EDITORIAL: Who could have imagined?

Published April 2, 2020

By MAUREEN DOHERTY

Editor, North Reading Transcript

Think of where you were at this time last year. What were your greatest concerns? Who among us could have imagined that a year later the phrase of the day would be “social distancing?” Or that standing closer than six feet to another person in any direction – especially in public – even sitting in the front row of a Palm Sunday church service – could mean putting yourself in harm’s way of catching a virulent illness that mysteriously spares the young – mostly – but which seems to make them the silent carriers who infect those mostly, but not always, older than 60?

If I’d had told you in the spring of 2019 that one year later your state would ban groups of more than 10 people congregating peacefully in one space and then close all public and private schools and daycare centers; shutter houses of worship, town halls, theaters, ballparks, stadiums, malls, gyms, senior centers, museums, playground equipment, bars, dine-in restaurants, and construction sites – and that your government would strongly urge all other businesses to let their employees work from home  – all in the hopes of avoiding the transfer of droplets traveling in the air between people who were simply talking to one another, one of whom may be an asymptomatic carrier of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). And that this behavior would rapidly repeat worldwide, or that perhaps a person who coughed or sneezed onto a surface a few days prior, which you then touched – like a doorknob or a keypad – followed by inadvertently touching your face before washing your hands with plain soap could have life-or-death consequences for you, or someone twice removed from you, you’d have asked where I was hiding the tinfoil hat ’cause that’s just crazy talk!

Would you have believed me if I’d said even though you are living in one of the most medically advanced regions of the world, in terms of per capita medical centers, physicians and research scientists, that the government would need to order all non-elective surgeries to cease if we were to survive the coming pandemic?

Or that the brightest minds of the day would be comparing this pandemic to the one you vaguely remember your late grandmother telling you about — the one that stole her little brother from her over Christmas vacation when she was about 9 years old and he was just 8 — and you do the math and realize that since she was born in 1909 she was talking about the Spanish flu?

Would you have believed that the only way to protect the old from getting an illness that could overwhelm their respiratory system in a matter of days was to ban visits from their loved ones or anyone other than their caregivers? Or that our society would put a very heavy burden on every front line medical worker – the people who would become the de facto comforters and companions of our parents and grandparents in their final days?

Would you have believed me if I’d said we’d be living in a world crawling with clear, thin plastic packaging — the kind that encapsulates virtually every consumer good sold, and which must be cut apart with scissors to dig out the product “protected by” this truly “single use” packaging that is absentmindedly tossed back into a supply/waste chain and sent straight into our oceans would be the same world where both doctors and nurses were forced to reuse their “disposable” face shields and masks because these simplistic though life-saving items were out-of-stock everywhere in the world?

Would you have believed that these same nurses and doctors would just take matters into their own hands, head to a craft supply store, and make dozens of their own face shields rather than wait for the government to track down a manufacturer to make it and a supplier to ship it to them? Or that armies of volunteers would share prototype patterns of cloth face masks and use donated cotton fabrics to sew special covers with a pocket into which they’d slip those formerly disposable – now rationed – masks to keep them “cleaner” longer?

Could you have envisioned yourself being “that” factory owner who, in an “aha” moment, decides to stop wasting an inexpensive and moldable lifesaving material on throw-away single-use clamshell packaging for toys and batteries and lettuce, and just figures out how to retrofit it to produce face shields?

A year ago, who could have guessed that we’d be told by experts there was a finite number of ventilators in the world, thereby forcing front line doctors to choose who among the sickest of their patients would get the chance to live… and who would die?

Is this death by a hundred thousand paper cuts?

Or is it a watershed moment for a generation… or two?

Would you accept as your fate that the best you could hope for would be to ride out this storm by sheltering in place and living off contact-less take-out while spending your days grinding away at your job remotely, praying that your company won’t go belly up before your rent is due, even with the $1,200 stipend the government has promised to pay every adult making less than $75,000 before our economy truly enters free-fall?

Or will you do what your generation has been trained to do best — and what past generations had figured out how to do – collaborate on group projects and attack a problem from all angles?

This is your time to harness the brainpower contained within your vast circle of worldwide friends and prove everyone wrong about what can and cannot be accomplished within a short amount of time when the private and public sectors, and the Democrats and Republicans, work together instead of butt heads.

Prove the government wrong! Prove the powerful wrong. Prove the doomsayers wrong. Prove all of us wrong. We need to be wrong because something is “just not right” about the way things are turning out right now for humanity on so many fronts.

Find the solutions to cure this disease, and others like it, because there will be others… Use your STEAM skills, Model UN skills and  Robotics Club skills to invent a better test kit, develop a vaccine, build a better ventilator. Share your solutions in the marketplace of ideas as an open source document, then challenge every one sitting at home and in empty corporate offices to join you.

Perhaps your talent lies in creating a diagnostic test that takes mere minutes to detect the antibodies to COVID-19, not hours or days. Wouldn’t that be something? In the process you will fail, but you must pick yourself up and persevere. Because just as you put your all into the initial problem and solved it, new ones will crop up… and humanity needs you to carry on, combat this monster, and slay the next.

So you say engineering is not your thing? No problem. There are so many other ways to contribute to the greater good of society. The true “gift” of this break from the rat race is the gift of time to really sit with your own thoughts and contemplate what your special contribution to this world will be. What will your legacy be? Only you can answer that question.

But we need each one of you to figure it out in relatively short order under trying circumstances. Your yet to be born grandkids will be grateful that you did.