Five Years Gone

What's a good anniversary gift for a plague?

Five years ago today, I snapped the picture below of the writeable panels in the central atrium of the brand! new! Integrated Science and Engineering Center at Union. We had moved in back in December, and all the stuff for my research lab was still sealed up in boxes in the basement, because I hadn’t had time to unpack before Winter term classes started. We had made it to the tenth and final week of classes, though the exact fate of the Spring term was still a little tenuous, as you can see:

I do not employ or endorse the grading scale at right.

I was on campus that day primarily to attend a colloquium talk at lunchtime; I don’t remember what the topic was (something astronomy related), but the speaker had come to campus and we were all eating the accompanying lunch when people’s phones started buzzing, alerting us to an all-campus email from President David Harris. The college had just been informed of a positive Covid test for a member of the staff, and we were shutting down, effective immediately. Classes cancelled for the rest of the day, students instructed to pack up to leave that weekend, finals moved online, and the Spring term delayed for a remote start.

We all read that, then shrugged, finished our pizza, and listened to the talk. Because we figured if anyone in the room was a plague carrier, we were all infected already, and might as well enjoy a last moment of semi-normality. Once the Q&A wrapped up, we all hit the road, heading to the grocery store to stock up on bread and toilet paper.

The kids’ school closed at the end of the following day— Friday the 13th, so it sticks in their memories very clearly— and that was it for normal education in the 2019-20 academic year. Union’s Spring term was not on campus, at least not for the students— I was still sneaking in occasionally to work in my office. That term we had planned to experiment with a “modular” GenEd science course, with faculty from five departments each coming up with two weeks worth of material (including a couple of labs) that we would repeat multiple times to five subsets of a class of ~100 students. We moved that online, which I did by pre-recording a whole bunch of YouTube videos, the first of which you can see here:

I also spent a bunch of time acquiring laser pointers and diffraction gratings and mailing them out to students so they could do lab-like things at home, on their own. My Google Photos archive from that period is full of snapshots of improvised at-home labs using those materials. (And also pictures and videos of improvised obstacle courses so the kids could burn off energy; they had been regulars at the Ninja Lab that winter, but that was obviously Right Out…)

Anyway, five years is a fairly traditional interval from which to look back at a Significant Event and reflect on what happened. So you’re getting… this.

Any look back of course needs to start with the obligatory disclaimer that we were extremely fortunate in a number of respects: Kate and I both have the kind of white-collar jobs that could easily move online without disrupting our income, which is substantial enough that we could solve some of the early pandemic problems by just throwing money at them. We live in an affluent suburban community with plenty of options for getting outdoors without getting too close to anyone else: safe and walkable streets, access to a bike path and some big open parks. And both Union and the school our kids attend are wealthy and high-quality institutions with the resources to minimize the problems of school in the Covid era— 2020-21 was weird, but both the college and the local school were open for in-person instruction in September, so we got off lightly in terms of school closures.

Most importantly, we started from a place of generally good health. None of us had any pre-existing issues that made Covid especially threatening. I have seasonal allergies that kept me incredibly paranoid through the rest of 2020 and 2021, but none of us have the really significant risk factors, so we could remain relatively calm.

All of that went a long way toward making the pandemic experience easier to tolerate. It wasn’t good by any stretch— I’m enough of an extrovert that I get really twitchy without regular social interaction— but it was way better than it could’ve been. If I were less well-off, asthmatic, and living in a crowded apartment building in a dodgy urban neighborhood, well, I don’t know that that would’ve ended well.

But then again, maybe it would’ve. Because one of the revisionist things that drives me nuts about the #discourse around Covid is the way people now talk about it like everybody instantly hit the state of batshit polarization that we have today. It really wasn’t like that at all, in the early days— the vast majority of people were scared and confused, but also pulled together to do what needed doing. Businesses closed and public spaces emptied, often without explicit orders to do so, just because people were playing it safe. Both formal and informal organizations worked within communities to find ways to support people who needed it—delivering food and arranging to do chores for the less mobile, etc. Those who were out and about— I do basically all the shopping for Chateau Steelypips, so was at the grocery store on a regular basis— were generally careful and courteous, giving each other space and being patient with everyone’s ragged nerves.

