[Note: see the new comment on the March 13 blog below. FK]
Boy, that was a title that wrote itself. I don’t know about you, but I felt the weirdness factor take a quantum leap last Saturday when we had a special session of our guitar group practice at the band leader’s home. We were at his home because the library had been closed for the Corona virus. It seemed like a picnic, a freak party, a spontaneous jubilee, but without closure. Freak parties are supposed to end. This continued throughout the day, and then into the next, and then into the weekdays until now, the end of the week. ‘Jubilee’ has changed to a sense of disaster. Businesses are on the brink, bars are shutting down, perhaps forever, and in spite of the derision hoarders of toilet paper get, there is still no toilet paper at the grocery stores. Our retirement savings have been savaged and friends who own businesses have been calling for comfort because there is nothing they can do. The picnic has become a bad dream, or better, a shift into another reality. People say that the government should tell us about UFO action because we would NOT freak out, but this proves that we would. The panic hoarders would be buying everything then, and soon we would only be able to get something from them by force. It would not be pretty.
This will not get that bad. I believe it is an overreaction, because the epidemiologists have been given the reins, and all they think about is saving specific lives from the disease, without thinking about how many deaths will be caused in the long run from a global depression. There would be less free food, less charitable donations, less subsidized medicine, less concern for anyone else while trying to keep one’s family alive. There would be less of everything. I could be wrong, I know, and besides, I am getting too close to the political. Instead, I want to get back into the scary, magical space of the alternative reality we have entered, which really hit me last night when my younger brother called.
I was watching a news show that had been recorded when he rang, and of course I picked it up. I always pick it up when it is him because we can talk about everything and usually do. And of course we started right in about the weirdness of our times, which increased when he said, “Did you watch that news show tonight?” I explained I had been watching the recording of it when he called. “Well, turn it to the last three minutes. Right there, some freaky looking dude with a robotic voice just said we already have a cure, with chloroquine.” Chloroquine? I was very familiar with it. We carried it around in bottles like aspirin when I lived in the southern forests of Venezuela, which was lousy with malaria. It “bleaches” the liver, which I take to be a metaphor, if used too much, but a few weeks of it at a time kills off the most common of the malarial parasites. It is an absolute necessity, used since the early 20th century and just about as cheap as aspirin. This would be the miracle drug that everybody was hoping for without even thinking about it, thinking it was beyond hope.
I turned to the last three minutes as advised, and sure enough, there was that strange man, head of some medical department at Stanford no less, telling us that a peer-reviewed study in France has just been completed, where 100% of the 40 people treated with it were cured of the Corona virus. It was, he said, only the second virus killer ever found, the first being for hepatitis C about 20 years before. It was a one in a million shot of luck, like winning a large lottery. It was like the voice of God speaking, an impossibility that was; in effect, it might be a real miracle, another poke in our fragile minds pushing us further into the unknown.
Wow. With all that, I woke the next morning, yesterday, expecting the news to be shouting the wonder of this miraculous discovery; I expected the stock market to have shot up like a rocket and for everyone to be crying tears of joy and relief. To my surprise, I was dead wrong. The same baleful voices were telling us of more disaster and more dead and more people out of work, perhaps for months or years or God knows, until the End Times which these might be. What the heck? I had heard the man himself, a doctor at Stanford who would ruin his career with such a statement if he had been wrong. He had quoted the peer-reviewed study which clearly showed that this cheap drug which needed no additional testing for general use might be a very effective cure for most people. But no one seemed to care. Was it because of politics? Was the news media too enamored of its breathless reporting to face the beginning of the end of the biggest world crisis in our lives?
By later in the afternoon, some had mentioned the drug but with the caveat that it still “needed further tests.” No one mentioned the Stanford doctor or the peer-reviewed study which showed such clear and testable results. Were politics or storytelling at stake, or had they, too, slipped into that other dimension?
Of course they had. It is not hard to do. Take Fred Rogers for example.
On that same Saturday where I had the guitar practice and had found that we had all been propelled into an alternate reality, I did something that I had not done for at least twenty years. I held a family matinee of “A Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood” in our living room, with wife and our now twenty-something son who happened to be home. We had brats for lunch, then made popcorn doused in butter, closed the curtains, and began what I knew would be a tear-jerker, but hopefully not too corny a tear-jerker. It was not. It was absolutely excellent. It was excellent because it took this man who seemed so wimpy and unreal and showed how he was more real and more courageous than the rest of us. It did not do this by showing his struggles with some vice or with a rough childhood or anything of that sort. Rather, it showed a man who was committed to loving each and every person in the world as most Christians have been told to do but almost never do. He did this by acknowledging that each of us lives in his own reality field, a universe complete unto itself, so complete that each feels lonely and misunderstood and underappreciated and perhaps crushed by this loneliness. With this understanding, he was able to enter other people’s world the only way one can – with complete empathy. Most of this was done with children, but in this story, based on real life, it concerned hurt and lonely adults. It showed us that Mr. Rogers understood that each adult is still that small child living in his complete universe, but one that has been so muddled and hung with armor and scars that he often cannot find his own way out. As with the children, Mr. Rogers could enter that world and offer the necessary solace. With that solace, the individual could at last free himself from his isolation. In so doing, he – any of us - would then be able to reach into another’s universe with the same compassion.
See how it all fits. In a way, we are brought together by this Corona catastrophe, but because it is based on fear, it alienates more than it unites. That is what fear does: that, fear of being exposed, is why we self-alienate in the first place. More fear makes us hide even deeper. It is this which gives us the feeling that we have entered another dimension. But intensified fear is also what can force us out of our personal universe, because it often gets too weird to handle.
Fred Rogers showed us how we can escape our personal prisons: to treat each person as a full universe with all the emotions that he can imagine right there, as it is with all of us. To use other, more venerable words, if we are to reach across the vacuum between personal universes we have to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” This does not mean we have to love them as a spouse or as our child, but rather to recognize them as the full universes that they are. This kind of love is a matter of ultimate respect. It is what brings healing to all but the most damaged. It is the only cornerstone that can be used to develop a true one- world new order. Where politicians and dictators fail, recognizing others as humans just as full and complex as ourselves will work, if honestly tried.
Chloroquine or any other drug is not the panacea to our problems. Rather, our new fear reminds us that we are always in fear. Good ‘ol Fred reminds us once again how we can heal ourselves and others more deeply and become free of that fear.
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