Published: Sept. 3, 2020

A Call to Rebellion against the Peril of Exaggerated Expectations

 

Coronavirus is not done with us until we have a vaccine.

A headline in USA Today, June 17, 2020, 

but also a statement that is omnipresent in our world today

 

The key to life is crushing expectations before they crush you.

Artist, Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, comic strip on September 2, 2020

 

My fellow Americans our long national nightmare is over. . . . Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.

President Gerald R. Ford at his swearing-in ceremony, August 9, 1974

My fellow Americans, join me in pondering an occasion when a President of the United States made a statement of faith in the Constitution, the government of laws, and a higher Power who ordains righteousness, love, justice, and mercy. But as you ponder, repeat to yourself, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

And now stick with me while we figure out how a commitment to not getting our hopes up may actually reduce our troubles in the future.

Or, to put this another way, look back at the image on the banner above, and contemplate this caption for that image:

“Get this vaccine off its pedestal before it falls off and hurts itself—and the nation itself!”

 

Diagnosing a Prospect of Peril

In a widely viewed commercial in the past, an actor in a white coat would say, “I’m not really a doctor, but I play one on TV.”

Here’s my variation on that theme:  I’m not really a policy expert, but I used to play one at podiums, lecterns, and tables set up for panel discussions, and now I play one in the digital world of websites and postings. Bear with me; near the end of this essay, I will appear in my true identity as an all-out over-the-top, shameless advocate for the solace provided by the humanities.

Taking a lot of history courses in my formative years, I received what we might call “a lifetime license to drive in the ‘past tense’ lane.” And then the road took some unexpected twists and turns, and I found myself putting on my turn signal and easing over into the “present tense” lane, holding forth on current events and breaking news, while nervously keeping my eye out for flashing red lights in the rearview mirror. And, every now and then, carried away by a compulsion to be helpful that overpowers caution, I have gone even further, speeding up and merging into the “future tense” lane. At that stage, as I am cruising along while offering opinions on things that haven’t happened yet, and in fact, may never happen, I am all too aware that—on the likely chance that I am pulled over and asked for ID—I will find nothing much more than an out-of-date learner’s permit stashed in the glove compartment.

Is it conceivable that, in our long national nightmare, we will become even more polarized and divided?

As a historian now admitting that she is out of her lane and driving without a license into the zone of the future, I am ready to declare that the answer to that question is “Yes, almost certainly.”

Why?

Many people are resting their hopes for the future on the discovery of vaccines for the coronavirus. Because vaccination has become the repository of our greatest hopes for a quick and clear resolution of our current calamities, it promises to drive us to a new level of disunity. Success in designing vaccines will add to our capacity for antagonism and opposition by turning very high expectation into very intense disillusionment.

Every time I hear the vaccine invoked as the force that will rescue us, I become more convinced that we are setting ourselves up for a festival of dispute and blame. Our expectations are setting us up for a very hard landing.

Here’s what weighs on me.

In September of 2020, scientists in innumerable labs are pushing hard. It is entirely possible that a vaccine—or several vaccines—will soon come into existence and achieve certification as safe and effective.

And then what?

For the hopeful, the vaccine will solve the problem.

Manufacturing will move with prodigious efficiency. Getting vaccinated will become a national—an international—enthusiasm. Realizing that rescue is at hand, in an extraordinary orchestration of trained personnel and a cooperative citizenry, millions of people will compliantly present their arms for injection or open their mouths for inhalation.

The era of caution, constraint, and care will be over. Audiences will pack concert halls, theaters, and auditoriums. Airports and airplanes will fill up again. Restaurants will be fully booked day after day and night after night. Children from kindergarten to high school will flock into their classes with a thirst for education and an intensity of curiosity that were far less evident back in February of 2020. That passion for knowledge will extend the enrollments for higher education, with an enrollment boom that continues for years. Handshaking and hugging, and contact sports and ballroom dancing will undergo a renaissance. Homes for the elderly will throw open their doors for visitors and entertainers. Everyone will hold on to a mask or two for use in nostalgic Halloween costumes.

Well, maybe.

How long will it take to manufacture millions and millions of doses of the vaccines? How long will it take to distribute those doses to populations far and wide?

And now we arrive at the core of my fear.

The story of the discovery of a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine will soon hold the status of a very short introduction to a much longer tale. The story of managing and defeating the virus, by installing the vaccine’s protective power in roiled and rattled human societies, will be many times longer than the story that recounts the achievement of the scientists in their laboratories.

