Betsy Morrigan

I am lucky. I am a non-essential worker, a semi-retired senior citizen, a part-time college professor at Hawai`i Community College, working from a comfortable, peaceful home. The best of times for me as I have experienced the coronavirus pandemic were the early days of the lockdown here in Hawaii starting in March 2020. In some ways, we were all together in it then, spanning the entire United States, or so it felt to me. I had this comforting, cozy, heartening feeling, “We’re all as one now. Every American in every living room -- we ‘re finally are all the same! We’re all doing the right thing to beat this disease.” The scientists prevailed and people listened respectfully to their explanations and suggestions. It felt for a short while like a pleasant, relaxing time, even I knew that terrible divisions were simmering in the racial, class, and political stew. In Hawaii, the streets were strangely quiet. The tourists were gone. Life slowed down. Before the beaches and bays were closed, I could stand on the rocks with one friend and see no tourists and just a few other locals. I threw my arms out wide and exclaimed, “Wow! The water is so clear and the fish are brighter! The air is so deep blue and crisp and the hills are greener! It’s a whole new world!” Air quality has improved all over the world. Ironically, the coronavirus pandemic that was caused in part by environmental disasters has also temporarily greatly healed the environment. I wish it would last like this, with the frantic rat race of life as we knew it before gone, when our schedules were filled to the brim. I am now enjoying living with less. Life has slowed down here. It has just about screeched to a full stop.

This pandemic that has captured the world and me in its grip is fascinating, foreboding, frightening, and feels deeply unknowable—all of this at once. Is it even the “middle” that we’re in now? Or could these early months of the pandemic represent just the very beginning -- a dark, long tunnel in world history that will last not just until the magical bullet vaccine is ready in every doctor’s office, but for decades as we are buffeted over and over not only by more “novel,” ever-evolving plague-like diseases brewed in a greedy global stew, but also by increasingly polarized governments and hostile populations? Already this COVID-19 disease has revealed heartbreaking class and racial group suffering. It has destroyed for years or perhaps forever some of our most basic social institutions—the handshake, the family dinner with grandma, the Friday afternoon shoulder-to-shoulder at the bar—and unleashed factions of new true believers going for each other’s throats. Many, including myself, are also experiencing it in part as a quiet, calm, almost pastoral time, a throwback to many years ago before the pollution, traffic, and work demands got so intense.

I am teaching two classes for Hawaii Community College online, so there is very little danger of my actually catching “it,” because I work from home and have little exposure. I live in a lovely house I own in rural Kona, Hawai`i on the relatively (still) COVID-19-free island of Hawai`i in a friendly, safe subdivision near a local beach. I have met many new friends on the roads outdoors and walk, talk, and swim with them and with some of my other friends, socially distancing. I hear the comforting click-clack of my neighbors playing pickle ball for hours in our park every morning and late afternoon. There have also been some other major bright points. I gave a well-received graduation speech at the Daifukuji Zen Buddhist Temple. (See link at end). I am swimming almost a mile three days a week with two very good friends and sharing a tasty picnic afterwards, and am spending time helping a dear friend in need. I am having great Facetime conversations with special friends and family. Though I interact with fewer people, those people seem more real, more open, more important—they are luminous. On Zoom I participate online with about twenty friends in our Buddhist study group. Sometimes we just sit there on our computers and stare lovingly and longingly at each other’s faces. My friends, my people, the human beings I love -- here we are, so close, so far!

Like the virus itself, much of this new life in the pandemic is “novel.” I have cleaned and organized every cluttered corner and drawer in my house, am preparing to teach my Zoom college classes online, and often hang out in my comfy jammies until long after lunch, sometimes even all day and night. I talk with my grandchildren a lot on Facetime and they are happy talking to me because they are bored too, home from school, and even grandma’s goofy turtle faces are a welcome distraction. I sent them seeds and special old books I owned when I was their age. I spend nothing now on "entertainment” and very little on eating out, even take-out. I finally mastered how to grow sprouts and love to make gallons of soup to share with friends and neighbors. My lettuce and herbs are colorful and tasty in my planter boxes and my homegrown tomatoes ripe and plump on their well-watered vines. I take pleasure in trading or sharing my homemade peppermint-scented hand sanitizer and herbal tinctures of home-grown turmeric. I have done some long overdue writing and reading, aptly, Love in the Time of Cholera. Oh yes, I admit I am wearing out my recliner binge-watching a whole lot of good TV series shows.

