The Literary Review
Nonfiction Page 1
Covid: The First Wave
by Robert Roth
One foot in the old reality, one foot in the new one.
The first day of this year various poets at an event I helped organize kept talking about how glad they were that last year 2019 was over and that somehow nothing could get worse. I kept thinking what the fuck are you talking about. Why shouldn’t it get increasingly worse. I don’t even remember now any of the specifics of all the truly horrible things of last year. And it was beyond anything I could imagine that “why shouldn’t it get increasingly worse” would turn into this nightmare.
A week before the shut down, I did a reading at FIT. The mc said she was a hugger and kisser but because of the crisis made hand signal substitutes for actual hugs and kisses. Something similar happened the last day I went to the synagogue. An open handed tap on the heart substituting for a kiss or a handshake. When the reading ended the mc on saying goodbye to me spontaneously without thinking gave me a real warm actual hug. Still no kissing, no flesh on flesh, no cheek on cheek. But flesh (her hands ) on the back of my shirt did feel good. Forbidden contact. One I hope someday to experience again.
A convergence of two very different or maybe not that different currents. Prior to the pandemic physical contact at many jobs had been dramatically diminished. It has grown increasingly more tentative, nervous, inhibited. Something that has been building for many years. A handshake maybe? No hugging. No kissing. One person’s flirting might be another person’s please get away from me or get the hell away from me. When there are very different power relationships on the job this can be even more fraught. And unwanted physical contact can always be very unsettling.
My friend who is here from Venezuela before starting to work at an after school center mostly with [Latino, Hispanic, Latinx] children was told that there could be no hugging. Except a sideways hug for no more than five seconds. And high five hugs. Clasping hands for a split second or two. She was told that most of the kids were part of a culture where physical contact was totally woven into the fabric of everyday life. So it would be particularly difficult to enforce such prohibitions where physical contact occurred as a matter of course. These rules though needed to be in place they said as a way of protecting the children from sexual violation and abuse. But maybe equally so to avoid the [perception, appearance, suspicion] of inappropriate behavior. For hours at a time, no matter how spontaneous and genuine, almost all physical contact is forbidden. Not every kid would want to be hugged. But my strong guess is many would. What if anything is the cost to a child when some adult they attempt to touch or hug or spontaneously embrace recoils from them or immediately have their bodies tense up out of fear of being reprimanded or fired. Can it heighten feelings of undesirability or create an added sense of loneliness and isolation no matter how manic or constricted or filled with love and acceptance the substitute is.
I flash back to the late 80s early 90s when the country was gripped in a sex panic hysteria around child abuse in daycare centers. People accused of performing satanic rituals. All forms of sexual abuse. Children brought front and center were prodded into making false accusations. Parents working each other up into a frenzy. Sex panic hysteria spreading around the globe. Lives ruined.
The image of gay predatory males as well as predatory men in general has had serious consequences in terms of who can work with children and in what ways.
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Within the first months of #MeToo a couple of women said to me and others, “I’m a hugger.” It was a bit jarring when I first heard it. It was said by someone I had just met after a talk she gave. I felt she was giving permission to both hug and be hugged. It was generally said to both men and women, but felt more directed towards men. This was echoed a number of times over a period of months.
Now in the early stages of the pandemic not touching is almost a directive. Social distancing as a new term, a new concept, a new directive. Remain six feet apart. Wear a mask. Wash your hands.
The virus and human contact can result in serious illness and death. Can this be separated from an almost phobic response over the last number of years to intimate human contact? The sex-negative response to sexual desire as well as a punitive sex- negative response to abuse, harassment and sexual assault seem in some very serious way to have merged. And here again in the face of the pandemic all physical contact in most situations is discouraged. The danger is real. There is no ambiguity about the wisdom or the necessity of these prohibitions.
We hold each other tight
Six feet apart
We will get through this
We need to wear masks, not ceremonial masks, but masks that cover your nose and mouth. Yet the few times I walk in the streets I feel I am part of a dance. People looking out for each other and themselves. It feels more communal than isolating. Brings back a memory of long ago. Gay men cruising the streets wearing different colored handkerchiefs, each color and where it it was worn, signaling a particular sexual [preference, desire, need]. Here as I walk everyone is paying close attention to each other: step away, step aside, step back.
Out my window
Locked here in my apartment
There is a narrow space between two buildings
In the far distance
I see a bridge barely visible
COVID-19 rages across the globe. New York inside massive outbreak. Hospitals flooded to the breaking point.
I sit in my apartment filled with severe anxiety that I can get sick. And I can. I’m 76 and this heightens my fear. And if decisions in hospitals are made who will live and who will die—well there we are.
In the meantime just a few blocks away hospitals are flooded with very sick people. They are overflowing with sickness and death. Healthcare workers working beyond the point of exhaustion. Their own health being severely jeopardized. Some have become gravely ill and some have died. Others are straight out traumatized. They have asked the rest of us to stay home. To reduce the numbers filling the hospitals. To help them cope with the mounting nightmare.
They are running short of proper protective equipment. They have to make do. Constantly improvising. Nurses have worn garbage bags as makeshift protective gowns. And even if they don’t catch the virus, the enormous stress, the daily horror and exposure to a whole range of other illnesses intensifies every minute of every day and they just keep working. And now people who are Asian are being assaulted in the streets. And the administration is one day more dangerous, reckless, incompetent and despicable than it was yesterday.
