Hard Truth: Coronavirus

Okay. Take a deep breath. (Unless you assume the face mask on the person next to you is to protect you from them instead of them from you.)

It's February 28th and the news of a flulike disease has been spreading faster than the disease itself for more than a month now. I want to write about this at length, in part to document my feelings at this particular moment in time but also to communicate those feelings to spectators who express their concern and curiosity to us on a regular basis.

First, please understand that my viewpoint is cynical. Since the beginning of time, news media in any form has had a singular motive: sell. Journalist friends and friends of journalism: I do not speak ill of thee. But if you go to the New York Times website, there has been a flashing red box for weeks announcing breaking news on the subject. Sometimes there is something new to report but mostly there is just a new derivative of the same limited information. But sell, sell, sell means headlines have to drive clicks and so the Old Grey Lady does everything short of putting visual click bait on these stories. So I'm cynical.

Second, I'm scared. I'm not scared that one of us (meaning, one of the six members of our traveling family) is going to get sick. We're young and healthy or middle aged and healthy. We can all tolerate getting infected and enduring the nuisance of interrupting our trip while, inevitably, we fall to it in succession. I'm nervous about how we'd arrange lodging if we can be denied service. I'm nervous about how being sick at the same time. I'm worried about being sick in series such that it takes a month or more to work through our family.

I'm also worried about being quarantined. Not in the same way that our friends will probably be banned from their workplaces when they return in a week. I've begun to take it for granted that at some point we will have to stay in a hotel somewhere for two weeks before we can enter a country. Or we won't be able to board a flight until we've been monitored for two weeks. Or something like that. Fortunately, I feel pretty much in control of where that could happen. We are about to decide where to go after our remaining booked itinerary wraps up in a few weeks.

Third, I'm calm. I see a lot of panic in the facebook groups and other virtual social circles around me. There's a lot of energy going into speculating. It seems clear to me that this is changing every day and every week. I feel very conscious that I'm in the middle of a unique lifetime experience. I'm already aghast that we will spend approximately one month in transit within one year of travel. Ten percent! I don't want to spent a tangible amount of this precious time...writing blog entries about communicable diseases. Okay, got me there.

Fourth, I'm shocked, though not surprised. Fear stirs up a lot of ignorance and, as a wise man (Yoda) once said, fear leads to anger and anger leads to hate. This is the way of the dark side. On social media, in conventional media, and elsewhere, I see a lot of fear mongering, thinly-, barely- or unveiled racism peddled in the name of public health. I might be less worried in a different political time but it's 2020 and fear/anger/hate seems to be a dominant force in our public discourse.

So here's what we're planning to do. We're booked in Vietnam until March 9 and in a Malaysian suburb of Singapore until March 23. We'll probably fly west by the end of March or early April, a decision we'll make within a week. (I'm really curious what it will be like to extend our travel insurance, which is set to expire on March 14.) We plan to take a holiday en route to Europe by the end of April. This will give us May and June to wander Europe, as planned. We have a little bit of logistics to handle with the Shengen Zone in Europe but plenty of time to handle that.

I think the biggest burden on my brain is uncertainty. It's all the what ifs. What if we can't move freely in Europe. What if we face border control problems. What if "they" run out of toilet paper? What if it all becomes so onerous that the cost of completing the trip is greater than the benefits?

I struggle most with that one because I think this is a singular opportunity. We'll take more trips like this one but never to the depth of this experience. To cut it short seems (to me, right now) like a tragedy. I just read a comment in a facebook forum about a family that is retreating to USA to do a national park roadtrip like we did at the start of our adventure. I immediately thought to myself, their risk of exposure isn't less (especially in the peak of tourist season) but their resources of coping/recovering are greater.

So we plan to stay the course. Our kids are really accustomed to hand sanitizer and their personal hygiene (never especially great) is really much better. There was the moment in the most recent airport when we saw Cate leading on a handrail with her mouth. "I didn't touch it with my tongue, just my lips." Yuck. Even without a highly-transmissable pandemic; double yuck.

What I really don't like, among friends or in a venue like a facebook comment thread, is judgment. Clearly, every country, every community, every family, every school, every church and every individual is going to handle this their own way. There is an abundance of persons passing judgment on others and attempting to impose their own views, their own risk calculations on others. Sometimes its sensible and sensitive and sometimes its inane. The worst, to me, is ugly fear mongering. We simply do not need to incite fear to achieve our goals.

Anyway, enough of this. Our kids are asleep by 9, which is a minor miracle so we're going to go watch a movie. Goodnight!