Bob Schwartz

“I can’t be a pessimist. Because I’m alive.”
James Baldwin

The video clip below is included in a recent film about the words of James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (available on Amazon Prime Video and elsewhere):

Master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, Remember This House. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.

In this clip from 1963, Baldwin talks about the future of America:

“I can’t be a pessimist. Because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I’m forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But the Negro in this country…the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives…it is entirely up to the American people, whether or not they’re going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger whom they maligned so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigga in the first place. Because I’m not a nigga.”

When it comes to attitudes toward the the pandemic, American divides keep cropping up. The latest is masks v. no masks. Then there are Democrats v. Republicans, blue states v. red states, trump v. no-Trump, fact v. fiction, etc.

I note today the most basic divide.

The virus follows an exponential growth pattern. One person infects two. Two infect four. Four infect sixteen. It is multiplicative.

It is does not follow a linear growth pattern, with each new infection adding more cases one by one. It is not additive.

If you don’t understand exponential growth, you don’t understand steep curves, peaks and outbreaks.

I would like to think that almost all American understand the difference between linear and exponential growth, and that a number of those simply choose to ignore it.

But I don’t think so. A number of American are somewhat innumerate, which is the number version of illiterate. American innumeracy is well-documented, though its causes are still an open question—whether a result of education or lack of interest is still debated.

Masks, distancing and other directives are essential precisely because the virus follows an exponential path. If people don’t understand that, that along with a general lack of social concern explains how we got here. And where we might be going.

Not numbers.

There are a dozen different ways America got off to a bad late start in responding to COVID-19.

To illustrate one, consider this picture.

Two co-workers or friends are standing close together, neither wearing masks, congratulating themselves on their scrupulous hand washing.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Sanitizing hands and surfaces were stressed early on, even as ramping up of diagnostic testing never (and still hasn’t) reached adequate levels.

At first, regular people wearing masks was not stressed. But in the weeks and months since, there is consensus that as a relatively simple measure, wearing face coverings makes sense.

Unfortunately, that message either hasn’t gotten through to people or is anathema to those who have a political/ideological problem with wearing masks—and who resist protecting those who might get sick or die.

You can wash or sanitize your hands every five minutes. But unless you are absolutely confident through diagnostic testing that you and those you stand near to are not infected, a face covering is just prudent common sense. Which seems to be a bridge too far for a lot of Americans.

Today Trump directed all states to open houses of worship as essential.

Religion is important to a number of Americans, and for a number of those, attending services together is a primary practice.

Religion is unimportant to Trump, except as a political tool. He knows nothing and cares less about faith in general, or about the particular faith he cynically claims as his own.

We know from just a few weeks of churches opening in states such as Georgia and Florida that it is a dangerous situation. Churches have had to close after congregants were infected with COVID-19, and in Florida, a Catholic church not only closed, but the priest has died.

There are few regular gatherings riskier than houses of worship, particularly large congregations. Like concerts and movie theaters—and like political rallies—dozens or hundreds of people together for an hour or more, sometimes vocally (loud voices equaling breathing hard), is an ideal environment for transmission.

Reopening of churches is questionable at best right now, though it hurts to see the genuinely faithful denied their usual style of community. But to see someone so faith-free promote the practice is profane.

We are seeing all sorts of people and initiatives at the forefront of the response to the virus. Some are brilliant, some stupid. Some knowledgeable, some ignorant. Some arrogant, some humble.

Humility in the face of a towering task is not acceptance or surrender. As in all aspects of our lives, it is recognition of our limitations while we work tirelessly to transcend those limits.

Among the many examples of this, I am thinking of all the work and talk about a vaccine. There is over optimistic talk about the practical possibility of a safe and effective vaccine being widely distributed by end of year or shortly after, an unlikely long shot. Then there are those experts who want to maintain hopeful realism based on past experience with developing vaccines and on how relatively little we know about a virus that first appeared only months ago. That realism isn’t just less than optimistic; it is added weight to already crushing circumstances.

Humility is always needed and always in short supply. Which is why every one of our religious traditions incessantly promotes it. It is not a paradox that we are at our greatest when we are at our least. It is the character of living, as best we can, the complex and elusive reality of paradise here and now.

The pandemic has been the period of the stupidest things Trump has ever said, which is saying something.

Even though the pandemic is far from resolved, it was widely believed that his suggestion to inject disinfectant as a cure was as stupid as it could get.

Of course it wasn’t.

Yesterday Trump said the following. Please read it slowly. Just as with the beauty of perfect intelligence, perfect stupidity has its own perverse beauty.

“And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

We are sometimes at a loss to describe and explain the range of shortcomings and indecent venality that Trump daily reveals about himself. It is a multi-faceted tragedy, much like the growing list of symptoms that COVID-19 inflicts.

This one quote captures it all. Needless to say, whether or not you count the people suffering and dying of COVID-19 in America, they are still suffering and dying. They are still cases. Cases are not numbers. Cases are people. Cases are facts. It’s just that without the numbers, the facts can be buried, the public impact softened, and the blame averted.

But sick and dead is sick and dead. Even if Trump doesn’t want anyone to know. Or to know just how tragically stupid he is.

Too late.