In the middle of March, as shelter-at-home orders were beginning to roll out across the country, Fresh Air on NPR aired an interview with Max Brooks (1) that I have thought about every day since I heard it. Brooks is a novelist; he writes zombie literature with lots of end-of-the-world scenarios. I think he has had at least one book turned into a movie but since I don’t like that sort of fiction (really, not much fiction at all, I am a little ashamed to admit), I have not read any of his books (2). He is sort of a professional end-of-the-world-scenario drawer. He works with people who help make the plans for national safety and security in the case of a disaster, nuclear attack or yes, a pandemic. He is a lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
He says some things that I think are important to consider, if we are going to truly, fundamentally, recover from this pandemic. I also identify with him because he seems like a skeptic on the outside – being able to imagine the worst, in its most horrific form – but an optimist on the inside – being able to imagine the best of all possible worlds, seeing the best we can be. (Maybe “skeptic” is not the right word but “pessimist” is not the right word, either, because pessimism is irredeemable. Or, at least that is the way I think of that word.)
When the virus has finally run its course through the world, and months from now when we can leave our homes again, a lot of people will argue over how much could have been prevented. They will argue about it because people want someone or something to blame, other than a virus. Brooks explains that one one of things we could have done is to simply stick with the plans we had put in place earlier in the 20th century:
“I think that we [Americans] have been disastrously slow and disorganized from Day 1. I think the notion that we were caught unaware of this pandemic is just an onion of layered lies. That is not true at all. We have been preparing for this since the 1918 influenza pandemic – no excuse.”
Fresh Air. (2020, March 24). Author Max Brooks On COVID-19: ’All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented’ : NPR. Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/transcripts/820601571
Of course, he’s right. The virus had started killings thousands of people in China before it ever made its way to the United States. To suggest we did not see it coming is ridiculously fatuous.
What we didn’t see was the infrastructure that could have been mobilized to react quickly and effectively has been slowly eroding in the last 20 – 30 years. I did not know anything about the the 1918 influenza pandemic and its effect on our national preparations afterwards. Apparently, as a nation, we analyzed what we could do differently and developed stockpiles of equipment and supplies that could be utilized in an emergency. I am sorry that he did not have time to go into more detail but I think that the 1918 pandemic, at least – maybe the polio outbreak? – helped create the Defense Production Act, which allows the federal government to step into the private arena and commandeer what we need to act quickly and aggressively. But Trump did not invoke the Defense Production Act.
Despite the warnings of the very smart, patriotic and hard-working people that Brooks talks about, the people who could have helped us mitigate this disaster, there was a climate of denial and resistance to facts which accounts for the “onion of layered lies” that Brooks refers to. Electing Trump was the culmination of years of a lot of people who did not want to hear that bad things happen to good people. Things change and not always for the better. That is just the truth and when you never plan for the bad stuff, you are indeed caught unaware and unprepared. Brooks says,
“It’s not just President Trump’s fault that we are continuing to build a society and support a tech world that is based on comfort and not on resilience.”
Fresh Air. (2020, March 24). Author Max Brooks On COVID-19: ’All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented’ : NPR. Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/transcripts/820601571
That word – resilience – is critical to understand and hold up as a goal in the aftermath of this disaster.
Any parenting book will tell you that the best thing to do for your children is teach them how to be resilient. Our job as a parent is not to give them everything they want but to teach them how to work for what they want. Our job is to show them that they are capable of coming back from failure, when it happens. And it will happen. They need to know that failure happens to everyone. They need to experience it while they are still home, safe and loved. They need to see their parents handle failure – not anticipate it, or expect it, but be prepared and be able to recover when it happens.
Why should a community of people be any different? Even if the community is 300 million people? It is possible to be prepared for bad things to happen without letting that preparation get in the way of moving forward and hoping for good in the future. We are not destined to be governed by fear or unwilling to change or resistant to the unknown – while we acknowledge that bad things can happen and that we can prepare for them … at least to some extent.
Which brings me to another observation of Brooks’s:
“[W]hat I found is cultures that already have a siege mentality tend to be better prepared for anything because they have a sense of vulnerability, and that sense of vulnerability filters down to their institutions and to their individual citizens.”
