Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Distinction

BSKing mentioned tonight that her new hobbyhorse is the difference between "no one was talking about (insert disease) that much then," and "I don't remember people talking about (insert disease) then."  Right up my alley.  Our memories mislead us.  It came up in the context of the three-year, three-wave Hong Kong Flu of 1968-70.  If you like hard facts and have a determination to look them up, as she does, you will find that people actually were talking about it a lot.  It was in the newspapers a lot, some schools closed because there were too many teachers and students out, and there was some serious worry about how high the deaths would go.

But it was in three waves, so the deaths were broken up.  It arrived slowly and invisibly, as epidemics did them, so it never even occurred to people to close borders or shut anything down preemptively.  You would have to have some idea where to turn the water off. The danger receded in the middle because a vaccine came in.

But most of all, it was during the Vietnam war.  That not only factored in to how people perceived danger then,  it hugely affected how they remembered it later.  The war has a gravitational force for all other memories. The contemporary documents show people were actually worried.  We just don't remember it anymore. We also did not have the awareness of what happened elsewhere then. Murders in Montana were not really perceived as happening to other Americans.  They were impossibly remote. Hell, Maine and Vermont were impossibly remote, as was the top half of New Hampshire. I had relatives in two Massachusetts towns, both close to the border. Other than that, only my neighborhood existed, and the kids at church and the Y.  Unless kids died at my school, kids didn't die anywhere. People in novels and movies were more real. Yet we remain sure that we remember what was capturing the national attention then.

Longtime readers may notice that I say this all the time about what we remember about school, education,  and childhood in general. There was a time when I kept all sorts of old papers - letters from junior-high girlfriends, a diary from 9th grade,  a few school assignments.  I recall reading some in my thirties and being so humiliated that it was easy to destroy 75%.  In my forties, another 75%.  (I think I have my yearbooks and some song lyrics now.  That's it.) Beyond my humiliation, I was struck most forcefully by how little it resembled what I had thought as an adult was central to me as a child. It is playing out strongly again in the time of cholera.  What people say they remember, or believe they can pick up from the contemporary and immediately succeeding historical documents turns out to have very different centers than we imagine. Millions of people died.  The dead fell like flies on my way to school.  But we hardly noticed, because we were tougher then and we just pressed on.  Nobody closed so much as hot dog stand over it. Why my old Dad would be ashamed at what we're doing now.

7 comments:

  1. Yup. For anyone who's interested, I had sent along this NYTs clip from December 1968 about it:
    https://www.nytimes.com/1968/12/11/archives/hong-kong-flu-attacks-thousands-here-swiftly.html

    A very key part of this story: the first case of Hong Kong flu anywhere in the world was July 1968. The article above a mere 6 months later notes that 5 million doses of a vaccine were being shipped out in the US alone. If the Hong Kong flu were C19, that would be the equivalent of this month.

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  2. That would be a touch encouraging about finding a vaccine now, then. I had been looking at that pessimistically, having heard that they usually take years.

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  3. Well, from my reading they did have an advantage here, in that flu vaccine had already existed for 40 years and just needed to be modified for this strain. Our issue here is we're starting from scratch, though we do have more resources working on it. Fingers crossed.

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  4. “We are really bipolar on this reopening,” said economist Russ Thibeault, president of Applied Economic Research. “We are dying to get out, but afraid to get sick.” From a May 18, 2020 NH Business Review article on businesses reopening (I know Russ Thibeault – a solid economist in NH for 40 years, so I'm in no way mocking him).

    Well yes, but that’s Life’s dilemma, isn’t it. “I’m dying to drive very fast, but I’m afraid of getting caught.” “I’m dying to eat this whole pie, but I’m afraid of gaining weight.” “I’m dying to go to Tahiti for a year, but I’m afraid of spending half my retirement funds.” Really, when has life ever been about anything but choices and balance?
    Spongeheaded Scienceman

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  5. I had the Hong Kong flu my senior year. Sick as a dog, but no one seriously feared that children would die of it. My mother was a good parent-nurse, and kept it from spreading to the rest of the family.

    I remember school, in Lakewood, OH. I remember 'skating' to school on the frozen sidewalks. I told my students (in South Carolina) that I'd attended school in elementary years walking 5 blocks or so, in 18 degrees below zero (F) weather. The schools didn't close.

    They couldn't believe it - either that the schools weren't closed, or that the temperature was so low. They thought I was talking about 18 degrees below freezing. I verified my memory with historical data on weather.com.

    I also pointed out that the temperature was almost FIFTY degrees below the freezing point - 32 (F).

    They were awestruck. You'd have thought I'd blazed a trail in the Arctic. Hey, kids, that was the EXPECTED task - walk to freakin' school in the cold. Dress for it, get over it.

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  6. What was in the foreground of my life in high school? The things that were closest to me weren't the Vietnam war or plagues somewhere else. The nearby, everyday stuff, and the nearby disasters are what stick with me. I didn't spend enough time in the States for the TV news to be a big part of my environment, but the TV narratives would have been everyday foreground stuff for some of my friends.

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  7. I was only 12 then, and definitely not paying attention to the news, but it wasn't a topic of anxiety in my household, or anything that resulted in new rules. In contrast, I remember very well the anxiety over polio, or rather the sense of relief that there was now a polio vaccine that I was required to take before I started school in 1960. (I was terribly relieved to find it was an oral medication rather than an injection.) My parents made it clear that the vaccine was nothing to mess with; this was a serious disease and the vaccine should be welcomed. I knew kids whose older siblings were crippled by polio.

    The first epidemic I can remember being scared by was AIDS.

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