My hip-roofed house, not far from the Pacific Ocean, with its wide overhanging eaves and clerestory “eyes” in the top, is more than merely my home. It is my second skin I wear for twenty-four hours a day, my haven, my castle, my prison. In my tower, my hair is growing long like Rapunzel’s while I await my prince.

Every time I go to the grocery store, I thank the cashier and baggers for being out there on the front line. I have learned a lot of new pandemic science and vocabulary: “flattening the curve,” “community spread,” zoonotic diseases, N95 respirator, PPE, “shelter-in-place,” asymptomatic transmission, “super-spreader,” social distancing, etc. We all have learned and use these new concepts, even the school kids. I hung on Dr. Fauci’s every word, felt comforted by New York Governor Cuomo’s fatherly “fireside chats,” and it made my day to see what color scarf Dr. Birx would wear in the daily White House coronavirus show. I admit I spend too much time “doom scrolling” the bad news on the pandemic. I still find myself waking up at night to read more coronavirus stats on my phone at 4 A.M. to see what the national death toll has risen to and where we stand globally. How many more dead bodies are lying around in refrigerated trucks in front of nursing homes? What if they run out of refrigerated trucks? In the Middle Ages bubonic plague time in Europe, bodies piled up in the streets faster than they could bury them because there weren’t enough living people to bury the dead and they barely could shovel them into mass dirt pits. That happened in the 1918 flu pandemic too where the dead were tossed into mass graves. OMG, will it possibly get that bad for us, and even right here in Hawaii, as it has happened on Hart Island in New York? Could you imagine workers hauling out bodies from the Regency old folks’ home in Kona into vans sitting out there in the hot sun in that fancy curved driveway lined with carefully tended flowers?

The worst of times has begun. I know people in Hawaii who are desperate, who have gone broke, as Hawaii bleeds out, with no transfusion in sight. All over the US, the death rates from COVID-19 soared, as the virus mowed down nurses, doctors, meat packers, bus drivers, and grocery clerks -- really just anybody in its path but the poor and exposed have been hit harder -- and penetrated deep into the heartland. Then President Trump suggested we take Lysol for a cure, and encouraged those who protested against the very lockdowns and facemasks that were "flattening the curve." No one stopped the angry large white males who swaggered into state capitals in camo, wearing no masks, displaying Confederate flags and AK-47’s. America shattered into two camps. At this point, my solidarity with a warm, cozy united America that I had falsely conjured up at the beginning of the lockdown turned to bitterness and disbelief at the “red against blue” mentality that permeated right down to wearing facemasks or not.

I am ashamed of being an American now. I am ashamed of the armed and ugly anti-lockdown, anti-mask protestors; of bumbling, fumbling, death-dealing President Trump and his complicit Republican cronies; and of our astronomical numbers of infection and deaths, the highest in the world. America pulled out of the World Health Organization; America pushed aside our own Center for Disease Control; many citizens spurned the well-researched facts of scientists and experts. Europe and the world has shunned and humiliated us, which we sadly deserve. Desperately poor citizens of India, Mexico, Brazil, and Bangladesh are also suffering disease and hunger, as the deaths worldwide climb to a likely one million mark within several months at this rate. I suffer with the African-Americans and the Latinx population here at home, who have been hit very hard with deaths from COVID-19. Our health care and workplace support systems have failed them, and by extension, all of us. I am so ashamed and feel so bad that it has come to this. We know what needs to change and I have hope that it can and will.

And then in the midst of the pandemic, of everything shut down, came the murder of George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter protests that followed have kept me at the screen watching Blacks and whites marching night after night, now month after month. Everything broke loose. Federal enforcers lobbed “flashbangs” at peaceful protestors in front of the White House and hauled them off by force in unmarked vans in Portland. It’s a repeat of Nazi Germany’s 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews. I am scared in America now. We all have learned so much about how systemic racism connects every aspect of American life, even here too in “occupied” Hawaii. I was part of the civil rights protest movement in the sixties, and these protests are equally inspiring. I joined a calm and orderly street side BLM protest in Kona where everybody wore facemasks and tried to do the social distancing thing. So much change from the bottom up and the top down has to happen. The energy and righteousness of the protestors and their cause gives me hope. Civil rights icon John Lewis died and former president Obama spoke eloquently at his funeral, but President Trump did not attend.

