The New Faultline

As the 1960s tipped into the 1970s, I was working as a Peace Corps Volunteer in northeastern Afghanistan. It was a remote post in a rural district, where conservative Islamic norms of dress and behavior prevailed.

That included the chadri or burka, a loose body covering that women wore in public, ostensibly to protect their modesty. To young American men and women of that time, this manner of dress seemed absurd. We hailed from the land of the bikini, where women burned their bras, and the women's lib movement was sweeping through society.

Hiding behind masks translated into invisibility, which Western women were sick of enduring.

So we were shocked when one of our female PCVs married an Afghan man and disappeared behind his compound walls, covered in a chadri, presumably to never be heard from or seen again. Why did she do that?

I do not know the answer to that question.

One key demarcation factor in today's America and beyond is who wears masks in public and who doesn't. A stark reminder of this divide was captured in images of yesterday's solemn Memorial Day ceremonies. They were attended by the presumptive Presidential candidates -- one wore a mask, one didn't.

If Covid-19 causes our societies to change in lasting ways, I wonder if the mask will be a symbol of this new divide. Between the masked who believe they are protecting others from disease and the unmasked who scoff at the notion.

Hundreds of years from now, historians may well identify 2020 as the turning point when mask-wearing became entrenched in roughly half of the global population, with the other half remaining mask-free.

If so, this may be historically as pivotal a moment as the 7th century birth of Islam or 16th century Reformation.

The faultlines of the new social order are emerging just as clearly as the surface breaks in the earth that appear after major earthquakes.  If you visit one site in western Marin County, you can see a stretch of field with a fence and a dry creekbed. Halfway through the field the fence suddenly sifts ro the other side of the creekbed.

That is what happened during the Great Earthquake of 1906. The earth cracked, the fence moved aside.

In the film "Passengers" (2016), two of the 5,000 people hibernating in a spaceship bound for a distant colony in space that takes many lightyears to reach wake up prematurely. As they come to comprehend their situation, they realize they will not survive the trip. They fall in love and live out their time the best they can anyway. The woman (Jennifer Lawrence) is a writer and she leaves behind a story that greets the survivors when they finally reach their destination and awake.

She achieves immortality. So what is her message?

This is, of course, but one of many such efforts by story-tellers to seek meaning in our fate as living beings who will not survive the journey.

In producing these daily essays, I am dancing with that theme also -- the meaning of being mortal during this pandemic.

How can you dance with words? Text is inert; it just sits there on a page or a screen. The stories that result, however, are not inert.  They are ert.

Of course, there is no word ert and if you try to type it, the "smart" software you are using will probably change it to art.

I've got a serious issue with the current state of spellcheck technology. It employs the vocal reach and grammatical sense of a 7-year-old.

It is not necessary for catching typos; writers can always look up any word in a dictionary. Alerting us that the spelling may be wrong is a service, of course, but making automatic corrections is not.

I just hope the story that survives this imperfect process saves the last dance for me.

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