For any other scenario to be imaginable, the process would require careful and consistent coordination and orchestration. As of September 2020, the United States cannot coordinate and orchestrate its way out of a paper bag.

And now for the heightening of polarization and division in the United States: because of the very high hopes pinned on the vaccine, the slow pace of getting it distributed and deployed will provoke deep disappointment and disillusionment. The now hardwired custom of responding to problems by blaming everyone else will prevail. And one side effect of this custom will be a further erosion of the trust needed to persuade the doubtful to accept the vaccination. Getting a vaccine into people’s bodies has to ride an enormous wave of consent.

I have not been able to break myself of the conviction that this particular fear for the future rests on a foundation of historical perspective, but I would be very relieved to bid that conviction farewell. So, I ask readers to seize every tool of critical appraisal in their reach—from scalpels to pick-axes—to take apart what I am saying about the tensions and conflicts that the discovery of the vaccine will unleash. It would be wonderful to be persuaded that my worries are without justification.

Readers, have at it! Success is in your reach!

As it happens, my prediction presents one very vulnerable flank for those aspiring to demolish it. It rests on the most over-generalized statement I have ever in my life made about the big picture of history. We’ll get to that soon.

 

My Fellow Americans, Our Long National Nightmare Is Not Over, 

And It Could Be About to Flare Up

Since the coronavirus arrived in the United States, practices that were supposed to support a better understanding of the disease, and of ways to minimize its impact, have become arenas of cultural, social, and political struggle. The availability of tests—whether aimed at identifying current Covid-19 infections or at finding the antibodies that would indicate an infection endured and survived—has been an unending source of dispute, with the supply of tests often constrained by limited funding. As a means of tracking contagion and putting infected individual people into quarantine, contact tracing soon became a tangle of trouble, whether from insufficient training for the people assigned to contact strangers and persuade them to disclose their social ties, or from a failure to get test results with a sufficient timeliness to give meaning to the information that contact tracing was supposed to provide. And then there is the misfortune by which the wearing of masks became a flashpoint of conflict over political identity and, in college towns, over the variance of concern over contagion in different generations. And then there was the pressure felt by low-paid essential workers to continue showing up at jobs that offered them patchy protection from infection, added unsettling dimensions of ethnic injustice and class tension to a picture that already included uneven access to health care.

The conclusion I cannot avoid: the cultural, social, and political tensions and conflicts already in play over masks, testing, contact tracing, worker safety, and the factor of ethnicity in susceptibility to Covid-19 will multiply with the high stakes of a vaccine.

And we haven’t gotten yet to the doubled challenge presented by vaccination.

A significant majority of Americans will very much want to get the vaccination. This will make the setting of priorities very difficult. Presumably health care professionals will come first, and a range of essential workers, in jobs where isolation is unworkable, will be right after them. But who comes next? Teachers? People with compromised immune systems? Elderly people with particular vulnerabilities to the virus? People who work in facilities that serve those elderly folks? People enrolled in the best-funded and most smoothly operating health plans? People well-placed in social networks with physicians? People who are members of Indian tribes that have had devastating levels of contagion? Residents of African American and Latinx communities with high rates of infection? People holding high-level offices in the federal government? In the state governments? In county and municipal governments?

Arranging these claims on priority is an enormous challenge. But an even bigger challenge may lie in designing a line of approach to Americans who have long been distrustful of vaccinations, convinced that they are accompanied by undesirable side effects. It is entirely possible that the cohort of the distrustful has expanded over the last years. Unless they are subject to coercion that violates basic rights, people will only accept an injection recommended by a system that they trust and administered by professionals that they trust.

So what we confront is a doubled need: a need for a system of allocation to set priorities that will hold back some people who think they should be awarded a higher priority for vaccination, and an equal need for a system of persuasion to bring forward those who do not, initially, consent. Whether the issue is agreeing to a vaccination or accepting a place in a line-up of priority recipients, trust in experts and institutions is currently in a very frayed state, a dilemma that seems sure to complicate both the persuasion of the reluctant to accept vaccination and the persuasion of the eager to accept their place in a line-up of priority recipients.

