A Swamp of Reasonable Doubt; and, A Symphony of Sirens

“Two distinct sounds have been competing in New York City’s streets during the coronavirus pandemic: the wail of sirens and the songs of ice cream trucks.”

Sirens are a customary counterpoint to the din of the Citi That Never Sleeps, to cop an old advert. To live in New York City is to hear sirens. One becomes accustomed to them.

Ice cream trucks with their hurdy-gurdy melodious self-announcement are more likely to be heard in the outer boroughs.

What a perfect dichotomy to represent where we are with the Trump Pandemic. Paul Krugman put it so eloquently: “As Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicare and Medicaid under Barack Obama, puts it, Trump is a quitter. Faced with the need to actually do his job and do what it takes to crush the pandemic, he just gave up.”

Things are so fast, furious, and contradictory that I’ve switched my metaphor from Wimbledon singles, now I see which proceed at a relatively sedate, matronly pace, to championship table tennis a.k.a. ping pong, which is so fast that sometimes, the bouncing ball disappears.

Social-distancing has worked, as the medical doctors who know predicted it would, but “[t]he success of social-distancing measures has always been largely dependent on individual behavior.” This past weekend more than 25 million Americans left their homes for the first time since the lockdown was invoked. Twenty-five million more than in the past two months.

“[T]he public is also wrestling with a barrage of conflicting messages.”

Um, yeah, we are.

We had a tough conversation in our home just yesterday. The May 15th expiration date on the “pause” that Governor Cuomo requested expires in two days. We all have friends who live just across the border in Western Massachusetts. One is a sweetie. One is a friend undergoing treatment for a hard kind of cancer. Others are close friends.

Does the expiration mean we can go East to see our beloved peeps?

Probably not. Or, probably not, if we take the time to read the 51-page pdf of guidelines on reopening New York. The recommendations for individual behavior appear on pages 50–51.

Then there’s this: “Two of the federal government’s top health officials painted a grim picture of the months ahead on Tuesday, warning a Senate panel that the coronavirus pandemic was far from contained, just a day after President Trump declared that ‘we have met the moment and we have prevailed.’”

No, we haven’t, we haven’t even close to prevailed. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s testimony recommended “humility in the face of an unpredictable killer” which means “erring on the side of caution.”

There’s more: “On Tuesday, the federal government’s own top experts painted a starkly different picture. ‘We are not out of the woods yet,’ Dr. Redfield testified.

“The C.D.C. director declined to talk specifically about reports that the White House had blocked the release of his agency’s guidance for states to reopen schools, businesses and religious institutions, saying only that they would be released ‘soon.’

“‘Soon isn’t terribly helpful,’ Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, replied in a heated exchange about whether his state, which has a stay-at-home order expiring in the next few days, would know how to properly reopen. Mr. Murphy said the guidelines that the White House released in April for opening the country were ‘criminally vague.’ More recently, White House and senior health officials rejected the C.D.C. recommendations over concerns that they were overly prescriptive, infringed on religious rights and risked further damaging the economy

“The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that the suggested guidance was more detailed than previously known. The A.P. obtained a 63-page document that advocated a coordinated national response, with step-by-step measures outlined for community leaders.”

Overly prescriptive or criminally vague.

Which do you choose, Beloved?

Myself, I’m all for overly prescriptive because our primitive brains are starting to act out, to make living with a mutating pathogen just another new, more rotten than ever, normal. Is that what we want?

There are many more examples of the PushMePullYou variety, and we needn’t go into them here. What I’m most curious about is how we got to where we are with Covid-19. It’s reminding me of the R.O.U.S. from The Princess Bride. For those who don’t bring up an instant association with the acronym: Rodents of Unusual Size.

Ross Douthat writing in “The Coronavirus Quagmire, In the war on Covid-19, can America do better than a stalemate?” maintains that Americans have stopped playing to win. He cites General George Patton.

“‘Americans play to win all the time,’ George Patton told the Third Army in the spring of 1944. ‘That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.’

