element of society: public health at its core, with secondary effects reverberating throughout our economy and lurching into politics.
The reactions have been complex, leading to much confusion. The unique characteristics of the coronavirus lend themselves to misunderstanding and manipulation. The virus’ high reproductive rate and asymptomatic spread, coupled with its long incubation period and relatively low but still disastrous mortality rates, together fuel endless controversies and conspiracy theories.
The pandemic has created a perfect storm, ripping away all pretense and posturing. For the first time in our lives, a worldwide existential crisis has exposed the souls of family, friends, and colleagues; the crude machinery of our institutions has been laid bare. Such unprecedented transparency is shocking and revelatory. We now see the world and ourselves anew.
Until April of 2020, the day-to-day temperatures of our lives varied by only a few millionths of a degree. We all at some point had endured various times of crisis, personal tragedies or business disasters. At these rare moments we gained painfully acute insights into the people closest to us. We discovered through the crucible of life the true nature of our most intimate relationships.
Roaring into May, the pandemic spread exponentially, and so did such insights. Emotions flaired like never before, bringing out the best and the worst in ourselves and everyone around us. The surprises surprised us: we often felt betrayed and disappointed by those we once trusted, while the courage and tenacity of those we had once denigrated felt invigorating.
Our government and institutions similarly found themselves stripped naked, the crisis revealing systemic weaknesses alongside inspiring strengths. Our stubborn individualism made much of the country stupid about masks and mitigation, while that same spirit fueled the creativity and initiative necessary to develop and deploy gamechanging therapies and vaccines in record time.
The politicization of the pandemic has had disastrous consequences. Deprioritized education has spawned generations of Americans inured to science and suspicious of fact. Social media has trumped network media for news and information, blurring and destroying lines between authoritative sources trying to inform, and opportunistic players with sinistral agendas.
As with most disasters, the poor got poorer and the rich, richer. Decimation of the service and entertainment industries has eliminated millions of jobs, hunger continues to spread as farmers throw away food they can’t distribute, while the stock market surges to record highs. In many ways the country has proven astonishingly resilient; in others we’ve displayed shameful negligence.
Amid the structural dysfunction, mixed messages, and acidic partisanship, nascent trends accelerate in ways that will benefit us all. From the iniquities of systemic racism to the inefficiencies of traditional work, the pandemic pushed protestors into the streets and employees out of offices. We’ve reassessed things taken for granted, morphing them into something new.
“Whenever you get hopelessly stuck,” Cardulla advised us in high school chemistry class, “stop everything, and start over again.” I’d later learn that same lesson with computers: turning any malfunctioning electronic gadget off and then on again fixes most problems. In that same spirit, the pandemic of 2020 has rebooted most of global civilization in the early 21st century.
The speed of life has slowed down, in ways ground to a halt. No movie theatres or Broadway plays; sports teams play to empty stadiums; restaurants are allowed only takeout; bars and gyms are closed. Able to work from home, you do; if you can’t, you risk your life within a world now ruled by tiny bundles of nucleic acid and protein that aren’t even technically alive.
Despite the danger, millions of people take holiday trips to visit their families, ignore mask mandates and physical distancing guidance. The virus continues to spread across the country, ICU beds are full, healthcare workers are exhausted, and more than three thousand people die each day. The vaccines are already here, yet still many months from making significant impact.
Pandemics are nothing new, and neither is the human circus of fear, hysteria, superstition, and scapegoating that exponentially spreads along with them. The physical and psychological damage of plagues has triggered revolutions, brought down dynasties, and redrawn maps. Recurring onslaughts of the immune system have transformed our biology, and tweaked our evolution.
The pressure continues to build, but most of us will survive this pandemic, as those before us survived theirs. A few years after herd immunity, and likely much sooner, life will return to normal, and with a vengeance. “The Roaring ‘20s” of a century ago was that generation’s post-pandemic catharsis, much as our own imminent 2022s will no doubt bring a bodacious bout of debauchery.
Will that renormalization be complete? Will any vestigial tissue be left to remind us of a year of isolation? The systemic disruption of everyday life? The uncertainty and risk of death — and for so many the reality of financial ruin, chronic hunger, domestic abuse? When the Pandemic of 2020 is made into a documentary, will we be happier for having lived through the experience?
Perhaps we’ll be surprised. The souls of those closest to us made transparent, we might better understand our own weaknesses, and appreciate strengths often overlooked. Forced to stay home, we’ve never spent as much time with our families; if lucky enough to work from home, we’ve never been more efficient. My bet is we learn to love more, hustle less, and live better.
“Rendered asunder” was Mr. Cardulla’s favorite phrase, a stylishly archaic expression for breaking something down to its core constinuents. The pandemic has indeed rendered America asunder, and in so doing triggered a paradox: Never have we been made so aware of what’s broken in ourselves and society — and for that reason, never more optimally positioned to fix it.
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