Our World Gets Smaller Again

Delta. Afghanistan. Division. A season of defeat drives us inward.

I’m watching the rain race in rivulets down the window. It’s drumming on the skylights.

This should be good news. It’s hardly rained this year. The grass is the color of the Sahara Desert. The plants in the yard are anemic and sad. I can only imagine if I was a farmer.

But rain tonight feels cruel. My wife and I were supposed to attend an engagement party for the daughter of dear friends. A truly lovely young woman who grew up with our daughter. In the backyard, with masks at the ready, it seemed safe enough. Even with the Delta variant rampaging.

Driven indoors by the rain, not so much. Maybe back in the halcyon days of late June, with vaccination rates on the rise and COVID seemingly on the run. Not anymore. Our good friends canceled the party.

I stayed home and obsessed over the news out of Afghanistan. We’re learning we have a new implacable foe. Yet another evil in the world. Well, not exactly new, as it turns out. The Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, has been a malevolent presence in Afghanistan for years. But the place the group seared into our consciousness with their monstrous bomb at the center of a crowd surging toward the Hamid Karzai International Airport, and the U.S. Soldiers there to help save them, that’s new.

Terrorism gets a new worse variant, just like SARS CoV-2 got its Delta variant. Dangers compounding dangers.

The net effect is our everyday world once again diminishes. We’re back to recalculating risk in even the most normal things. I ordered a new box of N-95 masks. I’m re-thinking plans to spend a few days along the North Shore of Lake Superior. The trees there are on fire anyway. The sky is choked with thick clouds of smoke.

“Recalculating,” as the NAV system on my car says when I’ve made a wrong turn. That’s what we all need to be doing.

Here are some numbers from my relatively sensible home state of Minnesota to plug into your calculations. The town of Albert Lea, south and west of where I live, started school using the “personal responsibility” system being trumpeted by MAGA governors in the red-hot COVID states like Florida and Texas. Five days into the school year more than 300 students were out on quarantine. Now masks are mandated.

During the same week, test scores came out from the Department of Education and they show how much damage was done by the previous year of getting the public health wrong. We’re down to just over 52% of students “proficient” in reading, and 44% meeting state math standards. That’s a steep drop for a state more accustomed to seeing numbers like that go up.

One another number — zero.

My son, a pulmonologist dealing with the surge of COVID cases in Oregon, writes that the math has changed with the arrival what he’s started calling super COVID. He used to get a fair number of wins. Even very sick patients had a shot at getting off the ventilator and going home while the staff lined the hallway and clapped.

Now he’s not getting any wins at all. That’s what you’re up against if you don’t have the vaccine on your side.

“There are zero vaccinated COVID-19 patients in my ICU,” my son writes.

My level of patience with the unvaccinated and unmasked, and the political charlatans urging them on, is approaching zero. I notice I’m not alone in this.

On the news I see parents protesting outside schoolboard meetings, howling about the idea of their kids wearing masks in class. I don’t know what kind of people they are, but I know this. If they’re willing to risk another year of lost learning over something as easy as masking up, they’re bad parents.

Maybe it’s not knowing what comes next that makes it hard for so many. So here’s what we know for sure. We can endure one more season of Zoom. Of ghostly quiet downtowns and partially filled churches. Of disappointed plans. Of meeting friends outside in the yard with the patio heater glowing red.

Of being unable to hug my grandson from a thousand miles away, as painful as that last one may be.

We can do that, while we reassess, get a handle on what we’re exactly dealing with here, give the doctors and nurses and hospitals a chance to breathe. We have that much in us. Right?

If our intestinals still need some extra fortitude for the work ahead, let’s think about the kids willing to risk all to stand guard at the Kabul airport and try to get a few more people to safety even though they knew there were bombs out there aimed their way along with tens of thousands of Kalashnikovs. Or consider the healthcare workers who strap on respirators for grueling 14-hour shifts in the ICU, and still need to isolate from their families and get COVID tests because they keep ending up exposed.

Kind of puts the courage required to roll up your sleeve and get a shot, even if you’re squeamish, into perspective.