Over 130,000 Americans have died from the disease, and that total is headed toward even more catastrophic levels as well. The Vietnam War was the iconic disaster for my generation, with a total of 58,000 U.S. soldiers lost over the many years of that conflict.
By contrast, the pandemic deaths have occurred in just a few months' time.
Trying to let these numbers sink in, I become overwhelmed by the scale of what we are living through. A vaccine, according to the experts, is probably a long way off, so we will have to be coping with this catastrophe for the foreseeable future.
Our economy is staggering; millions of the jobs that have been lost won't be coming back. Our educational system is beset by a terrible uncertainty: Can students safely return to school this fall? Some are predicting that it is likely there will be no in-person classes possible in the near term. That is a scenario this country does not seem prepared for. Our students are at risk on so many levels; they face the disease, which is spreading rapidly among the young; they face a serious disruption of their educations; and they face uncertainty in the job market.
I can think of three pieces of good news about all of this we should not overlook, though each comes with a "but"...
The short-term effect on our environment may be positive, as a reduction in car traffic is easing the carbon emissions at least temporarily. But over the long term, climate change is relentlessly looming over not only our society but the entire planet, and there seems to be no global consensus on what to do about that.
An encouraging aspect of Joe Biden's newly announced plan for the economy is that he will insist on green purchasing by the U.S. government, which is the biggest consumer of them all. That will create jobs and it will help preserve the environment. A green procurement philosophy in Washington, D.C. would be a major positive that could emerge from this trying period. But even the most progressive budgetary moves will not blunt the impacts of the pandemic on most families.
Some types of crime, like home burglary, are down, since most homes are never empty any more. Reports of domestic abuse are up, however, probably for the same reason. Gun violence continues unabated.
The net net here is it is becoming increasingly difficult even for optimists like me to find a silver lining to Corona-V.
***
Getting ready for an overnight trip to a beach community yesterday morning, my six-year-old granddaughter packed her rolling suitcase and strapped a large stuffed teddy bear that is substantially larger than she is on top.
"So your bear likes the beach, right?" I noted as she pulled her suitcase around the house impatiently, waiting for when the time would be right to load the car.
"And he doesn't need sunblock," she pointed out.
She has a point. This is not a particularly bad time to be a stuffed animal.
***
The weather service warns that parts of the U.S., especially the Southwest, are going to experience a serious heat wave, with temperatures way in excess of 100 degrees in the coming days. Whenever it gets really hot, I start thinking about writing in the tropics.
The rest of this post is a reprint of an essay I originally published 11 years ago in 2009:
One of the enduring images I carry around of a writer is that of the great Rudyard Kipling, banging away on a manual typewriter, the tap-tap-tap of the keys audible through an open window somewhere in Lahore as he wrote "Kim" over a century ago now.
Of course, I have no idea whether he wrote "Kim" in Lahore, which was then part of India, but it really doesn't matter. The point is that the idea of him at work captured my imagination, sometime at a much younger age, and it motivates me still.
I've never published a novel, or even a short story, under my real name, but I have written articles and books (some on manual typewriters) in the tropics. I've written in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tahiti, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Tahiti, among other places.
But some of my best writing (fiction and non-fiction) came at Sanibel Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Lately, I have been revisiting some of that material, trying to craft a novel, or at least a series of stories, out of the stuff I produced on an old manual typewriter in our family cottages on that island.
That type of writing continues, often at night, here in a place no one would call tropical, though given the strange weather patterns we are enduring plus global warming, it may be in the near future.
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