As curve flattens, pressure grows to reopen Va.
If we emerge from the fallout shelter only to confront an economic landscape absent of businesses, it’s far from a happy ending
In September 1918, the Spanish Influenza broke out in Virginia and over the next five months more than 10,000 Virginians died.
We’ve been in the clutches of the coronavirus epidemic for a month or so and, on Thursday, officials announced that the Virginian death count had exceeded 100. So, barring a horrendous acceleration of the disease, we are not going to experience the same losses of a century ago. That’s good, right?
Yes. Undoubtedly. Who would say otherwise?
But here’s the thing: We’re dying economically right now and that was clearly not the case back then. No one stopped working. Businesses did not close. Schools remained open.
The other night I found a little pamphlet published in 1920 by Oscar Jewell Harvey, which focused on local Pennsylvania efforts to fight the “Spanish Influenza Pandemic.”
It was “disconcerting” to realize that just as America threw itself into the First World War, Harvey wrote, “we should be smitten with a visitation which caused more casualties and deaths among the peaceful citizens in the homeland than the deadly missiles and poisonous gases of the enemy effected among the American Expeditionary Forces overseas in the great World War.”
Smitten, but not undone. In effect, we endured the losses. We got up each day and went to work.
Now, obviously, it should be understood that social distancing — separation, huddling at home, avoiding human contact — is the very thing that is keeping the number of deaths down.
We’re being smarter now, in other words. We are not oblivious to the carnage. We are doing constructive, beneficial things and the distance between ourselves is clearly saving us.
But “saving us” for what? That is the question, and the clamor for a response is growing louder.
If we emerge from the fallout shelter, ala The Twilight Zone, only to confront a desolate, economic landscape of destroyed businesses, ruined personal finances and financiallybusted schools, it will be hard to describe that as a happy ending.
It’s already pretty awful. We’ve taken a growing state economy and effectively slammed the thing in reverse, with commensurate effects. The General Assembly will convene on April 22, not just for its regular veto session, but to confront the stark reality of plunging revenues.
As a result, the new two-year state budget will closely resemble the current two-year state budget. Virginia will try to maintain the status quo and even that may be a serious challenge.
Just take one aspect of this heartbreak: Virginia’s economic light, that source of pride in recent years — creative eateries, vineyards, breweries and similar entertainment venues, universally driven by inspired entrepreneurship — has been crippled.
Think of these establishments as merely places to eat or a place to spend time and you miss the point.
Think of them as affirmations of imaginative human effort, that literally improve the way we live and employ thousands, and you recognize this as a tragedy.
In the last two weeks in
March, roughly 10 million Americans filed claims for unemployment benefits. Virginians made more claims in those same two weeks than in all of 2019.
All this has stimulated some two-step thinking.
First step: Survive. Separate. Wear a mask. Hide. Watch TV. Do tele-whatever.
Second step: We can’t survive doing it this way.
Earlier this week, I sent a note to an old friend, someone in a position of oversight for one of the state’s leading universities.
I asked him, “How do these schools — yours, any of them — not open in the fall? How does that possibly work, given the financial structure of these institutions? How much revenue rests on out-of-state and international students? A lot, right? You have to get the students back on campus. This on-line stuff has a halflife. Not opening the campuses in the fall makes no sense to me, even if you have to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure safety.”
I got a one-word reply: “Amen!”
The third step in the collective thinking process has begun.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said last week, “I do think it’s time to have a serious public conversation ... we need to have a plan nationally for reopening the economy. We all want it to happen as quickly as possible.”
Then he added: “That’s a judgment that has to be made, I think, starting with health officials.”
OK, fine. See what they think. But then look for openings, accommodations, variations, amendments, anything that will pry open the door and resuscitate the great American economic machine.
Virginia might even consider leading the way.
After writing editorials for The Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C. Morse wrote speeches for Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co. and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@msn.com.