 

A Stymied Search for Endings, Conclusions, Resolutions, and Closure

A quarter-century ago, speaking to public audiences, I became familiar with a sensation that bore a strange resemblance to standing—or trying to remain standing!—in a strong current of water. The desire of an audience to have a speaker arrive at an encouraging, hope-infused conclusion can make the speaker feel very much like she is trying to hold her footing against the   flow of a river or the pressure of a tide. The audience will go quite a long way in tolerating the telling of a disturbing historical story and listen responsively to reflections on the meanings and dynamics of the story. But at a certain point, the mood palpably shifts, and the audience wants the speaker to bring it home—not to an improbably happy ending, but to something that could pass for resolution or even solution. In non-verbal but eloquent ways, the audience lets the speaker know that they want her to say, “I wouldn’t worry too much about what I have told you. History shows that human beings get themselves in awful situations, and then things got better.”

With the frequent evocation of the phrase, “until we have a vaccine,” the popular desire for an outcome of closure and clarity is very much in evidence. And, in truth, it is entirely understandable that Americans aspire to an end to the currently astounding level of trouble.

So, I went on a quest. I let my mind wander through Western American history—and, as desperation mounted, any area of history I had ever learned anything about—trying to think of episodes in history that arrived at clear and unambiguous endings, with a premium on a fairly tight timetable.

But I couldn’t come up with much of anything in the way of closure or conclusion or solution or resolution. History proves to be very stingy in offering tales of things coming to a well-defined halt. Troubles have a way of petering out, far more than ending. Even when we want them to disappear the legacies linger. Wars end, and we can identify days when the armistices were finalized, the treaties were signed, and armed conflict ended. But the legacies of war linger in ways both visible and invisible. In the short term, demobilization when wars end can be prolonged periods of adjustment, and often enough, of economic hardship. Laws are passed and signed, but the story is far from over. How will they be implemented? What groups or individuals will sue to prohibit the implementation of those laws, and what will the courts leave standing in their terms and requirements?

The war ended. The law was passed. The cure was found. The revolution succeeded. The regime ended. The policy changed.

Statements like this used to make sense to me. But now statements with finality only make me ask, “And then what happened?”

And so, when I encounter the hope that a vaccine will bring the troubles of the coronavirus to  halt, I think, “If such a thing ever happened in history, no one told me about it.”

As every reader will be observing, the claim I am making here exceeds any authority that I—or any other historian—will ever hold. I have made a declaration placed at such a wild level of over-generalization that I have thrown the door open to corrections.

But I still cannot get beyond thinking of examples where enormous problems came to clear and quick resolutions.

But that does not mean that we are stuck.

 

Where’s the Fire? 

Borrowing Wisdom from A Brave Group

Western American history is a storehouse of stories in which people took actions—often quite risky actions—because they had wildly elevated expectations of how well these actions were going to turn out. In a very common pairing, very high expectations were the necessary prelude to very intense disappointment.

Let’s not do that again.

What shall we do instead?

Is there a productive way to lower expectations that could reduce disillusionment and bitterness of blame? Is there a way to anticipate trouble and to position ourselves to be relieved when the trouble doesn’t materialize?

Fortunately, quite a number of professions, occupations, and enterprises operate with frameworks that we could easily apply to our thinking about vaccinations. In these lines of work, nobody bothers with the expectation of happy endings or simple resolutions.

Here is my nomination for the best place to turn for an example of expectations brought into a closer alignment with reality: the world of wildlands firefighting.

I have had the good fortune to have quite a number of friends in this line of work, every one of whom is a first-rate storyteller. We’ll start with the pattern of their vocation. They bring one fire under control, and then several more break out. They finish one fire season, but they know that wildfire has not come to an end as a fearful feature of life in many parts of the West. I am not totally sure how they maintain their determination and their immunity to discouragement, though I have reasons to guess that a fondness for the experience of activated adrenaline figures in the explanation. But there is no missing the fact that their courage and persistence are astounding.

When they are fighting a particular fire, they waste no time on imprecise claims of success or failure. They report their progress in percentages: the fire is at zero containment; the fire is now at 5% containment; the fire is at 20% containment; a hard wind has started up; the fire is now at 10% containment

Working in situations that are so dynamic and changeable, the decisionmakers in this world follow the protocol of the acronym, LCES:  Location, Communication, Exit Strategy, Safety Zone. Anticipating troubles ahead, the LCES protocol requires decision-makers to set priorities for what structures they will be able to save, to anticipate peril, and to make the best possible effort to deploy firefighters in ways that will reduce or even eliminate that peril.

The people who first taught me the LCES procedure were all people who had notified family members to tell them that a wife or husband or daughter or son had died while fighting a fire. They had nothing in the way of exaggerated hopes and expectations when the call came to report for duty.

