Will and pride and what not else in us

 

Way back in March, I was asked to have a look at the story of the Spanish Flu that ravaged the world at the end of the First World War. "Find out some things about it so we can use it for a news show," some friends at the station asked. I did. 

I looked through local papers from that era, small-town newspapers whose obituaries often revealed, sometimes rather unfeelingly, the cause of death. That's where I found this little item, in a newspaper from Maurice, Iowa--it's hard to imagine that a burg like Maurice ever had its own newspaper, but the papers were a far bigger item before radio, then TV, then Google. 

I used this snippet because what the editor said seemed so incredibly callous that I thought he might have been run out of town for saying it. The Spanish Flu was horrible, a plague. Army camps--and there were 32 of them--were breeding grounds for a contagion that no one saw coming and ended with a death toll that seems unimaginable--50 million deaths worldwide. Here, in the U. S., 675,000 died out of a population of 100 million, as if all of Nebraska and South Dakota, today, were to be wiped out, in the U.S. over two million of us, gone.  

And the editor makes a joke: "Read the two-column article on another page sent out by the government," he says. "Don't get excited about it." Sound familiar? And then the really snarky joke: "It is like being hanged, it is not so bad after you get used to it. . ." 

In March, eight months ago, that line seemed completely tasteless. 

Now, not. 

Somewhere in the region of 70,000,000 Americans might well have said the same thing, and may still be. Maybe 30 mill of those, Trumpsters all, likely thought, as he liked to say, that Covid was "fake news," that, come November 4th, "the coronavirus" will disappear from cable news and lame-stream media. The whole Covid thing was a ploy to make him lose the election. 

For the record, yesterday there were 143,408 new cases and 1,479 new deaths.

Still, ever since I read that Maurice newspaper column, I couldn't help wonder about the editor's tastelessness--how could he possibly say something like that when all over the country, thousands were dying?

One reason now seems clear--because others were. He likely wasn't tarred-and-feathered because he wasn't alone is determining the hoopla was hype-la. "Read the two-column article on another page sent out by the government," he says, petulantly.

We're in the middle of something big here, right now. The estimates of fatalities (and most estimates have been right so far) are beyond imagination. Still, life goes on. 

Forget politics. How is it that all of us look past the carnage? What powers do we have that keep us afloat in the middle of the death toll Covid-19 reaches? 

Todd Billings' The End of the Christian Life includes a quote from a commencement speech given by the novelist David Foster Wallace:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. . . . It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our [circuit] boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Striking passage because it seems to me to be so right. We're hard-wired to think and feel only out of our own consciousness. We are always at the heart of our own worlds. Always. It's hard work, it's pure self-denial to want to know others' experience. Our default gear is only self.

If that sounds like sin, like Adam-and-Eve-grade pride, you're not wrong. But built-in self-regard is also responsible for the sheer blessings of action and agency. Every word I'm typing is my choice. I believe that the meaning those words form will make sense and are worth my time and yours. I may be wrong, but if I don't believe that, my fingers will stop dancing over the keys. We are immensely self-centered and while that self-centeredness morphs easily into sin, it's just as often an absolute blessing.

We're getting neighbors where we've never had them. Somebody is building a house right next door. On Monday, heavy equipment will lumber around just outside our windows because someone is going to dig a scoop into black soil because someone else believes, heart, soul, and mind, that they'll be a home for them to live here, next door. 

Christianity tries its best to tamper with all that drive. It would really prefer God-consciousness to self-consciousness: "Oh, be careful little eyes what you see." But even becoming a confessing Christian requires will, requires self-regard, the firm assurance that our lives will be better off if we follow Jesus. Passivity is neither normal nor healthy nor fun. 

As long as we don't have Covid, as long as we haven't suffered, it takes an act of God to make us selfless enough to care. That's who we are. That's why the editor of the Maurice paper in 1918 wasn't run-out-of-town on a rail. We come from the factory guided along by selfishness, and even though it has to be kept in check, it's often as not a blessing.

Amazing. We're in what Todd Billings calls "the discomfort of paradox."