Corpus Americana

At some point, late in my teaching career, I began suggesting to students that the United States’ body politic is an experiment, the results uncertain, still to be determined.

Sometimes I offered up India with its billion plus as a democratic lab to keep an eye on going forward.

Several times more recently, in the past month or so I would say, I trotted out the notion to family and friends that the veneer politically, socially, economically we superficially understand, and paradoxically deeply depend on, is thin, thin, thin.

Hardly earthshaking insights, to be sure, but they are generated by observing the world through the lens of my history.

We each have our formative moments, stretches even, where our understanding of the world beyond the end of our noses begins and in some cases quickens.

For me, from 10 to 20 marked quite a decade to see the world revealed. A few months after I turned 10, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In ‘68, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, assassinated. Stunning.

Yes, yes, the moon landing and Woodstock in ’69, but the working title for this post to my mind was “Grim Reaping”. We are, after all, in the comparative casualties phase of our current rolling disaster, this pandemic. Post losses due to traffic accidents and the flu season. Yardsticks, don’t you know.

And it’s a war out there. Sort of.

Vietnam: 47,424 killed—with the understanding that quibbling over this body count goes on. Of course, that war undergirded much of the nation’s miasma during my decade of growing awareness of the world beyond baseball cards and Doc Savage novels.

Unfortunately, this afternoon—I just checked the Johns Hopkins virus fatality update—our losses are at 66,425. Sadly, more to come. With the understanding that quibbling over this body count will go on.

Now how my 10-year-old neighbor processes her new reality, I do not know for certain. On the other hand, I think we all know the Class of ’20 must feel a gut churn of emotions.

Going forward, to what end and how we get there, no one knows. Or, at least, I know I don’t know. What else can I say.

Oh, with the understanding body counts to be updated as more information becomes available. Quibbling aside.