The "Internally Displaced Persons" Edition
It's hard to maintain the wartime-level mobilization we need when everyone is supposed to be distancing. Think of us all as one big convoy.
The Big Idea
I apologize for the delay in posting this edition: this week, my More Stable Spouse and I decided it would be best to move our More Stable Kids to a lower-density area than Washington, DC, as we socially-distance ourselves in response to covid-19. So, when I should have been writing MSU, I was packing and driving up to a small town in coastal New England. More Stable Spouse, however, needs to stay in DC for her work.
Now, don’t cry too much for us. We’re in a pretty comfy exile, even as we all wait to see who gets sick or not. At least for now, the community is functional, friendly, and socially-distant. It reminds me of what Army Officer/Foreign Service Officer/OSS Agent Charles Thayer said of his retirement after Joe McCarthy hounded him out of the State Department: “Under Stalin you went to Siberia, under Hitler you went to Dachau or Buchenwald, but under McCarthy you went to Majorca, which counts as progress.” Under Trump, I get Cape Cod.
There’s a definition for what me, my boys, and my mother-in-law are now: we are IDPs—Internally Displaced Persons. From my earliest days as a 21-year-old volunteer relief worker, all of my overseas work has involved IDPs to some extent. While my current circumstances are far more comfortable than those of any of the IDPs I’ve met from war-torn countries, I share this with them: I have left my home and my spouse, and I have no idea when I will see either again.
I’ve “moved to the sound of guns” a few times in my life, and that’s given me the chance to meet some real heroes. We talk in the U.S. of our “heroes” who volunteer to wear the uniform and fight our wars, but the war heroes I’ve met weren’t the people who volunteered for it, they were the people it just happened to, because they were in the war’s way. Their capacity and resilience has been incredibly humbling for me, and it’s their capacity and resilience we all need to summon now. We all need to be Kosovo’s Mother Theresa Society, or Afghanistan’s civil servants, or Syria’s White Helmets, to pick the most impressive examples I’ve encountered.
The biggest challenge we may have in this respect is that our imagination of social cohesion in warlike circumstances involves people being together: World War II is the template, and from Londoners sheltering from the Blitz together in the Tube to Rosie the Riveters together on the factory floor to Bands of Brothers fighting alongside each other, our image of wartime mobilization inherently involves groups of people working closely together, while our war demands we isolate ourselves to the greatest extent possible. My own examples of the Mother Theresa Society and the White Helmets are the same—people banding together to face a challenge.
I was going to make a commentary about each of us as a lone sentry at an outpost, but a) most of us aren’t alone, we’re—perhaps worse—stuck with our loved ones; and b) Tom Hanks is ill, so I’ll use an analogy from his upcoming WWII Battle of the Atlantic movie, Greyhound, which I hope is released direct to digital if the theaters are still closed. If it doesn’t, you’d have a great read in the book it’s based on, C.S. Forester’s The Good Shepherd.
Think of the coronavirus as Nazi U-boats. There are people whose full-time purpose in life is fighting the Nazis—the armies taking the war to Germany. Our armies are the health care workers taking enormous risks for our safety. Then there are the food service and supply chain workers, the elderly and those most vulnerable to the virus: they are merchant ships in convoy—we have to shepherd them safely to a virus-free port, where- and when-ever we reach it, because we need the supplies they provide, and we owe it to them as fellow human beings.
We, and our isolated family/social units, are the convoy’s escort destroyers, patrolling the seas on the convoy’s fringes. We keep the U-boats/virus away from the convoy by social distancing and keeping everything clean, even though we’re in monotonous, uncomfortably-tight quarters and rocking seas, and maybe we get truly sick of our shipmates. We may each get hit by the virus, but that’s a risk we have to take for the convoy’s sake. Our goal is to keep the U-boats/virus away from the convoy’s merchant ships as best we can, so that our army—the health care professionals—can get what they need.
So keep a tight ship for your crew. We are stronger than we think. In WWII, numerous pre-war studies predicted that civilians exposed to strategic bombing would collapse under the strain. At least in Britain, what they actually found was suicides decreasing, and mental health admissions dropping, as people found new purpose in the war effort. Be the best skipper, officer, or crew of your destroyer-house that you can be.
Good Reads/This Week
The coronavirus highlights our weak resilience. Let’s just say our government is not meeting our expectations, nor are a good number of our dis-informed and alienated citizens. It’s almost as if everyone ignored what experts thought about things! Who could have thought that would end badly? A good rule of thumb I’ve learned from crisis management is that the systems and methods that serve you well in crisis will serve you well in normal times. Your “crisis” management style can serve you every day; your “regular” management will fail you at the first challenge, and you’ll lose precious time trying to adapt to the crisis. Systems that maximize “efficiency” will fail in a crisis, because resilience lies in the margins of small inefficiencies, like stockpiles, training, and treating your people well, that “efficiency” doesn’t always provide for.
Unfortunately, our system of profit-maximization squeezes out quite a bit of that profit by getting rid of those inefficiencies that promote resilience. When building future models for society, we should de-emphasize “efficiency” and focus on “resilience,” which accepts certain inefficiencies and sub-optimal profits in the name of broader socioeconomic well-being. When we do get through to the other side of this, a lot of the adaptations we made for this pandemic will be things we’ll want to continue doing, like mandatory sick leave, better medical stockpiles, and maybe even universal basic income.
I have long corrected anyone who claimed that Donald Trump was our worst president. Putting aside the criminals like Nixon or Harding, I would always reply that George W. Bush killed thousands of Americans and uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in an utterly pointless war. Meanwhile, it’s hard to beat James Buchanan, who actively abetted the expansion of slavery, let the Union collapse on his watch, and was really corrupt. But the (to take from The Daily Show) “catastrophuck” of coronavirus and our crashing economy might actually give Trump the title of Worst President Ever. We’ll be lucky if we only lose as many American lives as died in the Civil War.
Next week, I promise to get back on schedule, for my own sanity if no other purpose.
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