COVID-19 rages across the globe. New York is the epicenter of the pandemic. Hospitals flooded to the breaking point. Sushila Sood, originally from Kashmir, who is an anesthesiologist, sent out a photo of herself in full protective gear. A moment of levity as she was about to enter the hospital where she works.
A couple of weeks later I joined a Zoom dance meditation session. When the dancing stopped participants were asked if they would like to speak. Without even a heartbeat of hesitation Sushila began to talk. Then started wailing as she described each day walking past a room piled up with corpses. No one said a word. Tears pouring down my face as I listened.
Doctors are women, nurses are men, janitors are musicians. People of various and multiple genders working together. Suffering together, doing crucial life saving work together. Comforting the dying as much as they can.
Many are here from other countries. To the powerful they are seen and not seen. Devalued, I think, because they look too similar to people working in the meat packing plants or living in poor immigrant communities. Or black neighborhoods. Or Latinx neighborhoods. Or neighborhoods of the South asian diaspora, or far eastern migrant communities.
Additionally a powerful social consciousness seems to be forming. No not forming but taking on an ever more powerful understanding and commitment to change. Inside the worst hit neighborhoods there are people like themselves. Maybe they themselves live in those neighborhoods. Maybe relatives or friends or lovers. People they embrace and who embrace them. People they are in solidarity with. And who are in solidarity with them. A powerful consciousness is developing. Both in the hospitals and among other essential workers.
Listening to heads of hospitals you would think that frontline healthcare workers are well protected as they put their very beings in harm’s way for all of us. Anyone who says otherwise is disciplined if not fired. The Navy says sailors are being treated with respect. Their well being is of the utmost concern. A captain who loves, respects, and actively acted to protect the sailors on his ship is fired. Amazon takes out an ad saying how much they respect their workers. Showing all the things they are doing to protect them. And then fire and threaten and slander those who speak out about the hazardous conditions of the workplace. Particularly those that are organizing other workers to demand even minimal justice. All the money for the ad could be going to do some good. But like the hospital management and the Navy it is only the illusion that matters. As for the Trump administration, the most monstrous in our sordid history, and to varying degrees other politicians such as Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, fantasies and illusion and misdirection and false promises keep pouring out of them. Mainstream columnists often are the prisoners of their own cogitations. They keep throwing out all types of scenarios how to deal with the pandemic as if it is all happening in a vacuum. Every suggestion or spun out scenario (fantasy) relies on the good judgment and good intentions of people who are incapable of either, being actively in the service of malevolent forces.
I grow increasingly terrified that these lunatics will have any role in the creation of a vaccine, choosing one that works, how it will be distributed, where it might be stored, who will be getting it—anything and everything. I can’t even imagine all the things or the one really catastrophic thing that could go wrong. One thing you do know is that they will figure out some way, some jaw dropping way, to do something extraordinarily reckless and devastatingly harmful.
In the meantime medical ethicists spend hours cogitating over how little valuable life I have left to live. How easy it is for them to triage me out of existence. If I were also brown or black or Native American or poor or had a serious disability my life would matter even that much less. So this is the way we are going to deal with this disease. Scapegoat, sacrifice, act as if a hardened heart, pseudo realism and magical thinking is going to do much to stop it from spreading.
Also in the meantime these medical ethicists all filled up with themselves glibly almost giddily keep assessing who should live and who are most expendable when hard headed decisions need to be made. Nothing like a pandemic to get their juices flowing. Old people are always among the first to be sacrificed. All this talk taking place in an ethical vacuum. There are no social forces, no structural realities. No nothing except cogitating, pondering, pandering. Should it be any wonder that others less sensitive and nuanced than they don’t even bother with all their subtle distinctions. And is it any wonder why nursing homes are death traps where infection and death are running rampant. The flip side of the syrupy sentimentality with which older people are discussed–some of it maybe even fueled by real love–is resentment, fear, anger, hyper rationality and revulsion.
In addition workers in the those places are also getting gravely ill and dying. These workers are often dark skinned, poor, or close to be being poor. They have “underlying conditions.” Underlying? Conditions? That explains it all. Yes. Living in a racist, sexist, ageist, brutally class stratified and everything else horrible society will do that to you. And if one group can be triaged out of existence why not another.
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Pandemic. Here in my isolation, old age, death hovering nearby, every day bleeding into the next. I see my knees in a full length mirror. They are old man’s knees, flesh folding over them. My face more gaunt, wrinkles on my neck. I drool a bit now. I feel a wetness slightly dripping from the side of my mouth. I am falling apart in real time. I am cut off from a vital flow of humanity. Entering an old age cut off even from myself. My sexual desire has almost totally shut down. The social, political, cultural and the very personal biological all converging in on me at once.
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Yesterday while waiting to pick something up in a store a women with a constant hacking cough was near me, her mask falling off then put back not very securely, then falling off again, the mask not covering her nose and barely covering her mouth. I am more than a little nervous about it. Nothing I can do but wait and see.
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This is an excerpt from No End in Sight, a book covering a number of subjects.