Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

What is the New Normal?

Welcome back, friends, to the restaurants and beaches, golf courses and motel rooms, airplanes and barber shops we thought we left behind. And while it seemed a month ago that a return to normalcy was impossible, now we are rushing back to the “new normal” that seems much like the old one.

So, now, it’s up to us to take care of ourselves and our families.

This may mean postponing annual family vacations, staying away from ball games, continuing the shelter-in-place, wearing your mask in the grocery store even if you’re the only one. Most important, it means figuring out, right now, how to vote from home if there’s another outbreak in, say, November when your vote will really count. How many days ahead will it take to get a ballot in the mail? What excuses will your county accept for staying home? Do you need a witness? Find out now, and mark all the instructions with deadline dates on your calendar!

There will be more waves of this disease, and history shows they’d come when the weather turns brisk. Despite the media assertions that nothing like this has ever happened before, epidemics have been common in human history. In the 20th century, Typhoid, cholera, smallpox, polio, a variety of flus, malaria, plague, AIDS, Dengue fever, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, rubella and more have all descended on the world for months on end.

The pandemic in World War I — the Spanish flu — was staggering in its impact with at least 50 million dead worldwide, with spikes for at least three years. Aggravated by the movement of troops to fight the war, it was nearly forgotten until COVID-19 brought it to our consciousness. The only nation that used the lessons learned seems to have been New Zealand, where the Spanish flu took more than 9,000 lives from a population of a million. That’s one of the only nations, by the way, with a memorial to the event and its victims. The memorial reminds, “This disaster shaped modern approaches to managing infectious diseases, helping to protect future generations.”

For much of human history, we’ve known how to handle epidemics: Quarantine the sick ones and keep the healthy ones away. In the US, every young state had a place, or places, for quarantine. “Quarantine Island,” in the Mississippi River across from St. Louis was set up in 1849 to take victims of a cholera epidemic, then became a permanent refuge for the epidemics that visited river towns every couple of years.

Isolation for tuberculosis was the only line of defense up until the 1940s when scientists began tinkering with antibiotics. Fresh air and sunshine were recommended, and TB hospitals had outdoor porches for the convalescents. It is said that more tubercular people went to Denver, seeking fresh air and sunshine, than went west for the Gold Rush.

How did we forget the basics? Why were isolation and quarantine not the first, instinctive steps? We can only blame arrogance, denial and politicization. These are the true pandemics of our age. Death from the Spanish flu, which nearly killed Woodrow Wilson, was considered unmanly. Catharine Arnold, who has written a book on the subject, told the New York Times, “To die in a firefight, that reflected well on your family. But to die in a hospital bed—turning blue, puking, beset by diarrhea—that was difficult for loved ones to accept. There was a mass decision to forget.”

In the case of COVID-19, we can add the hubris of generations of success by scientists against disease, but complicated by the fact that our money-grubbing society has destroyed the efficacy of some cures by over-using them until the diseases developed immunity. This, complicated by a President who uses hubris as a default mode.

In February, as the impact of COVID-19 was beginning to be felt, POTUS recommended cutting more than $693 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plus a cut of $742 million to programs at the Health Resources and Services Administration. These cuts, combined with a 26% cut to EPA, cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and other cuts led Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, to call Trump’s budget a “disinvestment in the health of Americans.”

The 24/7 news coverage of COVID-19 is now supplemented with ordinary news about robberies, car chases, kidnappings and global climate change. And even though we knew how to help each other at the height of the pandemic, set up soup kitchens and home school websites in a flash, now we are fretting over summer camp schedules and office carpools.  Ah! The humanity!

So, continue the precautions that have kept your family safe so far. If you feel safe taking up the old activities, do it. If you don’t, please stay home.

In other words, now that we have freedom to roam, we’re not all in this together. We’re all in this alone.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History”. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2020

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