An American Prayer

Ben Cohen

Apr 19, 2020

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: So we are experimenting with a new feature on our publishing platform that allows us to embed the weekly podcast directly into the newsletter. You can listen to the podcast by clicking the “play” button above, or listening on Anchor here. In The Banter Podcast #6 [Trump's Coronavirus Shitshow (Again)] Ben and Mike discuss Trump tweets that states with stay-at-home orders need to be liberated in an attempt to get Tea Party 2.0. Also, Elon Musk promised to deliver ventilators to hospitals, but delivered sleep apnea machines instead. Yet for some reason he's insisting they are "ventilators."

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(image: EPA-EFE/Ritchie B Tongo)

by Rich Herschlag

My upper right rear tooth had been bothering me on and off for about three weeks. I suspected it was something worse than a minor cavity or a sensitive nerve, but I was reluctant to consume valuable medical resources in a time of pandemic and while doing so expose a dentist, a dental hygienist, and myself to unnecessary risk. But last Wednesday night the tooth seemingly exploded to the point where applying my usual Advil-ice chip-Orajel—NyQuil—Bacardi cocktail was like bringing a knife to a gum fight.

By late morning Thursday I was driving back home from emergency root canal through the nearly completely empty streets of Easton, PA wondering if this was bottom. With anesthesia wearing off and the hole in my head throbbing, I thought about my younger daughter ejected from her college dorm just six weeks before graduation; my older daughter removed from her research lab by state police; my consulting business nearly on life support; friends of friends passing every day, and a country brought together by the prospect of death in a way the promise of life never could manage.

I thought about my reduced bandwidth—the way five minutes of mental exertion now seems to take 10 or 15. The way “working at home” feels like being strapped to a chair, handed a laptop, pushed out of an airplane without a parachute and told to finish this spreadsheet before you hit the ground. I considered my sick relationship with cable news—the 24/7 mandatory Muzak drone of horrific stats and anecdotes that is now Must See TV for people too guilt-ridden to blare Judge Judy in the background.

And then I decided that even if this moment wasn’t bottom I was going to make it bottom. From here on out I would at least once daily bathe myself in good news so long as it wasn’t fake news. There is indeed plenty of good news every day, and though I have spent much of the past half century ignoring it out of principled cynicism, the combination of coronavirus and excruciating dental surgery has either brought me to my senses, to my knees, or both.

As you probably know, the hospital admission rate in New York City has fallen for several consecutive days. Governor Cuomo and some pundits spent Saturday morning pondering whether this was for the crisis the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, but semantics aside it is at least the end of thinking about the sacrifice of social distancing on American soil in the abstract. It has worked. It works. It will work. The absurdity of our current existence and the virtual prophylactic smothering each of us serves a real purpose. The president lies but the numbers do not. We have effectively bought time, and time is lives. I avoided looking at the fatality number today because whatever it was, it’s going to fall like a rock soon.

Remdesivir is among numerous antiviral drugs being developed but is notable because it was effective against Ebola and is already in Phase 3 trials. One of the most intelligent things I’ve read while poring over every scientific article I could find until dozing off is that billions of dollars are funding the manufacture of many of these drugs prior to approval. Sounds at first like lunacy, but experience and logic tell us that once a treatment or vaccine is found to be effective and safe, six months or more to gear up production for a world of almost eight billion is unacceptable.

COVID-19 survivors are being released from hospitals by the thousands, freeing up beds, valiant hospital staff, and ventilators that can be shipped to the next state, which hopefully won’t need them either. Perhaps most importantly, often without the benefit of an antibody test thousands of potential superheroes are being dispersed back into civilization, serving a practical purpose as aides, couriers and medical staff and a spiritual purpose as beacons of hope.

While he couldn’t get very far interviewing his brother Andrew, Chris Cuomo’s short video explaining how he beat COVID-19 was literally and figuratively breathtaking. Cuomo explains how on advice from a cardiopulmonary specialist he fought back by forcing himself to move around and take deep, often painful breaths. At a time when most of us are being told hiding in our homes passes for fighting back, it’s nice to hear that fighting back also qualifies as fighting back.

The cherry on the cake of the sort of good news I now consciously consume on a daily basis is the nobility of the American people. It’s not easy to find an original way to celebrate all those on the front lines, but I’m going to give it the old quarantine try. Though religious symbolism is plentiful during holidays that celebrate supernatural events, the human wish to break the chains of bondage or rise again is universal regardless of one’s metaphysical beliefs. Regardless of those same beliefs, I’ve never once met anyone with a spark in their eye who didn’t believe in the collective merit of human beings. Today, when we happen upon another human being—perhaps from afar and swathed in non-woven polypropylene fiber—may we quickly remember that they are bearing much the same burden we are.

I’ve lived through assassinations of beloved leaders, body bags of neighborhood kids coming back from Southeast Asia, a couple of oil crises, stagflation, the Iran hostage crisis, the Gulf War, 9/11, the Great Recession and too many hurricanes to mention and I can guarantee you I’ve seen as much or more common resolve and selflessness in the past few weeks as I’ve seen over all those decades. And that is why after a traumatic political, social, and now a health upheaval, the future ironically looks brighter than ever.