The Sundays of 2020
There are so many things rattling around my head right now, few of them positive or happy. This is not unusual, as Sundays have historically tended to be the days that my depression is keenest. That being confessed, the past nine months have seen that historical trend skewed. It isn't much of a surprise to me to realize that the pressures of being in an extroverted (we prefer the term missionary-minded) church as an introvert were wearing me down. In Church BC, I would be fine in the first hour--Sacrament meeting, after all, requires very little in terms of personal interactions--then find solace in drawing notes about the Sunday School lesson. I sat next to my wife, whose presence calms my anxieties and explicates my eccentricities to others, so though Sunday School required more interaction, it was mediated by Gayle. Once the third hour showed up and I was off to the gender-segregated Elders' Quorum, thinks became even more uncomfortable. It's hard for me to really parse how I felt in many (by no means all) of the EQ lessons. I do know that part of what made me uncomfortable--and still does in other circumstances with other people--were the invisible lines of power that adults have to navigate. Some don't care about them, don't worry about them, or intuitively weave through them, but I'm not someone like that. In my classroom, there are very clear lines of autonomy, authority, and expectation. If something bothers me in my classroom, I can address it. In more grown-up situations like Church meetings and family gatherings, those clear lines efface. I don't know if it's appropriate to call out someone for a particularly egregious bit of stupidity, and when I do, I worry that I will have ruined a relationship or caused offense. (Example: I'm pretty quiet when my brothers-in-law gas about politics, but it was only when one of them declared the Second Amendment gave him the right to shoot someone on his property that I had to speak up. He retreated when I said that, but I know that it raised questions in his mind about what I think with regards to the Bill of Rights.) The stress of being in that kind of situation is really draining. It should come as no surprise that, when the Primary presidency stopped by the Elders' Quorum to find last-minute substitutes, I would almost always volunteer. I could be a warm body and quietly urge six-year-olds to sing along with Primary songs. Those are power dynamics I can understand. Church attendance--a major portion of a Mormon's Sunday--was one of the reasons that the first day of each week was one in which my depression was larger. Add to that the feelings of inadequacy that I gleaned (rightly or not) from my own lack of piety, faith, and commitment as opposed to what was on display at the local chapel, and you've a ripe recipe for feelings of self-loathing and -insufficiency. The gospel of Jesus Christ is very positive and affirming, very confident in the individual to become better, through the merits of Christ. The Church is very good at (purposefully or not) generating a type of pious competition. And while everyone's experience varies (and I should say that my current ward doesn't have this problem quite as much as previous places I've attended), what I've outlined here pretty well reflects how I feel about the end result of three hours of worship. In the past eighteen months or so--maybe longer? It's hard to tell with COVID fog in the mix--the Church shifted to a two hour schedule, with more focus on learning the gospel at home. I appreciated the change--for what should be obvious reason--though not all of the problems I had with Sundays disappeared. Once the pandemic struck and in-person worship cancelled, I felt significantly better about Sundays than I had in a long time. This doesn't strike me as some sort of cosmic indication about how I should treat Church services--if it's ever safe to worship in person again, I'll be attending once more--as it also tracks with the other areas of my life where additional stresses show up, and how those anxieties receded once the expectation of non-participation became the norm. In other words, not having to be around other people meant that I wasn't as stressed as I had been during the Before Times™. By worshipping at home exclusively, there have been some positive moments. My wife and I are in control of the situation and conversation, and my boys are (I hope) gaining a more intimate understanding of the doctrines we abide by. The down side to this, of course, is that trying to keep a seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old interested in the topic without it becoming too diluted for the older one or too complicated for the younger one has been a hit-and-miss proposition. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don't. The yearning here is hard to define: I don't really want to go back to the weekly slog of feeling inadequate and acting as though I'm excited to be at church. Yet I know that it's important to create friendships and connections with my neighbors (I know hardly anyone in the neighborhood), something that has been neglected throughout 2020. Maybe this upcoming year will see some sort of breakthrough in my own spiritual journey. Maybe. The Cancer of 2020 This week marks another surgery for Gayle. She needs to get her chemotherapy port "installed", which will require another out-patient surgery, another dose of general anesthesia, another afternoon in a waiting room where I watch the sunlight slide across the carpet to an early sunset. I'm yearning here for a quick recovery and that the process not take as long as last