COVID Silver Linings? The Peripatetic Preacher

I admit that I am hesitant to write anything positive about the now 10-month-old pandemic that has claimed over 340,000 US American lives, well over 1,000,000 global lives, and has sickened over 2,000,000 US Americans. And due to the horrendous surge of the virus in November, December, and certainly on into the New Year, these numbers will surely climb significantly. Behind each of these grim statistics lie real human beings and their loved ones and friends; few if any have remained untouched by this deadly scourge. I wonder whether any talk of positivity with regards to COVID-19 is a horrid assault on this vast suffering.

And yet, for those of us who have not been sickened, and whose families have thus far escaped the worst, there may be value in thinking about what long-term changes the virus has wrought. After all, the virus will not be with us forever, locking us into our homes, denying us the human touches we all need, making us fearful to move about in the world. There will be a time when we once again find a freedom of movement, a time for planning the rest of our lives on the planet. The virus will not completely end life as we have known it, though surely the lives we have known will be changed, often in ways we cannot predict, but perhaps in some ways we can. So, what follows is a brief list of potential silver linings that the microbial beast has wrought among us all.

1.COVID-19 has illuminated the enormous and dangerous cracks in our human family. Most especially here in US America, the long struggle for some sort of racial reckoning has been made plainer than it has been in my lifetime, even during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s and 70’s. The fact that the virus sickens and kills three times the number of people of color, especially black and brown, than it affects whites is a telling and demonstrable reality of our fractured society. It announces loud and clear that people of color are far more likely to live in situations where social distancing is difficult, where working from home is far less likely, where technology is not as readily available and well functioning, where the goods and services of the society are far from equally distributed. Many of us have known these things, but that knowledge has not urged us forcefully enough to move toward genuine solutions. The virus has opened the reality to the full glare of truth. We simply cannot wait any more days to begin the work of addressing this obvious racial divide.

2. In addition to the disaster of the virus, there remains the racial reckoning of the apparent assault on Black people by the supposed protectors of our communities, most particularly the police. Not only are Black people killed in police shootings far more than whites are, but also our prisons—the largest population of prisoners by far in the industrialized world—are disproportionally filled with Black and Brown inmates, many of them the result of simple drug possessions or petty theft brought about by extreme poverty, along with other fractures in the society that make safe and easy lives difficult if not impossible for people of color in US America. COVID may not be a direct cause of the recognition of these long-simmering pains, but Black Lives Matter may not have exploded into our consciences with quite the force it did without the added burden of the persistent virus.

3. Neither of my first two supposed “silver linings” sound very “silver,” I am aware, but both have the potential to create a better society than the one we lived in before COVID showed up. My third silver lining is to me one of COVID’s greatest benefits: it ended the presidency of Donald J. Trump. I have little doubt that if the pandemic had not taken hold, Trump would have easily gained a second term, a fact that I think would have been unimaginably horrendous for our nation and for the world. Trump’s terrible address of the virus, his unwillingness to take its terrors with any seriousness, his inane and incompetent attempts to take on its ravages, either from an institutional standpoint or from a personal place of compassion and comfort for its many victims, mark this president as one of the greatest failed chief executives in our history. Though it is important to admit that his absurdly named “Operation Warp Speed” (Star Trek anyone?) did positively influence the rapid development of several promising vaccines, in the main the president’s virtual absence in the theater of war against the beast, most especially after his election defeat in November, has rendered his legacy decidedly poor. If there were no COVID, we would have had Trump for four more years, a proposition devoutly not to be wished, not even to be imagined at all. His appalling actions since his defeat, refusing to concede, continually sending out fallacious and ridiculous claims of massive fraud and voter manipulations and legerdemain without any evidence of either, enlisting a veritable army of clownish attorneys to file useless law suits claiming nonexistent voting problems, demanding recounts and investigations without bases, indicate all too clearly just what sort of man Donald Trump is, namely a narcissistic, self-absorbed bully who simply cannot accept a loss of any kind, most particularly a loss of face. This is not a president, but a mob boss, demanding unquestioned fealty from his minions, without which anyone refusing to offer such loyalty would suffer the terrible loss of access to the boss. We all are well rid of such a compromised human being as any sort of leader.

4. The necessary rise of ZOOM brings with it any number of potentially enormous life- style changes. For businesses, the vast army of people who have jetted around the world for one meeting or another, have found that they can do perfectly well via virtual association. The same is true for academia. All those large physical meetings may go the way of the dinosaurs, saving time, vast money, and enormous capital investment. When I think of the huge amount of time I have spent in my life on airplanes, flying to over 1000 churches and conferences throughout the country and around the world, I now wonder, after COVID, whether all that was truly necessary. My own religious denomination, The United Methodist Church, every four years spends literally millions of dollars on its General Conference, flying delegates in from around the nation and the world to meet for two weeks to hash through the ins and outs of our 21st century church. Will that sort of meeting any longer prove necessary? As one can readily see, one large fallout of this new reliance on technology will be the travel industry, with its jet planes, fine hotels, and lovely restaurants. Such changes may be very large indeed.

5. To add to the wonders of technology, enforced by the virus, our church has held its services on-line for the entire time of the pandemic. As a result, we have, we imagined, seemingly struggled to retain membership, but have at the same time found new/old persons who have joined us online from any number of places other than southern California. We learned just this past week that our virtual worship services, shown at our regular 10:00AM hour on Sundays, but recorded for viewing at any time during the week, regularly garners some 300 views. Before the virus, it was usual for us to have fewer than 100 in physical attendance on a Sunday; hence, there appears to be some gain here in our range of service. Also, another member of the church and I have begun a ZOOM session on the first and third Tuesdays of each month that we call God Talk. Those teaching events have had a consistent attendance of some 20-25 persons. In Los Angeles, there is no possibility of holding a Tuesday night teaching event due to the infamous LA traffic. ZOOM makes it all possible. No one may actually like ZOOM, but it is a very handy delivery system, and it makes possible all manner of encounters not available in other ways. Over the past six weeks or so, I have led three Sunday school sessions over ZOOM in my former city, Dallas, TX. No need to fly there; I merely ZOOM there!

6. On a more personal level, I have been able to be isolated with my superb partner of 51 years. As a direct result of our inability to go much of anywhere, we have found new facets of our relationship, hidden gems of deep joys and pleasures that we may never have discovered had we not been thrown together for all these days. To be sure, not every day with one another is a grand paradisiac romp, but I have found my enforced times with Diana often to be little less than delightful. Plainly, that spinoff from COVID is a clear silver lining.

I am certain that you can add to my list. To try to find positive results from the monstrous pandemic is hardly to say that it has been any sort of a blessing. But not to search for silver linings is to announce that the virus has won, that it has bested us in our battle for hope and future. No Christian desires to admit complete defeat, because we worship a God of the new and the possible. I remain anxious to see what my life and our world will resemble when the virus releases us from its claw-like grip. But in the meantime I will continue to wear my mask in public, will stay distanced from my fellow citizens when around them, and will wash my hands carefully and often. And, of course, I will gladly take the vaccination when it becomes available to me. Then I hope to face a new and better world as COVID first relents and then disappears from the planet.