This too shall pass

All of us who are locked down have a sound basis for feeling sorry for ourselves.

Little fresh air, no sports, digital-only interactions with good friends and colleagues, and rare opportunities to venture beyond our homes. Think of caged chickens.

But, relatively speaking, these are trivial complaints. My parents were married in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression. That crisis lasted for more than a decade, giving way to another disaster — World War II. In both cases, no one had any idea when the crisis would end. (Sound familiar?) It was unclear what impact the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt would have on the Depression, or how long potential changes might take to manifest. It also wasn’t clear that the war would put the economic crisis in the rearview mirror for good.

I remember my parents, having agreed to host a wedding reception for a relative, frantically leveraging connections just to secure a decent meal for the occasion. And when the U.S. entered WWII, I remember most of the men in my neighborhood shipping off, risking their lives for years. And I remember the refugees who soon moved in, in particular a Czech couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hupert, whom my mother befriended.

So, annoying as the lockdown is, compared with the Depression and the second global war in little more than 20 years, this is nothing, zip, zero.

Protesting the lockdown with weapons of war and Confederate and Nazi flags is to dishonor mightily the real and widespread suffering of earlier times. The protesters just don’t know anything. But, then, they haven’t lived long enough yet.

The United States, and the rest of the world, could soon be faced with even greater hardship. Wars often follow economic hardship, and tensions have been rising between North and South Korea, as well as India and Pakistan. There is also the very real concern that President Donald Trump, who has struggled with the ongoing effects of COVID-19 on the American economy, could start a conflict to enhance his chances of being re-elected in November.

I think that once the U.S. gets a better testing regimen in place, the economy will recover and people will have money again. Trillions of dollars in debt worry me. Do we really want to hand on a country in massive debt to our children and grandchildren? It would be as if our last will and testament constituted a distribution of debt among them. I would feel a lot better about it if there were some plan to whittle away at it, maybe to reduce it by $1 trillion a year.

I believe that Mr. Trump, a bankruptcy-prone real estate operator by trade, could pull that off. And, if he could do that, I might even be prepared to forget about my hope that climate change will drag Mar-a-Lago underwater. It could be that his “light at the end of the tunnel” is not a locomotive coming in.

In the meantime, I will just have to be glad that the earlier parts of my life were not lived under locked-down circumstances. I swam in Long Island Sound, the Mediterranean Sea off Benghazi, Libya, and Beirut, Lebanon, and the Dead Sea. Never again, I suppose.

But spare me the sound of me or anyone else whining about the circumstances we are experiencing now. I remember the dust in the air in New York after 9/11. I saw the gunshot holes in the wall of our house in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and our grandson marveled at comparable holes in the body of our car.

It won’t be the same afterward, but this, too, shall pass. So far it isn’t even good enough to make a film like “Casablanca.” We may be destined to play it again, or to write a more interesting coda. I don’t even know whom we would shoot, or where we would fly off to.

Brazzaville does not host a resistance and Lisbon has had its own problems with the virus.