Elder Advice – Thinking Inside the Box - Week 6
When Ontario’s pandemic lockdown was announced six weeks ago, a friend of mine babbled: “Everything happens for a reason!” I immediately kicked him as hard as I could and, when he whined: “Why did you do that?”, I sensibly replied: “I don’t know, you tell me.”
A vigilant eye (and a ready boot) for nonsense is always required, but especially now, as we move glacially toward some sort of recovery.
There is much worthless speculation and spilled ink over what will change now, forever. As if we need more cause for anxiety.
Will “Harrison and Sarah are close” just mean 1.999 meters or less?
Will shaking hands will be replaced with shaking heads? Actually, a supplemental head shaking greeting would be welcome. As if to say: “I just can’t believe what they’re doing now”; “I know, neither can I”.
Will the fate of parties and passenger pigeons be the same? Parties won’t be allowed again ever? Except maybe search parties. Because grandma wandered away from the home again without her N-95 mask. Maybe it’s just me, but they don’t sound like much fun.
Will there be wholesale corporate rebranding? Consider: 3M apart, just to be on the safe side, Inc.
Will we have to seek comfort in the sameness of small things. That, while all else is different, ‘Wednesday’ will remain misspelled?
Among the stupidities spouted by those who should know better, yesterday the CBC reported that Rachel MacCleery, senior vice-president at the Urban Land Institute, a city planning think-tank in Washington, D.C., said that "over the short and long term, certain aspects of city life will shift." Thank goodness - I was worried that things would remain chronically the same, as they always have in the past.
Look. Pandemic or not, things change. What contact tracing will link changes to COVID-19? Well, assuming some temporal distance until Wuhan II, for a few months at most, there will be momentary, awkward hesitation before physical contact with others. A thousand years of habit will not be undone in a calendar quarter. The death of 50 million people during the Spanish flu epidemic did not imperil the hug and the handshake, and neither will COVID-19. Except among the habitually over anxious and wannabe trendsetters.
The rumours of the death of the office are also greatly exaggerated. The majority of us will not work from our homes, Because we can't, or won’t want to. Because we want to keep our work and home lives separate. Because our homes are appropriately full of distractions.
It is not that nothing will change. Some adjustments will be made. Having found another connection through affection - for words - Sinclair and I will make time for Scrabble permanently. More of you will join me in seeing cruises and retirement homes as the highly undesirable choices they always were. Our children and grandchildren will think even less kindly of us when we are gone, given they are ones who will ultimately pay for the long-term economic carnage of our pandemic response. As if climate change so serious that the penguins are bursting into flames isn’t enough of a legacy. I can already feel the spit on my grave. There will be no money to fund grandiose schemes now proposed for re-shaping cities, re-tooling industry or re-imagining economies. The next 20 years will be spent not spending.
But let me take a moment - as all moments are - to observe, as the perpetually quotable Winston Churchill did: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”
We are first and foremost resilient, social animals and this event will not change us into permanently masked shut-ins. The multiple cataclysms of the 20th century did not make us so. “Keep your distance” has always been, and should remain, an instruction only for the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. And that is because the determining characteristic of humanity is not biology, but community. The human story is not about survival of the fittest: the human story is a tale of communities. Living and working together - at considerably less than 2 meters apart – is what has enabled us to survive, to build, to invent, to collaborate and create, and to pass on the knowledge we gain.
For people, apartheid is, and always was, a terrible idea.
So watch out for nonsense. Everything is NOT going to change. And continue the search for the positive in the pandemic. As I was telling Lisa and Sinclair, with whom I am “sheltering in place”, this week marks the 40th anniversary of the premiere of The Shining - a movie with a simple and enduring message that, if three people are isolated for a long period in a confined space, one of them will eventually go mad and try to murder the others. Hmmm.