Galloping Changes

(Photo by Nirav Shah from Pexels)

In our house, we’ve been rewatching Dr. Who since the reboot. We’re still in the episodes where David Tennant plays the Doctor. It’s relentless, isn’t it? On Star Trek you get a sense that each episode is about something notable that happened, and that you’re not seeing the long tedious uneventful travels in between. But in Dr. Who, as each crisis ends, the Tardis takes the Doctor and companion(s) directly to the next crisis. Everything is always changing and it’s always dangerous.

That’s how the world seems now for us. Changes are galloping along and it all seems dangerous.

In my family’s weekly online gatherings, ever since Putin invaded Ukraine we’ve been talking about previous crisis times we remember. My grandfather and father sailed in convoys supplying Britain during World War II. They aren’t with us any more, but my mother and aunt remember the war years. We remember the Cuban missile crisis, and duck & cover drills. Later, we remember Flower Power, the civil rights movement, the second American feminist movement, the gay rights movement…

One of my friends made the mistake of crossing over into East Berlin when she was young. She didn’t realize that because of her father’s position, she shouldn’t do it. The East Germans detained her for a while to see whether they could use her as leverage to wring secrets from her dad.

During the oil crisis of the early 1970s, the USSR had a poor harvest and suffered a shortage of wheat. If you clean a tanker thoroughly enough, you can pump wheat into it like you would normally pump oil. The USA and USSR made a deal. Tankers would take wheat to the Soviet Union, and after unloading the wheat there, they would return full of Soviet oil.

Unfortunately, tensions flared in the Middle East at the height of the exchange. The Middle East was often a proxy conflict zone for the USA and USSR. As my father’s tanker steamed into the Black Sea, the Soviet navy steamed out of it toward the Mediterranean.

His ship unloaded. Another American tanker unloaded. But then the Soviets would not grant them permission to do anything other than sit at anchor near the port. Nobody said the word “hostages” but in effect that’s what they were. They sat there for so long, the other ship ran out of food. My father had to get special permission to move alongside and transfer food to the other ship.

Eventually the Middle East cooled down enough for the Soviets to fill the tankers with oil and allow them to return to the USA. I don’t recall any of this ever being mentioned in the news. Few, if any, of my high school classmates knew it was happening. I remember feeling oddly happy, in a way, because for those weeks I knew exactly where my father was, whereas usually I didn’t.

It was also a revelation. The two countries were supposedly always at loggerheads, yet this incident showed that wasn’t true. The public face and private face were very different.

In 1985, my brother barely missed being in Mexico City during a catastrophic earthquake. He had gone there a few weeks earlier for international study, but our grandmother’s death brought him home for her funeral just in time.

In spring 1989, my sister participated in a program where China and the United States hosted some of each other’s medical people for a few weeks of professional knowledge exchange. Each city my sister’s group visited was closed off as soon as her group left it. Within 24 hours after her group left the country, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square.

That October, my brother and I made a long-anticipated trip to Europe. We had one week booked at a ski resort in Austria (off-season, not enough snow yet) and otherwise took trains at random. For the week in Austria, we were joined by a friend of my brother’s who is fluent in several languages. The borders opened while we were there. The fence had been breached earlier in the year, but this was when the border fully opened and people began to pour in from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Every evening the news carried 10 to 20 minutes of coverage from demonstrations in Leipzig. My brother’s friend translated for us in real time.

Our week in Austria ended. My brother flew home from Munich. I stayed in West Germany to do some work, which I had pre-arranged to subsidize the cost of the trip. Everyone could feel that something huge was about to happen. No one knew whether it would be wonderful or terrible. From the pattern of history… probably terrible and bloody, so fear was high. But maybe, just maybe, the Wall would come down? My bargain unchangeable air ticket said I had to fly home on 31 October. I will never let a bargain ticket take me away from history in the making like that again.

Everything I just mentioned from the Mexico City earthquake to the fall of the Berlin Wall happened as the AIDS epidemic took hold at the top of health news, especially for gay men, and the ME/CFS epidemic more quietly took hold, especially for women.

If you have the good fortune to live long enough, chances are that you’ll live through more than one period of time that feels like you’re in the middle of a stampede. We are in such times now. We face climate collapse, pandemic, political destabilization, war, plus all the associated ripple effects.

There’s no guarantee about how any of it will turn out. Very few of us are in a position to make a big impact on the end results. But getting through a crisis does not mean blundering along the way we always have. It requires adaptation, like putting in water and sewer systems after we learned how cholera spreads and establishing food sanitation standards after we learned how food-borne illnesses spread.

If each of us does what we can, the cumulative effect may be enough. Think of the people who challenged the Berlin Wall in November 1989 even though East German border guards might have opened fire on them. There were so many people, opening fire became not viable as an option. An immense crowd could do what only a few could not have dared.

The lesson for us? If we want any chance of a good outcome from times like these, it’s important for enough of us to do whatever we can. Eat less extravagantly, burn less oil or coal or wood, heat less in winter and cool less in summer, use lighter-colored shingles the next time the house needs its roof refreshed, plant trees, grow a vegetable garden, mend instead of replace… Work from home when feasible, hold meetings online instead of in person, visit outdoors with social distancing when possible, ventilate and/or run HEPA filters and/or install UV germ neutralization for indoor work and visiting and healthcare spaces, wear high quality face masks in public indoor spaces and schools and offices, keep all vaccinations up to date… Lobby politicians, donate to and/or volunteer for good candidates for office, run for office (local school board, city council, anything), seek reliable sources of news, check validity of information before believing it or spreading it, participate in peaceful demonstrations… Donate to humanitarian relief efforts, offer shelter to a refugee, volunteer to help refugees resettle in the strange new place that is your home turf…

Nobody can do all these things, so don’t beat yourself up about what you can’t do.

The key about how to handle yourself in a time of galloping change is not to freeze in the headlights. In times of galloping change, we need the equivalent of a great crowd at the Berlin Wall, each doing one little thing. All each of us has to do is take our small place in that crowd. Choose your thing and do it. Our best chance of getting through these times in the best way achievable comes from as many of us as possible simply doing that.