time. I'm sure it won't. The fact that we're at this particular part in our journey against Gayle's breast cancer is hard for me to come to grips with. There are so many things that have made me despise this year, but Gayle's cancer is by far the largest. We've done a fair job of using the holidays as distractions, keeping the need to focus on our annual celebrations as excuse to avoid thinking about the necessary steps. We did that with Thanksgiving; we did it again with Christmas. Once the holidays were over, however, reality came knocking like a debt collector on our door and now we have no choice but to face what's in front of us. Here's what is currently most on my mind about the cancer issue: Like so many people, I've been holding on to the hope the arrival of the vaccine would provide. The light at the end of the metaphorical tunnel is glimmering and could even possibly be sunlight. The conclusion of this pandemic's nightmare feels tantalizingly close. Real life and normality are returning…but not for us. After going through this hellacious year with the entire world suffering with us (to an extent) gave, if nothing else, a sense of solidarity and mutually shared and -endured hardships. But not for us. The hardest trial we have to face right now is stretching before us all the way into the early days of summer. I won't be able to attend my school's graduation without knowing that there's another chemo appointment either just passed or on the horizon. I'm looking down the barrel of another half year of difficulty and stress. It's possible that many people's goodwill toward us was heightened by the pandemic (and I'm grateful for that; the amount of help that people have extended to our family will always be a highlight of a dark year), when we were all having a hard time. But when the vaccine has finally added up to pulling the numbers down, we will still be in survival mode. We will still be taking each day as its own challenge, focused on trying to accomplish the most we can with what we have. We will remain in the crucible while so many others will be able to move into the next stage of rebuilding. It's hard to not feel a bit of acrimony over that. And while I acknowledge the great blessing and privilege I have that this is our grand trial (rather than, say, the manifold miseries that this world could otherwise offer), that doesn't diminish the fact that this is one of the hardest things I will ever have to do…and I'm not even the one who is going through with it. Up until 2020, the worst year of my life was 2007--my oldest's two emergency heart surgeries were some of the hardest things I've ever been through--and this year is the year that keeps on giving. I yearn for this nightmare to be over, to leave us alone, to move on…I yearn to move on myself, but the tendrils of 2020 are perfidious and plentiful, stretching into the future to corrupt us in ways both visible (the divisions of the country will not be miraculously healed because of a change in political parties) and invisible. I'm done with the problems of 2020; the problems, however, aren't done with me. The Sacrifice of 2020 Though it may seem contradictory to what I was saying in the Cancer of 2020, there has been something that has weighing on me for the past five-or-so months. I write this hesitantly, knowing that some who read this may feel called out and/or attacked by what I have to say. I'm speaking in broad terms and generalities, for the most part, though there are no broad terms that don't encompass some individuals. There isn't a way to sugar coat my feelings here, which are raw and angry. If you're not interested in seeing that, feel free to skip ahead to the next topic. Or stop reading, I guess, that's okay, too. At the beginning of the pandemic, back when we were unsure about what to do and what, exactly, would be required of us, there was a sense of communal response, mutual responsibility, and joint reaction to the immense trial in front of us. We were throwing down tracks as the train barreled behind us, responding to contradictory impulses as best we could. Education, economy, and governmental authority all started straining in ways that we didn't know how to handle. School was dismissed and moved online, with poor results happening for the majority of students. Business had to close down for a bit, and when they reopened, lukewarm support from states forced other businesses to stand up for public health, leading to the sorts of viral videos of entitled white folks screaming at Costco employees because of the business' requirement for a mask to enter the premises. The governor's vacillation and unclear explanations about what public health needs were added to the confusion. This is a story we all know. As the summer waned and the pending school year loomed, it became clear to me that the people of my state were never actually interested in the lives of others. The way we drive in Utah is, apparently, the way we view the world: Incidental to us and there for our exclusive use. We, and only we, matter. Everyone else can, well, die a preventable death. The data are pretty clear: Every time there was a call for the community to sacrifice for the betterment of the entire state, it was ignored. Mask mandates in schools were a hot button issue for a while, if you recall, because some people viewed the possibility of a teacher getting sick because of COVID-19 exposure a price they were willing to pay. The speed with which teachers went from being praised during the spring and derided (and, let's be brutally honest here, threatened with death) during the fall truly was breathtaking. We