A year of grief, hope and change
We have suffered, seen and learned much one year since the pandemic was declared
Where were you when the world stopped? It’s a grim question, one with answers unique to every individual who has endured a year of living in the pandemic.
For some, it was the early reporting from China about a new virus strain that first sounded alarm bells. For others, the first confirmed cases, including those in Virginia, served as the wake-up call that the disease was a real and immediate threat.
But on March 11 last year, everything changed.
That day, the head of the World Health Organization announced that COVID19 was a global pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a household name now if he wasn’t then, told Congress in a high-profile hearing that the coronavirus would get much worse than the 600 cases confirmed at the time. Sporting events across the country suspended play.
Be it that WHO declaration, Fauci’s ominous warning, the sight of empty basketball courts or even actor Tom
Hanks’ announcement that he had contracted the virus, everyone has a moment they remember when the seriousness of the situation was unmistakable.
Into the unknown we plunged. Social distancing and hand washing were encouraged, followed by limitations on gatherings and travel. Masks were mandated. Schools were closed. Restaurants and business were restricted.
The worst was yet to come, as we now know. COVID-19 has claimed more than 526,000 American lives, including more than 9,700 in Virginia.
More than 2.6 million are dead worldwide, the global landscape changed by this pathogen.
Many more were sickened, some seriously and some permanently, by the coronavirus. But there is no one left untouched by what’s happened in the last year.
In Hampton Roads, the frontline health care workers who performed heroic work in the face of that horror will be forever shaped by the experience. We owe each of them so much for their courage and will never be able to repay that debt.
Bravery wasn’t confined to the area’s hospitals and clinics. From grocery store clerks and delivery drivers, to essential manufacturers, food workers and mail carriers, there are so many people — our family, friends and neighbors — who stepped forward when the circumstances demanded it.
Much was made of the disinformation artists and conspiracy theorists — those who proudly proclaimed, in the face of all evidence, that COVID-19 wasn’t worse than the flu — but the fact is those charlatans were vastly outnumbered by area residents who honored the guidelines, did what was asked and reached out to help others.
That spirit of common purpose — of compassion and resolve — gave us hope when we needed it and strength to carry on when things looked their worst. If there is something to take from this awful experience, it should be that.
There is still a tremendous amount of grief and pain and loss that permeates our region today. There are empty chairs at too many dinner tables, empty desks in too many offices and empty pews in too many churches.
That anguish will linger.
The world changed abruptly and dramatically a year ago. Few of us were prepared for what unfolded, and there is much we would do differently if given another chance. But we shouldn’t need a deadly disease to show our gratitude to those who serve, or to be helpful and kind toward one another.
We should strive to be more compassionate toward others, to help when and how we can and to try to build tighter and more connected communities — to know our neighbors and give them strength, understanding they will be there when we need some for ourselves.
And we should also take clear notice of what the pandemic revealed — the need to strengthen our health systems and reduce inequity of care, to broaden our safety net programs and make them more resilient, to plan for worst-case scenarios and to put our trust in the most knowledgeable and experienced rather than those with the loudest voices.
From the idealistic liberalism of my high school English teachers, I learned that to try to get rid of offensive literature is the great sin of easily triggered rubes. A special horror at banning books, which usually meant removing them from the curriculum in some rural school district, pervaded our libraries and classrooms. And a particular shame seemed to throb in my teachers’ breasts when they admitted that some books were even targeted — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” say — for misguided progressive reasons.
This past week I learned from a different kind of liberalism that only easily triggered rubes care when offensive books are made to disappear. It was mildly creepy to hear that the custodians of Theodor Geisel’s estate, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, consulted with a “panel of experts” and decided to cease publishing six Seuss titles because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” But it was much creepier that so few people notionally in the free-expression business, so few liberal journalists and critics, seemed troubled by the move.
There were exceptions — Substack exiles with their free-speech absolutism, the occasional libertarian contrarian. But often the Seuss cancellation was dismissed as a boob bait for Fox News viewers and a move to which only someone sunk in white anxiety could possibly object.
Plus, we were told, it’s only six books. And is Seuss so great anyway?
“The vast, vast majority of his books, the ones without racist images or references,” wrote Philip Bump of The Washington
Post, “will still be sold.” And if Dr. Seuss’ “profile wanes a bit … to whom is harm being done?”