“That was in another time, another country. When Patton spoke the United States was still ascending, a superpower in the making. But once our ascent was complete, our war-making became managerial, lumbering, oriented toward stalemate. From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to all our lesser conflicts, the current American way of warfare rarely has a plan to win.”

I think I know why. We are caught doing the limbo in a purgatory of reasonable doubt.

Reasonable doubt is a legal term, much bandied about. It means “Proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is required for conviction of a criminal defendant. A reasonable doubt exists when a fact-finder cannot say with moral certainty that a person is guilty or a particular fact exists.”

Let’s excerpt it slightly to make clear what I mean. A reasonable doubt exists when a fact-finder cannot say with moral certainty that a particular fact exists.

Here’s a perfect example: “The committee chairman, Lamar Alexander, described a future vaccine or treatment as the ‘ultimate solution,’ but he said ‘until we have them, all roads back to work and school go through testing.’

Now, that’s a pretty clear sentence. We need a vaccine or treatment as the ultimate solution. That would be a win, no? But in the meantime, we need to be doing testing to make a return to work or a return to school safe.

“Brett P. Giroir, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, who is overseeing the government’s testing response, testified that the country would have the ability to conduct 40 million to 50 million tests per month by September.”

That’d be great.

Here’s the rest: “But his remarks drew skepticism from Democratic senators, including Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who said, ‘This administration has had a record of bringing us broken promises that more supplies and testing are coming, and they don’t.’”

It’s as though we’re all on a rollercoaster that simply doesn’t have the steam to get up over a high loop so it keeps gunning to get over it, and never manages. If you’ve ever felt your car tires spinning in snow when they’ve lost their traction, you know exactly what I mean. We seem to have lost our collective traction.

Two phrases from Ross Douthat’s essay particularly struck me as insightful. He says, “but we have … little grand ambition,” and that there is an “assumption of futility” amongst the people of the West.

Sit with these ideas for a moment, Beloved. I think what the faux outrage and the fake news and the devastating partisan sniping have done is undergird that assumption of futility.

Me? I can’t make a difference, so why try?

I think what the faux outrage and the fake news and the devastating partisan sniping have done is undergird that assumption of futility by inserting and or insinuating reasonable doubt into every exchange.

If I don’t know what’s true, what’s right, what’s real, how can I make the choices that are right for me, my family, my clan, my tribe? I can’t, so why try?

Undergirding that assumption of futility with reasonable doubt has left us with little grand ambition.

So we’re back to escalating sirens, a symphony of sirens. Sirens that remind us that there is a state of emergency no matter the swamp of reasonable doubt where the rest of us, not intimately in the face of that emergency for the moment, are paralyzed into stasis, inaction, and, ultimately, the hopelessness of despair.

There is another spin on the word siren, that being a siren call. If you’ll listen closely, you’ll hear it inside the police sirens, the fire sirens, the ambulance sirens. All the sirens, all the time, everywhere.

Here’s Ross Douthat again: “So as we look for a post-lockdown strategy, maybe what we’re actually looking for are leaders … willing to embrace the old-fashioned idea that in this struggle, as in the wars our country used to wage, there is no substitute for victory.”

One of the reasons the scientists and medical professionals are so engaged in this process of addressing Covid-19 is that, like the United States during World War II, they are still ascending a very steep learning curve. “Dr. Fauci emphasized the importance of having ‘multiple winners,’ meaning more than one vaccine available, to provide ‘global availability.’”

They have to be engaged. They’re on the frontlines, to borrow another war metaphor. But so are you, and so am I.

Our national leaders, our state leaders, our city leaders are all caught in the swamp of reasonable doubt. That’s the media environment in which they must function. But you and I are not caught where they are. I hear the siren call, do you?

The siren call is for local leaders — boots on the ground, if you will — to hear the homely call of the ice cream calliope, remember long, happy, lazy summer days and nights of fireflies and fireworks. Hold with me the vision of everyone getting vaccinated as soon as is humanly, and Divinely, possible, would you please?

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

© Dr. Susan Corso 2020 All rights reserved.