teachers were asked to put it all on the line while every Chad and Karen out there got to lather up their indignation at the idea of wearing a mask to the store. And skipping a holiday? Upset traditions? Oh, well, that was not a sacrifice they were willing to make. This hits me very deeply. I got sick with COVID-19, brought it home, infected three other members of my family, and could have been responsible for the death of my oldest son, because Utah was willing to do piss-all to get the virus under control. Utah has been doing horribly with the COVID response, with cases constantly escalating, ICU beds beyond safe occupancy, and an ever-increasing death count that--considering the sparsity of our population--is mind-numbing. Utah failed me entirely. I was told that if I did the right things--washed hands, cleaned down surfaces, kept my distance, wore a mask--I would be "safe" at my school. I wasn't. I was lied to. Like many (I don't even know if I can say most), I sacrificed a huge amount this summer. Every time I stepped out of my house, I knew I was putting myself and my family at risk. So I minimized those. We skipped every family gathering--from my sister's wedding to my nephew's baptism to each birthday and holiday. Oh, sure, we visited in the backyard with masks on from a safe distance on Mother's Day, but we didn't have a Mother's Day dinner together. We didn't go when I could see my siblings or my kids their cousins. We went, just us, for a quick visit in the backyard. And every time I did something like that, I felt guilty for not being more careful, for not taking "one for the team" and letting go of what I wanted so that the state could be healthy again. But it was a waste. I contracted COVID from a student--one who had been sick the week before but his parents wanted him at school so that they could go to work--and it very nearly led to a coffin and a tombstone. For over three hundred thousand Americans, it actually did lead to the cemetery. Yet the sacrifices of the rest of our country is too much? Those deaths are a price they have to pay in order to disrupt others' lives the least amount possible? Each time I see a video of people being together, or hear about other people's kids going off to play with their friends, I'm reminded that my children have not been in their friends' houses since March. More than an entire year of my kids' childhoods has been stolen from them by this virus. At the outset, I thought that we were "all in this together!" but it's clear by the roving bands of maskless teenagers that I see slouching through the neighborhood, the "sovereign nation" types strutting about the stores without keeping their distance while their mask is below their chins, the lies of parents who Tylenol their kid before sending them off to school with symptoms, and a litany of other stark examples that we are not in this together. We are in this alone. One thing my self-sacrifice taught me quite clearly: It doesn't matter what I do if others don't sacrifice with me. If it were a simple matter of the Dowdle family taking the rules of the pandemic seriously, we wouldn't have COVID in the state. But I have to rely on everyone else to do something for (and I know this is shocking and monstrous to dare dream) someone else. That, it has been made quite transparent to me, is asking too much of the community I live in. My responsibility for keeping my family safe was one that I took very seriously. I'm not saying that I was perfect at the lockdown. I'm human, too, and there were times I caved. Yet each infraction of the rules--we visited Sanpete county during the summer because there were very few cases there, despite knowing that traveling was a risk--made me feel guilty. Nevertheless, I do the most I can as often as I can to try to help put an end to this pandemic. So when I see videos on social media of family gatherings for the holidays, where mixed families have come together to do their annual traditions, with all the fixings, trimmings, and habits unchanged, it hurts me. When I see news clips of college-aged kids going to parties, dancing and singing without masks or social distancing, it hurts me. When I catch a glimpse of a selfie taken during 2020 with two friends who "haven't seen each other in ages!" smiling with their heads close together, it hurts me. Time and again I look out to see the solidarity of action. Instead I see the indifference to human suffering that has made America the world leader in both COVID cases and deaths. We have more than doubled the number of dead that World War I claimed, and it seems as though we're well on our way to have more dead to COVID than we lost in fighting on two fronts during World War II. As other countries demonstrated, it didn't have to be this way. We were told how we could save lives; we just felt that our lives were more important. And you know what hurts the most? Being a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that, in part, I am supposed to "mourn with those who mourn". Yet so often it's members of the Church that I see who are doing the very things that are causing others to mourn. (The kid who brought COVID to my class? You guessed it: His family that sent him to school sick is LDS.) Yeah. That's the one that really hurts. COVID isn't going away. The coronavirus is potent, potentially mutating, and more of a threat now than it has been before. The vaccine still has question marks about whether or not inoculated people are still capable of transmitting the disease, to say nothing about its safety for non-adult people. My son wants the vaccine, but we don't know when we'll be able to