Joys and Concerns: Wonderful Life

Part of my work since we've been isolating and locking down is to write a weekly message for the rest of my healthcare team. I call it "Joys and Concerns" after the UU check-in at each service. This is my most recent one. The links aren't in the original because my readers don't have time to click on them.

We reached a couple milestones over the weekend that will have a tremendous effect, I think, on our future. The first is particular to us, as healthcare workers. The US reached the half million mark in covid-19 deaths. Figures from Johns Hopkins University tell us we are at the top of the list of countries with coronavirus deaths, followed by Brazil, at nearly half the number. There are many articles out there helping people to visualize 500,000 people, but I'm going to use an aid that, in our media-saturated culture, might have some power left. It is as if Thanos' snapping his fingers, decimating the universe by half, had happened. Slowly. And to people you know.

The second milestone is also important, and it's relevant to how we think about humanity. NASA safely landed the rover Perseverance on the surface of Mars. Consider the ingenuity that took, the ability to create, not only machines that mathematically make it possible to figure out how to do it, but machines that deliver and release--and this is critical--the rover, full of delicate instruments, without doing it damage. Surely, such creativity, turned to the development of vaccines, has helped us to perhaps cross thresholds undreamt of.

I've been thinking about this song all morning. It's by Black, an especially obscure one-hit wonder of the 80s. It's kind of schmaltzy, both in its lyrics, its style, and even in the images in its video. But maybe milestones sometimes demand schmaltz.