The warm, fuzzy, comforting feeling of unity I had at the very beginning of the pandemic lockdown, when all my friends were calling and texting me, “How are you doing? How are you spending your time? Let’s exchange recommendations for movies, books, recipes,” has deteriorated into dismay as a number of those same friends have become virulent and vocal anti-vaxxers, Covid-19 nay-sayers, and conspiracy theorists. They claim this virus started as a bio-weapon from China or was caused by 5G rays. When they complain about wearing masks, against all scientific evidence., I argue right back with scientific evidence. I can’t stand it that the radical right with its “drink bleach” and “demon sperm” gibberish and the New Age left with its anti-vaxx and anti-mask drivel are shaking hands and smirking behind my back.

Well I know and feel the divide between my own soft situation and that of the parents who are dying from work as bus drivers or nurses, leaving children behind, and the meat packers forced to butcher pigs in conditions that were terrible before and that are killing them now, while I smugly advocate “meatless Mondays.” Those in prisons, immigrant detention centers, nursing homes, and factories are terribly vulnerable to getting this disease and dying from it. I support Hawaii’s release of non-violent prisoners and advocate for community restorative justice programs for healing, rehabilitation, and safety rather than years of expensive and largely ineffective incarceration. My own three adult children are quite stressed out, trying to work professional jobs “Zooming” from home while their kids, my grandkids, mill around under their feet in the living room with not very exciting online lessons to get them through. There are no limits on kids’ screen time now while the parents try to pound out enough hours a week to survive under these conditions. I worry about whether my grandchildren will be able to return to school safely in the fall, and when/if I will hug them again. And these are the lucky Americans who can work comfortably from home. So many more are suffering in poverty, with no employment in sight.

I feel my white, upper-middle class privilege daily, owning my house and living comfortably as I do on mostly passive income, on this sweet, slow, protected island of Hawaii isolated in the far reaches of the Pacific ocean, with its still low numbers of infection and its kind and compliant residents. I do feel guilt for the many who are suffering, yet I admit that while I send donations to nonprofits to help in the trenches, write and talk to my students and anyone who has an open mind, and post my version of the truth on Facebook, I am also thinking, “It can’t get me here. I can ride this thing out alive for another year or more! I am doing fine!“

No, I am not doing fine. I am lonely and bored and sick of it. Days have gone by when my only human interaction has been digital. Although my mental health is basically rock solid, in the course of three days I can veer wildly from doing nothing all day except TV bingeing in my pajamas; to adrenaline-fueled gardening, hauling heavy loads of dirt up and down my hill for six hours in the sun; to feeling smacked in the head and rendered witless at the prospect of another six months or a year (or more?) like this…and then what? My son who owns a business in Miami wanted me to do a grandmother camp for the two kids this summer, and I would love that, but what about exposure to me? I said no and will not see my grandkids for another year. I have friends and family in Washington state and Miami who want me to visit with them, eat out with them, kayak with them, contra dance with them this summer or so they hoped, but that’s not going to happen. Do we -- will we – when will we -- have anything more to celebrate in Seattle, Washington, or Miami, Florida, or soon, in Kona, Hawaii? I also am very much aware of what I need to do…and a little less sure of how to do it.

And yet my anger and anxiety serves little purpose unless I transform it into something meaningful. I will not let the danger, death, and uncertainty this pandemic is causing to paralyze and destroy me and rip apart my country. Our lives and times are changing. Many of these changes are good and will be permanent. I intend to know and face these changes fully, to help myself and others, so that everybody can have full, safe and healthy lives. I have hope for good changes. Right here in Hawaii we have the chance to wean ourselves off Costco Spam and white rice by growing more of our own food which almost everybody can do here, like the local farming that used to feed a Hawaiian population almost this large. I am applying to teach gardening at the local school. We have the chance and choice now to stop “business as usual” and to design and create better lives for all from the ground up, including responding to the persistent voices of the Hawaiian people here at home. The puzzle pieces of work, housing, education, environment, and health care need to interlock solidly to work for all. That is true resilience - facing the situation, bouncing back, moving forward. As the Buddhist philosopher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh says, “To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.”

That may mean dying in the midst of this new reality, but for now, I intend to find a way of awareness, acceptance, experimentation, and resilience. I have hope.