It’s only a few hours away. What we have all been waiting for, the first day of spring. Of course, this year it starts in darkness at exactly 11:50 tonight. Many of us will be in bed trying to get to sleep after a long day of looking out the window. There is never a good time for a pandemic, but springtime may be the worst. We all look forward to spring after the dreary winter months when we are struck in the house. We look forward longer days and warmer weather. They actually make us feel better. A study at Brigham Young University a couple years ago found students getting counseling found longer days and more sunlight reduces mental stress. Now we get longer hours of sunlight we can’t enjoy. We usually look forward to getting outside, flowers breaking through the earth, birds sweetly singing, spring training baseball. Opening Day has been delayed at least until mid-May. We look forward to March Madness. We now have silent arenas. We are probably looking at an Easter with no egg hunts or big family dinners. Students look forward to the end of the school year and proms. Seniors look forward to graduation. Now they are stuck in the house taking courses on line on their couch that they have to share with their parents who are working from home, who also have to home school their younger kids at the kitchen table.
The coronavirus is radically changing our everyday life. People are getting sick, people are dying. The economy is shutting down. People are losing their jobs, the stock market is tanking. Their is no confidence in a president who denied this was a big deal just a few weeks ago. He even says he didn’t know that people on his own National Security Council who plan for these kinds of things were fired two years ago. Now he calls himself “a wartime president”. I don’t think he will make us forget FDR. Everyday he breaks one of the basic rules every medical expert has been pounding into us. Stay at least six feet apart. Everyday he stands at the podium in the White House briefing room with Mike Pence and at least a half a dozen medical experts and cabinet members shoulder to shoulder breathing on each other while they tell us it’s the worse thing you can do. Leadership?
There are thousands of health care workers and ordinary citizens who are sacrificing and even endangering their own health to help the sick while they struggle with a lack of test kits, hospital beds, respirators, masks, and gowns. They are the people showing leadership. There are some political leaders like governor Cuomo of New York and Newsom of California who are showing what leadership looks like in a crisis. This is a time when we should be leading the world. Our government was unprepared and we are now paying the price.
The enemy were are fighting is frightening because it’s invisible until its already inside of us. You can’t see it. We have heard many numbers during this crisis. The number of positive cases, the number of deaths, percentages. One number that may describe the enemy most clearly was when I heard an interview with a medical researcher working on a vaccine. He was showing the reporter an enlarged computerized version of the virus. The reporter asked how big is the actual virus. The expert said, “Twenty thousand of these could fit on the head of a pin.”
There will be dark spring days ahead. But spring is a time of hope and renewal. We will come out on the other side and feel the warm sun on our faces. This springtime may be lost. But we should take heart in the spirit of people. People are filling the spring air with music and song from balconies that look over us all from Italy to Boston to New York. Spring will come again next year, and in the words of that great philosopher Robin Williams, “Spring is nature’s way of saying, “Let’s party.”
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