The areas of public life that eventually went toxic didn’t start out that way— it took a few months for public health issues to start to polarize, and it didn’t get completely awful until well into 2021. There was a lot that was terrifying during those first few months, but also a fair amount that was uplifting. And far too much of the #discourse about the pandemic now is looking back through polarized lenses that really only emerged later.

An unfortunate consequence of this is that we tend to underrate and misremember the amount of voluntary sacrifice made by the general public in the early months of the pandemic. People on the right are too quick to remember every Covid shutdown as a draconian imposition by the government, when in fact a lot of the measures were things people did willingly. And people on the left project a lot of later resistance to public health measures back farther than was actually the case— the anti-mask and anti-vax stuff didn’t emerge instantly, but only after months of generally polite and mostly voluntary compliance.

There are a lot of reasons why that happened, and plenty of people are happy to debate the relative importance of the various contributing factors. I’m not convinced that will accomplish much at this stage, so let’s just say that as the pandemic wore on, nobody in public life exactly covered themselves in glory, and leave it at that.

One of the smaller pieces that’s always been most annoying to me, though, is the relentless negativity of the #discourse on social media. Even in the moments when people were voluntarily sacrificing a lot, there was a tendency to not give them sufficient credit for making the effort— to react to a loose-fitting mask in an outdoor space as if the wearer was spitting directly in the mouth of an immunocompromised person, or to discuss mild measures to reduce crowding like the equivalent of imposing martial law.

What was particularly grating to me was a tendency to pooh-pooh a lot of the sacrifices people were being asked to make, particularly on the social side. This has been on my mind this week because Monday would’ve been my grandmother’s 100th birthday, and among the small number of pictures of her I have on Google Photos are shots from Thanksgiving of 2020, when we met my parents and grandmother in a park lot in Oneonta, NY (roughly halfway between us) to exchange side dishes.

My grandmother had a stroke in March of 2020, right before the hard Covid lockdowns hit, and spent a few weeks in a nursing home recovering, during which the main contact my mom had with her was waving through the window from out on the lawn while talking on the phone. She was actually in hospice care at my parents’ for a while that summer, but outlived it for another year-and-a-bit before passing in October 2021.

Given that context, we decided that an in-person Thanksgiving would be too risky, thus the parking lot photos. And that was really difficult in a way that I don’t think a lot of the more militant Covid hawks ever appreciated— even aside from my extrovert need for socialization, Thanksgiving has long been one of my very favorite holidays, and I was acutely aware that the number of times we would see my grandmother again was not large. (We did manage to all be together at Christmas and the following Easter, for which I am grateful.)

In the online discussions of the time, though, passing up in-person holidays was talked about as if it were a trivial concession, and people who were unwilling to forgo a major holiday with family were moral monsters. Which, you know, is probably an inevitable consequence of allowing the #discourse to be dominated by introverted weirdos with broadband Internet and family relationships that are strained at best. But it was grating then, and remains so today. And while it’s not remotely sufficient to push me into the arms of the MAGA crowd, it absolutely pushed a bunch of people whose side I am otherwise on onto my lists of blocked accounts.

Which is not to say that I think being nicer is the One Weird Trick that could’ve headed off… [expansive gesture in the direction of Washington DC] all this. But I do wish we had collectively been more willing to extend a bit of grace to people who were scared and confused and doing their best to balance deeply rooted and conflicting interests.

Because there genuinely was a moment there when we were, cornily, All In This Together, before we blew it all to pieces in ways that will be hard to ever recover from. And if we’re going to look back to those early confusing days, as we collectively tend to do at five-year intervals, I wish we could put a little more emphasis on that moment, without dragging in the rancor and recriminations that came later on.

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