When it comes to lowering expectations and managing hopes in ways that anticipate and minimize peril, firefighters—as well as practitioners in a number of other risk-infused occupations—have acquired expertise and wisdom that could make a big difference in the quality of the planning of the wisest management of the coronavirus vaccines.

Given that the vaccines are very unlikely to be in the picture until well after the fire season slows down, there’s time to enlist experienced firefighters to the cause of getting expectations in the best possible alignment with reality, and thereby reducing the prospects for increased tension, conflict, and strife when the vaccines prove unable to bring the pandemic to a clear close and conclusion.

 

The Solace of The Humanities:

Famous Last Words

The coronavirus is only one component in our long national nightmare. A national government in disorder, communities overcome with social unrest, unemployment and financial desperation in many sectors of the nation’s economy; the calamities extend far beyond the reach of the best-managed and best-administered vaccine.

At this point, the only help I can offer is the solace of the humanities: an immersion in the final words of some very well-known books.

At the end of books of fiction, the authors return their readers to the real world. And so the last sentences of books serve as the authors’ valedictories, benedictions, and farewells. They are statements that say to readers, “I am about to leave you, and you are going to find yourself suddenly back on your own in reality. Here are some words to keep in your minds.”

I have assembled some candidates for contemplation in the Fall of 2020, presented in ascending order of helpfulness.

  1. The Closing Words of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

Limerick Commentary: This is very tempting, very appealing, and as far as I can tell, of no help at all in 2020, when “lighting out for the Territory ahead of the rest” could only mean “find a temporarily satisfactory form of denial and evasion.”

  1. The Closing Words of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

    “The Silver Shoes,” said the Good Witch, “have wonderful powers. . . . All you have to do is knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry you wherever you wish to go. . . . .” 

    Dorothy stood up and found she was in her stocking-feet. For the Silver Shoes had fallen off in her flight through the air, and were lost forever in the desert.

Limerick Commentary: This is also very tempting and very appealing, but the loss of the Silver Shoes [yes, ruby slippers in the movie] adds a sharp note of reality: Dorothy has landed back in Kansas, and the shoes that take you “wherever you wish to go” are somewhere in the desert where only Flying Monkeys were going to be able to see them from the air and swoop down and try to see if they fit.

  1. The Closing Words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Limerick Commentary: This is not so tempting and not so appealing, if you know the plot, but it is somehow still a tribute to humans pushing on “against the current,” even as they are overpowered by the past. And yet, from the historian’s angle, being “borne back ceaselessly into the past” may actually provide historical perspectives that might prove useful in setting our boats on a better course.

  1. The Closing Words of Dante’s Inferno

My guide and I came upon that hidden road

To make our way back into the bright world;

And with no care for any rest, we climbed—

He first, I following—until I saw,

Through a round opening, some of those things

Of beauty Heaven bears. It was from there 

That we emerged to see—once more—the stars.

Limerick Commentary: Once you remember that Dante and his guide Virgil had been on a dreadful journey, descending through the nine circles of hell, this is very inspirational and inordinately helpful. Their successful ascent from the depths of hell, emerging “to see—once more—the stars,” should be on our minds every day. Moreover, Dante’s willingness to follow a trustworthy guide was obviously key to his getting out of the Inferno and regaining a view of “those things of beauty Heaven bears.”

  1. The Closing Words of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

A day of grace is yet to be held out to us.  Both North and South have been guilty before God, and the Christian Church has a heavy account to answer. Not by coming together, to protect injustice and cruelty and making common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved—but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the milestone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of the Almighty God.

Limerick Commentary: This, too, is a passage to keep before us and to contemplate when the intensity of our long national nightmare brings us to a halt. Stowe does not recommend passivity, resignation, and a sense of inevitability, but she does make it clear that we have to get our act together. It almost seems that Gerald Ford might have been rereading Uncle Tom’s Cabin when he composed the lines he delivered when he was sworn in as President, words to which we will, heaven willing, return. Often.

My fellow Americans our long national nightmare is over. . . . Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.

President Gerald Ford, August 9, 1974

Photograph of Chief Justice Warren Burger administering the Oath of Office to President Gerald R. Ford while Betty Ford looks on. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia, by Robert Leroy Knudsen

Photograph of Chief Justice Warren Burger administering the Oath of Office to President Gerald R. Ford while Betty Ford looks on. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia, by Robert Leroy Knudsen

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Photo Credit: Gerald Ford photo courtesy of: Wikipedia, by Robert Leroy Knudsen.

Photo Credit: Banner Vaccine image photo courtesy of: pixabay.com, by Chillsoffear.