Apparently, it was no earlier than 1966 that Robert F. Kennedy, giving an address in Capetown, South Africa said, “There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May he live in interesting times.’” The name Robert Kennedy today conjures a very interesting time in American history, even painfully interesting for some of us.

            But, like all history, the interest and the pain will fade. Wait long enough and none of it will be remembered. Who Robert F. Kennedy was, what America or South Africa were – all will be blurred into myth or oblivion. In the distant future, all manner of fictions will rise up from the buried rhizome of time – or what we call our present lives. “Consider Phlebas, who once was young and strong as you.”

            A case in point, though a small matter: no one can find any Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Frederic R. Coudert said there was such a Chinese curse in 1939. Remember Fred? No? He was a New York Republican. A US Representative. He served in World War One. And now he’s dead. Been dead for fifty years.

            Even he didn’t invent the “Chinese curse.” Coudert was quoting Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain. Have you ever heard of him? He’s even deader.

            No one concerns themselves today about whether or not Sir Joseph or Coudert lived in interesting times. But at the moment, being in this world-historical event, many of our wisest heads are feeling pressed to say something of significance, to help us in this present dark time. “This too shall pass” is cold comfort to a man I know who lost two of his sisters this year to the coronavirus. How does he go on now? How does he enjoy even the smallest things after so much as been stripped from him? All I can say is that he does. He’s had his second dose of the vaccine and is looking forward to getting back to cafes and record stores, to so much that we all took for granted before we’d heard of covid.

            That’s not to say that he has “come through the other side of this thing,” or whatever similar cliché we may want to employ. The ever-present fantasy is that we can somehow “get over it,” to “put it behind us.” We all know we can’t live happily ever after. That knowledge doesn’t stop us from wanting the impossible. It’s an unspoken wish. It may even be that the desire for all of this to be someday, somehow fixed, is what gets us out of bed in the morning.    

            And now it’s been a year since the whole nightmare began. The temptation seems to be to take stock, to look for answers that sum it all up. For me, that’s all too ambitious. Or, maybe, just optimistic. This pandemic isn’t done. I’m not going to make dire predictions about yet another wave ready to break out. We don’t have to turn our attention to new deadly variants in Brazil just to scare ourselves. There’s no knowing future catastrophes. That has always been true. Right now, however, this virus is on-going. As of writing this, there were twice the number of new daily cases as we had on, say, May 15, 2020. In America, over 542,000 people have died of covid – that is already more than all of the military dead in WW2. And the number of lives lost continues to increase.

            It isn’t only the deaths. Some survive the virus itself, but the aftermath is crippling disability and suffering. A friend of mine from college nearly died in the hospital from covid. He slept through the ventilator, slept through the doctors restarting his heart with CPR – more than once. But he hasn’t merely slept through his recovery. He’s not recovered. Every day, he regains some strength. When will he get back to 100% – that seems a natural question. Of course, there’s no guarantee that he will ever get back to where he was. And next year he turns 50.

             My cousin-by-marriage came down with covid. She was very sick with it. But her parents were worse. They both had to be put on ventilators. Her mother is now pretty much back to normal. Her father has survived. He can’t, however, walk or stand. He has trouble holding a fork. Prior to covid he was in robust health with a sharp mind. Now, he seems to be slipping into dementia.

            We will never know the number of survivors whose lives will be shortened by this disease. My mom came down with covid in December. The virus left its mark in her weakened cardiovascular system. In the days and years ahead, millions of us will ask, How much longer would Mom or Dad have had if they hadn’t contracted covid? That shadow will long linger. It will only fade in the normal course of time. See, terror too tires out. Everything expires.

            Yes, we’ve found ourselves in very extraordinary times. We look for wisdom from our brightest minds. What can they tell us? So far I’ve not heard anything new; there’s no new revelation that clears away all of the confusion. Nothing can take away the pain. We will simply live with it. It will die with us. Is that wisdom, or just a fact? It certainly can be no comfort to the parents of the children who weren’t able to handle isolation. Bromides weren’t any use for parents whose children took their own lives before this pandemic. The suicide of a child will never be easy. I bet nothing will ever be harder. Before, during, after a pandemic – that’s always true.

            Nothing will keep us from wanting some special wisdom to explain it all, to make it better.

            Seen from history’s long-view, covid is really a rather ordinary sort of horror. We should approach it as such, I think. This thought struck me as I was reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, a book I’ve had on my shelf to be read for nearly two decades. Is now a good time to read it? Well, I had just finished reading a history of the 1930s that mentions Nanking. So, why not?           

            What struck me was Chang’s motivation for writing the book: not only were there no other books written about the Nanking atrocities, the Japanese government had long been systematically denying that it ever took place.

            In the introduction, she writes, “I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying [that took place in Nanking], this reversion in social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote in history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.”
            The horrific insult heaped on hellish injury was the denial. Bad enough that this holocaust ever took place, worse for the survivors was the deliberate cheating of collective memory.

            I don’t believe there is any special wisdom for us in extraordinary times. There is only one wisdom, and it applies to all times equally: we must do what we have always known is right. In the words of Sholem Aleichem, “No matter how bad things get you got to go on living, even if it kills you.”

            For us in the midst of this pandemic, we need to do what Iris Chang did in writing her book. We have to unearth the truth. Again and again and again. Just the other day The New York Times ran a story by veteran investigative reporter, Sharon LaFraniere, averring that “both [the Trump and Biden] administrations deserve credit” for the current vaccine roll out. LaFraniere admits there are some fundamental differences in the two administrations; she seems vaguely aware of approaching a false equivalence, as when she says, “Still, corporate, state and federal officials agree that Mr. Biden’s White House has been more active than his predecessor’s in trying to build up the nation’s vaccine stock.”

            Fair-mindedness is one thing. But fumbling can be dereliction of duty. The Trump White House was mainly focused for its last months in overturning the election, in sedition and treachery. If we are going to bring up the previous administration at all in regard to this pandemic, we really ought to focus on Trump’s removal of expert personnel inside China. His disbanding of The Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit in 2018 speaks volumes. We should never forget that Trump knew about the severity of the virus in January, 2020. He continued to lie about the severity for months. He joked about wearing masks. He said the virus would disappear “like a miracle” with the coming of spring.

            There can be no comparing these presidents for those of us interested in the truth, for us who want to stop the swirling falsehoods. There will always be those who stand to benefit from burying the truth. Some will always find it more palatable, more convenient to believe the lie. That is part of darker human capacity to do evil, or to simply give up.

            So, this is the only wisdom I’ve found: live. And, surely, the biggest task of living is remembering, telling the story of who we are, not letting the memory slip into oblivion while we’re still breathing.

T. W. Ladd 3/12/2021