say it's safe for half-hearted folks. The anti-vax and anti-mask movements have much more potency than logic would dictate is possible, and the fact is, we need more people to become vaccinated than have indicated that they would. The need for other people to sacrifice for each other is just as high as ever. But when has that ever meant people will do the right thing? So I yearn for my sacrifices to not feel invalidated by the selfishness of others. I yearn for some sort of solidarity and recognition of the crises we're facing. I yearn for a stopping of the hurt. The End of 2020 The year closes in four days (at the time of this writing). I have written about 480,000 words thus far. I had the chance to teach a Harry Potter class that was magical, generating worthwhile memories for the students involved. I have taught in all sorts of new ways that I had never anticipated, including livestreaming a lesson from my car while stuck in line for my COVID test. I have been rocked by personal tragedies, familial struggles, and societal unrest. I have been reprimanded for speaking up for Black lives and saying that they matter. I have missed more days of work than I have cumulatively missed throughout my entire career. Almost all of my goals ended as failures or were forgotten outright. There is precious little that I will cherish or treasure from this year. While there were moments of gasped-in air, the majority of this year I spent drowning. I yearn for this year to end. When mid-March arrived and, with breathtaking rapidity, schools went from business-as-usual to crisis schooling, I held back on any opinions about the next school year. I didn't entertain questions about what it would look like, nor postulate how bad the pandemic might become, thereby necessitating some large-scale changes in how I visualize my teaching. I did this for two reasons: 1) I was busy trying to figure out what the best way was for educating my students remotely, and 2) Conceiving of changes implied that my worst suspicions and expectations would be confirmed; namely that statewide responses to the unprecedented (except it wasn't, but who reads history?) event would be so poor as to make opening schools untenable.
The end of the school year was difficult for a lot of reasons. (I detail a couple of them in this other post.) Once the grief process had worked its way through and summer arrived fully, it was easy to fall into my normal summer experience. I tend to be pretty introverted and hermetic, so the pandemic didn't put a lot of strain on my expectations. There were some, of course: I like to take my sons on a special summer experience once per season--a museum, a game store, whatever--but I couldn't do that this year. I also go on a writing retreat with my writing group, which also didn't happen. The Utah Shakespeare Festival had to cancel its season (and I wouldn't have gone anyway), which still hurts my heart. (It will be the first time since 2006 that I haven't gone to Cedar City for my biannual pilgrimage.) As summer waxed, so, too, did Utah's COVID-19 cases. The governor shut schools and churches and sports and a bunch of other things early on in the crisis, but failed to maintain any sort of discipline on the closures. Cases increased and restrictions eased--an inverse of what ought to have happened. Only on 9 July--a full four months after the pandemic began--did Governor Herbert announce that schools would be required to have everyone present masked, a no-brainer of a decision that still required a huge amount of effort to attain. The governor failed to make the mandate a statewide requirement, however, wagging his finger and telling Utahns that they had better start being more responsible or else! (For context: Since the beginning of July, Utah has seen its three highest days of COVID transmission, with our current peak being 9 July 2020 with 866 cases…coincidentally, that's the day where the school mask-mandate came into play.) The national discourse about the wearing of masks--the idea that the government can't tell us what to wear (even though you definitely have to wear clothing when you go outside or else you'll be jailed is, without a doubt, the government telling us what to wear) somehow becoming a rallying cry for armchair Constitutionalists and conspiracy-prone "thinkers"--has made it abundantly clear to me that my worst suspicions and expectations for the federal response to the pandemic were far too generous. And that's saying something. I'm not a fan of conservative politics in general--the thing that they're most often trying to conserve is racism and exploitation under the guise of governmental non-intervention, regardless of what their roots may have been--and I'm highly critical of the man in the Oval Office, so it's not really surprising that my biases meant I didn't have a lot of faith in the government's ability to handle the coronavirus. I admit that I was expecting it to get bad. What I didn't expect was that people would continue to see President Trump as a savior of democracy and a competent president. I assumed that the botched job would serve as a physical, visceral, personal reminder of his failings and would push his pertinence and rhetoric out of our collective minds. But, no. Currently, the United States is home to Florida, one of the largest epicenters in the world of COVID-19. Over 137,000 Americans who were alive to celebrate the advent of 2020 have gone to their graves like beds, killed because of the disease or complications exacerbated by it. That number surpasses how many American soldiers died in World War I by a clear margin…and it took 18 months