In The Guardian, Lili Wilkinson noted dismissively that “the six books in question were far from being bestsellers,” while Bump’s colleague, the usually perspicacious critic Alyssa Rosenberg, took the cancellation as an occasion to complain about “the tiresome lack of imagination” of people who obsess over Seuss but not, say, Peter Spier.
Now I love Spier, but this is still a censor’s argument. Upset that you can’t get a copy of “Ulysses”? You can still read “Dubliners,” which is better anyway. Also, plenty of other Irish authors out there.
Maybe that’s sound logic; as a Catholic I have a nostalgia for the Index of Forbidden Books. But it’s strange logic coming from liberal writers and publications.
In fact, the Seuss cancellations illustrate exactly the problems with censoriousness that liberals normally invoke. First, you have a nonspecific justification attributed to unnamed “experts” and “educators” that sweeps up a range of books and illustrations. The indubitably racist depiction of apelike Africans in “If I Ran the Zoo,” the canceled Seuss that most deserves it, gets the same treatment as “On Beyond Zebra!,” whose apparent crime is a Seussian picture of an Arab-looking man on a camellike beast. And a single problematic image seems to be enough to make an entire book disappear: One chopstick-wielding Chinese man in “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” apparently, means the first major work of an American master can’t be published anymore.
Second, the vagueness of the new standard offers openings for further disappearances. The anti-racist left is already ready with a critique of Seuss’ larger oeuvre, taking on everything from the alleged minstrel show element in “The Cat in the Hat” to the complacent colorblindness of
“The Sneetches.” And the principle established by this auto-cancellation could have applications well beyond Seuss-land.
For perfectly consistent reasons too. Western children’s literature really has been influenced by imperialism and racism. The Babar books have obvious colonialist undertones. Ditto the Man in the Yellow Hat. And as kids get older — well, “The Lord of the Rings” is waiting, with its Greco-Roman Gondorians besieged by darker races from the south and east.
I am not being dismissive here: J.R.R. Tolkien’s chauvinism is a real moral and artistic flaw. But it’s a flaw in a work of genius, just as colonialist subtext in Babar is a complication in a brilliant series of books. In a free society that appreciates greatness, these flaws are good reasons to develop a diverse canon — but terrible reasons to make the works of important artists disappear.
The Seuss cancellations also illustrate how a disappearance can happen without a legal “ban” being literally imposed. One day, the Seuss estate decides to self-censor; the next, that decision becomes the justification for eBay to delist used copies of the books. In a cultural landscape dominated by a few big companies with politically uniform management, you don’t need state censorship for books to swiftly vanish.
Yes, Amazon, the power that controls half of U.S. new book sales and around
80% of the e-book market, is still selling the used Seuss. But maybe not forever.
Just a few weeks ago the Amazonian giant decided to simply delete, without real explanation, a 2018 book by Ryan Anderson, a Catholic scholar and the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”
As with Seuss, the Anderson deletion has mostly been a conservative cause célèbre. I’ve seen little liberal concern over the dominant player in the book business playing censor in culture war debates.
But that case is particularly interesting because it’s not exactly that liberals are failing the hard test of defending a book they find bigoted or transphobic. For some that’s true, but I live and work among highly educated liberals, and I know that more than a few of them actually agree with the critiques of current transgender theory that Anderson presents. They’re skeptical about the widespread use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria. They’re wary about the implications for women’s spaces, women’s sports. They don’t share Anderson’s Catholic presuppositions, but they are, at least, J.K. Rowling liberals.
In the last stages of the same-sex marriage debate, I never encountered a flicker of private doubt from liberal friends. But in the gender identity debate, there are pervasive liberal doubts about the current activist position. Yet without liberal objection, that position appears to set rules for what Amazon will sell.
What does this say about the condition of liberalism? Something not so great, I think. I don’t expect “The Cat in the
Hat” to be unpublished or my own tracts to swiftly vanish. But it was a good thing when liberalism, as a dominant cultural force in a diverse society, included a strong tendency to police even itself for censoriousness — the ACLU tendency, the don’tban-Mark-Twain tendency, the free-speech piety of the high school English teacher.
Now liberal cultural power has increased, the ACLU doesn’t seem very interested in the liberties of nonprogressives anymore, and Dr. Seuss sells as pricey samizdat. I don’t know what awaits beyond this particular Zebra, and I’d rather not find out.