Fresh Air. (2020, March 24). Author Max Brooks On COVID-19: ’All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented’ : NPR. Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/transcripts/820601571
Then he cites South Korea, Taiwan and Israel as three countries who illustrate this phenomenon because they live with the specter of destruction on a massive scale every day. South Korea, Taiwan and Israel all have large, well-armed, bully neighbors who would like to destroy them or subjugate them. Going to war against the coronavirus did not require a whole lot more heavy lifting than the sort of preparation they have in place now, in case of attack.
Except, hold on, you may argue that South Korea, Taiwan and Israel are much smaller countries and a whole lot more homogeneous than the United States. Right? They can marshal their resources, unite their people and fight a common enemy more effectively because they are fewer in number, cover a much smaller land mass, speak the same language, and frankly, just don’t seem as divided from each other as we are, along the lines of class, race, religion and political persuasion.
Here is where the optimist in me comes into the picture. I think that Americans have as much ability to rally and recover as South Korea, Taiwan or Israel. I think it is our size and widely divergent resources, the heterogeneity that can make life so difficult, which is a strength of ours. I think that heterogeneity, if we allow ourselves to embrace it and value it as something very American, can be the critical piece in our recovery. We will be able to think through the best solutions, and prepare the most resilient response to the next disaster, if we use the advantages that heterogeneity gives us (3).
Finally, the last thing Max Brooks said that I have been mulling over is a phrase he used: “anxiety comes from the fog of not knowing.” I have been pontificating here, which I usually try to not do, so I am going to put this in very personal terms. I am like Brooks; I feel worse when I do not know. I would prefer to have more information than less, even if the more information is scarier and harder to deal with.
“So when you have a public that knows there’s a problem, but their leader says there is no problem, that creates a gap. Within that gap comes anxiety that then breeds panic. If on the first day of the crisis, if the president had said, listen, this is not a hoax. This is real. But it’s not the end of the world. On a scale of one to 10, this is a 3.5. And we have to make sure it doesn’t go to a 4.5, 5.5, up to a 10. This is where we are. And if we had been told something like that, then that would’ve helped calm us down.”
Fresh Air. (2020, March 24). Author Max Brooks On COVID-19: ’All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented’ : NPR. Retrieved April 12, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/transcripts/820601571
Here’s the personal part of this post: I feel better now that it has finally hit and things are bad. I don’t feel better because people are sick and dying. I don’t. In fact, I keep thinking that the law of averages says I will know someone who dies in this pandemic; there is no way I will escape unscathed and that terrifies me. (I admit I have been thinking a lot more about my own death but that is for another post.) Yet the anticipation of the disaster was worse than anything. Watching its slow march across Asia, across Europe and knowing it was a matter of days before there were people getting sick here was causing me enormous anxiety. I wasn’t sleeping. I was crying at any pretext. I was reading the news obsessively.
Now, we know more about how the virus is transmitted, who is most vulnerable, what to do if you are symptomatic. We know some of the details of the worst case – what it is like to die from this virus. Most of all, though, we are finally getting directives and guidelines which everyone is supposed to follow and rules are being implemented that enforce the guidelines. Before, when I did not want to leave my house, but everyone else was still leaving theirs, not only did I risk losing my job but I felt CRAZY. What sort of lunatic reads about a virus in China and wants to isolate at home in Kansas? Me. Because I did not have any information. Because I could not see through the fog of not knowing to be able to take action. Because I can’t fight what I can’t see or understand or quantify.
I am angry and frustrated and scared, usually several times a day, but not the way I was before we knew what we were fighting. We should have more of a lot of things: testing, ventilators, masks, hospital beds, healthcare professionals. We should have leaders who tell the truth and are willing to ask those smart people, like Brooks, for their help.
We should also remember we are not alone.
- https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-could-have-been-prevented-author-max-brooks-on-covid-19
- He is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, both of whose work I really admire, so I listened to Terry Gross’s interview with him several years ago. When she had him on again, I already knew he was credible. Link to the interview in 2017: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/15/543614192/novelist-max-brooks-on-doomsday-dyslexia-and-growing-up-with-hollywood-parents
- Yeah, okay, I haven’t figured this out completely but I think it is worth saying here. Maybe I will work it out in more detail at some later point. I am hardly the first person to suggest that diversity is a strength or that something is more resilient after being introduced to a “foreign” attack and surviving it, by incorporating it. Right? Isn’t that what a vaccine does?