of being involved in that war to get to our final death numbers. In the case of COVID, we're not even a half-year in. And, while we're still far away from the 1918 numbers (about 675,000 Americans died from that pandemic, more than both World Wars combined, and in the same ballpark as number of dead from the Civil War), we aren't out of danger. At all. I was curious how well we're doing now compared to 1918, which saw its first case on 4 October 1918 and then, by April 1919, had sufficiently contained the virus. Those six months saw about 9% of its population (10,268 people) come down with the influenza. The death count? A reported 576 people. As of right now, not even six months into this debacle, Utah is sitting at 28,855 cases and 212 deaths. Since history harmonizes, it's not surprising to learn that our current case number is about 9% of our 2020 population. That we have less than half as many deaths is a credit to the advances in medical technology and health care, which has absolutely blunted the lethal edge of coronavirus. However, medical experts warn that there is a pending crisis of hospital beds and ICUs that will allow that relatively low death number to remain relatively low. "It feels like we're headed for disaster." And it is in that context that I think about the pending school year. It cannot happen. I fully recognize the manifold problems, nuances, and complications that are tied up with the opening of schools in a month*. I am not insensitive to this at all. I don't know of a teacher who doesn't recognize the dilemma that's involved. Parents need the schools open so that they can return to work; students and teachers put back into the boxes we vacated in March will become vectors of the disease. It's what will happen, given what we know about transmission, infection, and difficulty with COVID-19. Parents demanding that schools open up in five weeks are demanding that teachers and students die for them. It's that simple. The danger to parents, students, teachers, and staff is higher and worse than it was in March. I'm positively baffled by the double standard here. The state of Utah has shown itself incapable of flattening the curve (see again the case counts). Our worst days of this virus are most likely ahead of us. And while there are some measures that can make schools safer, there isn't a way to make them safe. There's a narrative out there that only old people or those with underlying conditions need be worried about the coronavirus, and it's one that people want to believe so much that they are willing to risk lives for it. There are disturbing potential connections to COVID-19 and Kawasaki-like symptoms**. We have no idea what kind of long-term effects COVID-19 can have on a body--young or old--a few months down the line, to say nothing about a year or two or five from now. Deliberately putting people into harm's way in order to serve the economy is ghoulishly revolting. Alternatives do exist, of course. The most obvious one is to lockdown the state, reassess what we mean by "essential workers", and then pay everyone else to stay home. And I mean that: Pay everyone to stay home. Put a hold on all debt payments--not deferring to a few months down the line, I mean a complete stop--and guarantee a universal basic income that allows for food and necessities to be purchased. If people don't have to work, they won't have to insist their kids go to school. However you parse it, though, sending kids off to school "in the fall" is like encouraging them to play with their toys in the street: It's only a matter of time until a preventable tragedy strikes. --- * That's one of the ways in which the danger is being downplayed: We keep saying "in the fall". "Schools should open in the fall." In Utah, that's never been when we go back to school. For us, the school year begins on 18 August--that's five weeks from when I'm writing this. That is still summertime. The sun doesn't go to bed until 10:00 in August; the mercury consistently plays in the high 90s. "Fall" conjures images of autumnal leaves and crisp mornings, a distinctive change in temperature and frost on the lawns. But that isn't what we're actually talking about. When people say schools need to open up "in the fall", they actually mean, "middle of next month". ** This particular article is indicative of the willingness to perpetuate the narrative about who's vulnerable to this disease. If you notice the second bullet point of the summation at the top, it says, "New study pointed out a third of these pediatric patients were obese or had other medical woes". That means that two-thirds did not. The vast majority of those kids were not in a high-risk category! Not only that, but with heart-, lung-, kidney-, diabetes-, age, or obesity problems all being linked to higher mortality rate for COVID-19, essentially half of America is at risk in some form or another. And when you think about the potential transmission factors, almost everyone--or someone they love--is at higher risk. Pointing out that a third of these kids had additional problems tricks readers into finding a way to not be worried about what's going on. Here's a hypothetical: Say that all 330,000,000 Americans get coronavirus and only 1% of them die. When we read "1%", we're inclined to think that isn't so bad. But 1% of 330 million is 3.3 million dead. That's more than all of our wars that we've ever been in combined, plus the 1918 pandemic. Check out this video if you're interested in seeing how our brain tricks us into thinking that this situation isn't as bad as it really is. |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|