Half-Alarm

Even the Peanuts gang is getting in on the act.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that 2020 has received a bum rap. Not in the sense that it's been an awesome year, and is due some recognition for that fact, but in the sense that 2020 has been made into the fall guy for something that the world could, and perhaps should, have been prepared for.

I read an article from 2007 that discussed a pair of papers, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in mitigating the 1918 influenza pandemic. I mention this as a way of noting that the idea of a repeat of 1918, and the measures taken to contain the outbreak are not new. But the public wasn't prepared for what happened. In this interview from Marketplace, aired on December 10th, a Los Angeles cheese seller tells host Kai Ryssdal that she thought that the business closures and the like would last about a week. Mr. Ryssdal's response: "Right. Yeah, we all did."

But once it was clear that the SARS-2 CoV spread was expanding, why were people thinking that this was something that would have been contained in either a literal or figurative week? Part of it, I understand, comes from not wanting to panic people. But there is a problem that lies beneath that; that substantive changes spark widespread panics.

The world does not owe humanity anything. Earth was doing perfectly well for itself prior to our coming, and will likely continue to do so after we are gone. Perhaps, if we can work out the physics of it all, we'll be able to move the planet out of the way of the expanding shell of the Sun, when the star enters its expected red giant phase. This might be enough to be able to say that the Earth itself is in our debt. Until then, I suspect that humanity still has a lot to repay.

Generally speaking, American society is structured to be efficient, rather than resilient. Just-in-time is the order of the day. And this is a functional choice, not an ethical one. Neither of them is more or less "right" than the other. But they both have costs. And the way that 2020 has unfolded has revealed some of the costs of efficiency, by laying them in our laps.

I don't know if there will be a change. I suspect there won't. The American public, by in large, is actively disinterested in the systems that surround and support it. It's all somebody else's problem. But that, in the end, is what may 2020 such a difficult time. Suddenly, it wasn't just somebody else's problem, and people were unprepared for that that would mean. And given long enough, society as a whole will go back to being unprepared. It's the way of things, and most of the time, it works. And that's the downside to it all; that when things work, when they don't require constant attention, the time and energy that would be devoted to them becomes a form of dead weight loss, until things would have otherwise broken. The example that I like to use are fire extinguishers. The trouble, time and expense in buying and maintaining fire extinguishers is wasted; up until the moment that there's a fire. So far, I've never had a fire. And I might not ever. It's actually pretty likely that I'll never need one of the fire extinguishers I have on hand. And so they represent resources that I could have put to better things. But I can never be sure of that until I die without ever having needed them. So were they a good investment? I don't know. And there's only one real way to find out. But either way, the day, the month or the year won't be the culprit, or the hero.