Traveling to Freedom

Traveling to Freedom
On Sunday I am taking my first trip since moving to San Diego. I’m flying to New York, where I will work and see my kids, and then I am flying to London for other work and will transit back through New York to be home after what is, in total about eight days. Big deal. I’ve done similar trips about a thousand times (literally 1,000 times over my adult life/career). I am not going to any terribly exotic places, but rather the hubs of modern civilization. Neither New York nor London are particularly burdened with the current COVID-19 crisis and I am feeling pretty healthy overall and I generally have a robust immune system. I have not had even a sniffle since last June when I traveled back from a trip to Rotterdam. And yet, the state of the world has brought to my doorstep so many warnings and precautions that I feel the need to explore what is going on in the world.
To begin with, I recognize that I have had the distinct pleasure of living in a world that was in a Golden Era. In centuries from now, historians will look back and say that the second half of the Twentieth Century was as close to Camelot as the world can come. We had no global conflicts and indeed, hostilities and barriers to worldwide collaboration were at an ebb tide. We had globalized the world economy and we were systematically reducing poverty, pestilence and disease for all. Our ideological differences, while not gone by any means, were lessened, and religious and cultural diversity was generally more prized than not, even though pockets of extremism existed (but generally and universally condemned) and “hatred” seemed the exception rather than the rule. Coca Cola said it best, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.”
And then the human condition did what it does, and the cycle has seemed to pass from enlightened liberal democracy to soloistic nationalism. While the political environment was shifting back to a less kind and less gentle state, so has the medical environment. Where we had relegated diseases of poverty like cholera and tuberculosis, and even somewhat malaria, to the background of historical eras, we are now starting to live in an age of one epidemic or pandemic after another, culminating in the current scare over the Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Yesterday my daughter called me to wonder about whether I should be making this trip, given the global health crisis. We’ve all seen the pictures of the empty airports and tourist attractions and read of the dwindling cruise industry and the horrible price-gouging taking place on Amazon over hand sanitizer, medical face masks and disinfectant wipes. She knows me and knew I would be dismissive of the concerns. Then my youngest son texted me and we spoke. He is not so easily agitated as my daughter, but he warned me by reminding me that I am in the “older population” that is more affected by the pulmonary affliction. He had been gotten-to by my daughter no doubt. When I joked about it at dinner last night, Kim told me she planned to load me up with sanitizing paraphernalia because where I might have a cast iron immune system, she did not want me bringing any bad germs into the house. She failed to acknowledge that the day after I return, she boards a plane for Indiana to sing at a local cabaret concert in her hometown. I guess she thinks her pal, Mike Pence, being a Hoosier, will keep bad germs out of Wabash and the Indianapolis airport.
I have spent my life working and traveling to the grimiest parts of the world and I cannot remember ever getting so much concern about my travel from family members. When I went to Rio in 1986 when the protesting masses at the airport would have torn me to shreds had they known I was trying to collect a $1 billion debt obligation from the country, no one stopped me. When I went to Chile in 1987 and tussled with General Pinochet’s son-in-law over a sugar company buyout, no one stopped me. When I went to Lagos, Nigeria in 1988 during a tsetse fly outburst, no one thought I might bring back some God-awful parasite. And in 2014 when Kim told me she WANTED to go on a CARE Board trip to Benin in West Africa, despite my warning that the region was pretty raw, no one said don’t go.
I read a fascinating article in the New Yorker today about Pandemics and how they affect our culture, society, political stability and our baseline morality. An emeritus professor of medical history from Yale talked about how pandemics highlight our relationship with death, our environment, our religion and our very species. That rang a bell with me. I have written about the species-defining moment we are in vis-à-vis the global pension crisis, where generational rebellion is at hand over who gets the last crust of bread, grandma or baby. This article spoke of how pandemics are nature’s way of exploiting our ecological riches. It is not coincidental that this sprang from the middle of China, where 9% growth has created an economic juggernaut of massive global proportions. Furthermore, epidemics have historically been nature’s way of balancing back the dark and exploitative side of human nature. The historical example cited was how Napoleon was curtailed from his manifest destiny to rule the world in the early nineteenth century by the scourge of yellow fever that felled his troops in the new world (but the African slaves in Haiti were largely immune to it). The outcome was his ending his North American efforts and his sale of the Louisiana Purchase to President Thomas Jefferson.
I have no world-changing plans for this little trip to New York and London, but I have been raised as a globalist and I do believe that fatalistically I will be just fine up until the universe decides it is my time. I hate the current environment of fear that grips the world over immigration and refugees. Nationalism scares me more than any germ ever could. I know that the Plague and even the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 cleansed the world of millions of souls and that nature has its way of dealing with over-population. The biblical Great Flood was used by God to wash away the deteriorating inhumanity and moral deprivation which is so similar (to me anyway) to the fall from grace epitomized by Mr. Trump and his armies of doom. I neither plan to be Noah nor Typhoid Mary. I’m just carrying on and taking my little trip halfway around the world. I’ll stay in a modest hotel in Manhattan where the TV remote has always been just a black light away from a disgusting hot zone of e-coli. I will fly on planes where the seatback pockets have discarded tissues missed by the harried cleaning crew. And I will ride the London tube (God knows, not the NYC subway) from Heathrow to Piccadilly and brave an empire-full array of foreign germs. I will probably be more conscious of the need to wash my hands often and I will probably keep to myself a bit more than usual. But after all, what’s the good of years of building a rugged immune system in the shitholes of the world if you can’t fly into the face of the Coronavirus? I assume those will not be famous last words, but my declaration of Traveling to Freedom.