People used to take things in stride. I realize that by saying that, I sound like an old curmudgeon. But maybe I now understand better why old curmudgeons sound like old curmudgeons.
I grew up, as the somewhat-older author of this essay “Say Your Prayers and Take Your Chances: Remembering the 1957 Asian flu pandemic” did, in an era when nearly all children got a series of diseases that are now mostly distant memories. The vast majority of us survived quite nicely, unlike in previous eras:
Before the Modern Revolution child mortality was very high in all societies that we have knowledge of – a quarter of all children died in the first year of life, almost half died before reaching the end of puberty
Royalty was not immune; look at the record of the children of Peter the Great, for example. It’s horrific. It’s also one of many reasons people tried to have as many children as possible, although a lot of women died in childbirth or shortly after. Another terrible risk that was common in prior eras.
It was much much better when I was growing up. But still, in a few short years and while I was a toddler I had measles, mumps, German measles (is that racist?), and chicken pox, and that’s just what I remember. Polio was rather common, too, although a vaccine was developed when I was in grade school; I remember what a big big deal that was, and what a hero Salk was considered to be.
My only cousin had measles encephalitis when I was about two, and died a few years later of complications from it. I remember his death very very well, and his disabilities too. That’s the sort of thing that makes a deep impression on a child. My mother told me later that, when I had contracted measles not all that long after my cousin had them, she sweated it out because the risks were very clear to her. Another couple who were good friends of my parents had lost a child from measles even before I was born, and I heard about that periodically, too.
No one had to impress on me the seriousness of measles. I knew. And polio? We saw the photos of all those kids in the iron lungs, and we saw children walking around with braces on their legs.
But that personal knowledge is gone, along with those diseases and many others (for the most part, anyway, at least in this country; I’ve written about the anti-vax movement elsewhere and am not going to take it up now, but the lack of fear of certain diseases is partly responsible for the movement).
It’s a wonderful thing that the incidence of most of those diseases has been remarkably reduced. Wonderful, fabulous, a great reduction in human suffering. But there’s been a cost, too, and it’s the increasing fragility of our psyches’ ability to withstand and endure even the prospect of an increase in disease and mortality that mirrors what my generation experienced.
As Clark Whelton, the author of the City Journal essay I linked to earlier, writes:
It’s not that Asian flu—the second influenza pandemic of the twentieth century—wasn’t a serious disease. Worldwide, this flu strain killed somewhere between 1 and 2 million people. More than 100,000 died in the U.S. alone. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, governors did not call out the National Guard, and political panic-mongers did not blame it all on President Eisenhower. College sports events were not cancelled, planes and trains continued to run, and Americans did not regard one another with fear and suspicion, touching elbows instead of hands. We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.
Today, I look back and wonder if an oblivious America faced the 1957 plague with a kind of clueless folly. Why weren’t we more active in fighting this contagion? Could stricter quarantine procedures have reduced the rate of infection and lowered the death toll? In short, why weren’t we more afraid?
His answer is that we were more used to infectious diseases. But a corollary of that is that we would have had to have closed down shop indefinitely. There were so many illnesses around all the time that there was no way to escape. You might say we were fatalistic, you might say we were resigned, you might say we were stupid, you might say we assumed the risk, or you might say we understood that the drawbacks of that sort of reaction were immense as well.
Of course, I wasn’t around in 1918. I wasn’t around when smallpox and tuberculosis or the Black Death killed far far more of the people on earth than any of the plagues of my lifetime have come close to killing. I cannot even imagine how terrible those things were; I don’t even want to imagine. And I doubt that people took them in stride at all. And I think a good part of the dread and fear now is that in the back of our minds – or for some people, even the front of our minds – we know that such catastrophes are still possible. Human beings know they are intensely vulnerable.
But COVID-19 is not shaping up to be that sort of event, and there’s no reason to think it will be. However, although many measures are prudent – handwashing, increased testing, hospital preparedness, some measure of social distancing at least for a while – the degree of fear I see and hear is far greater than anything I can recall in my lifetime around a medical event.
And it’s not just medical events, either. Students demand that colleges protect them from ever feeling bad or bullied or offended by anything anyone says. Woman have become so reactive to the idea of sexual harassment that many have redefined it to include what used to be considered standard compliments on appearance. People start bitter twitter wars about things like cultural appropriation. There seems to be a hair-trigger over-reactivity, a new emotional fragility and vulnerability, that is akin to what can happen when a person fails to develop normal immunities of the physical type, to use a medical analogy.
[NOTE: On a different but related topic, I also can readily recall when a president – any president of any party – would be cut slack by his critics during an emergency, particularly a medical one. Those days of near-reflexive pulling together are gone, long gone. Now it seems the chief focus of the Democrats’ reaction to this crisis is to criticize Trump and score political points. There are hopeful exceptions, though, and that’s why I cheered the reactions of governors Newsom of California and Cuomo of New York:
[From Newsom]: [Trump and I] had a private conversation, but he said, ‘We’re gonna do the right thing’ and ‘You have my support, all of our support, logistically and otherwise.’ He said everything I could have hoped for. And we had a very long conversation and every single thing he said, they followed through on.
Cuomo:
This sort of thing used to be standard and expected. If a politician didn’t do it, people would have been critical of the omission. No more.]
