Recently I read Michael Lewis’ excellent book, The Premonition. In a most engaging way Lewis tells of the very disjointed – and often publicly resisted and opposed – development of our national response to infectious disease and the Covid-19 Pandemic. He also relates, through the careers of several of our nation’s various state-wide, community health officers, the sobering truth that local and national governments are not very well prepared – AND OFTEN UNWILLING – to develop effective, unified, community, health measures.
But there have been and are men and women of enormous intellect, training, and resolve who have been and are great exceptions to this state of affairs in public health policy and practice.
One of the several heroes and sheroes of our national health and immunization program is Dr. Carter Mecher (pronounced MEHshur). A highly skilled physician, Mecher is also one of our nation’s most respected infectious disease experts and has been a vital part of the White House strategists in our present effort to get the Covid pandemic under control. It continues to be hard sledding.
At one point in Lewis’ book, Lewis relates a vignette where Carter Mecher is trying to explain exponential growth of an infectious virus to various high-level government officials responsible for various aspects of policy in national public health efforts. Lewis quotes Mecher as saying,
“We are reactive and tend to only intervene when things are getting bad. And what we underestimate is the speed that what’s bad moves.”
AND WHAT WE UNDERESTIMATE IS THE SPEED THAT WHAT’S BAD MOVES!!
While Mecher was describing the speed at which infectious disease spreads, his comment could be an apt description of the realities under which all world cultures are presently living.
Indeed, there is no way to sugarcoat it, or ignore it, or in any credible way deny it. We are living in a moment in our national and world history where what is bad is moving so very quickly that even the stoutest of hearts, faithful of souls, and resilient of minds are spinning. Out of control?
The news of ever faster-moving bad things is often unbearable to hear and, if heard, impossible to assimilate. From a crazed driver purposely smashing into a holiday parade, to yet another school shooting, to horrendous behavior by our elected state and national lawmakers, to smash and grab gangs looting stores amidst holiday shoppers, the speed at which the bad is moving is … overwhelming. And all this is just in the last two weeks!!!
Well, what can we do beyond recognizing and stating the obvious? The damnable thing is that none of us, as hard as we may try and as hard as we may pray for speed limits on bad things, WE CANNOT DO ANYTHING! There is not a great deal of tangible, meaningful value in expressing, “our thoughts and prayers are with you” to the broken hearts about which we read, see, hear, or KNOW! The bad things which are taking place are creating a veritable whirlwind of hurt. (There are other descriptive 4 letter words for it).
While facing up to reality is essential lest we rose color our various situations and thus make our daily lives irrelevant to the real world around us, we must have a foundation from which to be grounded. If we are not grounded, our individual lives can more easily be swept away in this flood of bad stuff; swept away only to drown in pessimism, despair, and cynical living.
Perhaps more than ever before in our lifetimes, to quote the great New Testament scholar Auntie Mame (kidding), we need a little Christmas!
Clearly, I do not mean by this that we need the irrelevant distractions of Christmas doctrine or nonsensical escapism such as arguing over literal interpretations of Matthew or Luke’s version of Jesus’ birth story or whether the whole record of wisemen (how many, 3?) and shepherds and angels singing joyfully was a first century hoax. But rather, we need a little – actually a LOT of – Christmas to ground us on soul-securing footing amidst the flash floods of swiftly moving bad stuff.
The reason for the speed at which bad stuff is moving is the reason that bad stuff has always been described, in contemporary idiom at least, as moving as if the stuff has hit the fan: bad stuff is unhinged. Bad stuff has no boundaries. Bad stuff is the consequence of spontaneous combustion, unchecked greed, and storm surges of calculated revenge.
So, we need Christmas; the soul-grounding and soul-anchoring revelation that for each and every age and to each and every life there comes – even in the most horrendous of crap storms – the promise and historical record that storms do not last, love conquers hate, and the worst of times … END.
This is not easy to believe. The nightly news or a trip to a school board meeting or the garbage politics and religion that passes by ever quickly and unrelentingly challenges such soul-anchoring truth. But we must hang in there. We must not surrender to being hung up or hung out to dry, twist in the wind or let go and become a part of the faithless, untethered flood of manifest evil so evident in our times.
As faithful people we have been VACCINATED. Christmas is our great Booster shot and we need it right now!