America innovates in time of need

The spirit of American adaptation and innovation never ceases to amaze me.

I was pondering this the other morning as I stood in line to get into the local Walmart, mask around my face, disposable gloves on standby, and phone at the ready to pay without touching cash or handling a credit card.

Two months earlier, the experience of shopping with so many people dressed in full-plague gear would have been equal parts depressing and surreal. Now, it’s just Wednesday.

Not only did it take the public a remarkably short time to adjust to a new normal, but it took the retail and grocery world only a few weeks to institute systems to provide services safely — plexiglass shields at checkouts, X’s along sidewalks to encourage social distancing and one-way aisles to decrease traffic.

One part of mask-wearing I hate is that people can’t see you smile. And, indeed, companies have started to manufacture transparent masks, the better to catch those nonverbals and to aid people who are deaf and read lips.

Last week, I completed a touchless pickup at a local pizza franchise. My wife called ahead and ordered, paying over the phone. When I arrived, an employee brought the order outside, placed it on the hood of my car with a canvas bag underneath, and then backed away to the safety of the sidewalk. Once I had exited the vehicle, picked up the pizza and put it into my car, he came back and retrieved the bag.

Here was a ritual that didn’t exist a few weeks earlier, and one you would be hard-pressed to explain to any time traveler visiting from the distant era of, oh, February.

As strange as this all felt, in another couple of months it will be so commonplace as to be hardly worthy of comment, much like increased security for airplane flights were so unreal in those first months after 9/11, yet today we are acclimated to taking off our shoes and opening our luggage.

Our boundless capacity for adaptation and change on full display, once again.

Even when we conquer this coronavirus and are standing at the door of a reopened economy, like John Travolta’s immuno-compromised character in “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” wiggling our collective toes at the yellow tape separating shelter-in-place with complete freedom, some concessions may have to be made.

I can envision a world where, like those ubiquitous bagcheck stations at ballparks and concert venues, screeners take ticket holders’ temperatures and ask a few basic questions: Recent fever? Cough? Shortness of breath?

It may be the price we pay for watching a double-header on a sultry July day or seeing a favorite band prance about on the stage. Someday, our kids and grandkids will marvel about a time when this didn’t happen, when sick people were encouraged to go to work and weren’t asked to leave public places.

It will also be interesting to see how many work-at-homers and learn-at-homers are allowed to continue in this fashion, even once stay-at-home directives are lifted. After all, businesses have invested in outfitting workers for remote work, so maybe that will become the new norm, or at least some hybrid version dividing time between home and office/school. (Tax preparers should expect to see a deluge of deductions for home offices next April.)

Also remaining to be seen is how the pandemic shifts America’s — and the world’s — buying habits and, more importantly, priorities. Economists speculate that some big-name retailers may not bounce back, their business eclipsed by online options and an inevitable recession. The pandemic would have only hastened the demise of some, where the writing has long been on the wall.

As for our priorities, perhaps Julio Vincent Gambuto, writing for Forge, said it best in a recent column when he urged Americans to resist gaslighting attempts by the Establishment — the potent forces of government and advertising — to convince us to return quickly to “normal.”

“Take a deep breath,” Gambuto advises, “ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullsh** and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud.”

If enough Americans do this, the revolution that follows could be the most significant adaptation and innovation of the 21st century.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Missives from a home office

For one thing, the commute is grueling.

Today I had to detour around a stack of unwashed dishes and a basket of laundry.

My office is under construction by the cat. He is stomping across the table like Godzilla sashaying through Tokyo, hurling papers and empty plastic bottles of diet iced tea over the side.

He says he’ll be done never, so I relocate to the opposite end of the dining room, where the sun shines in my eyes most of the morning.

My chair is hardly ergonomic. It’s just hard. I should complain to the boss. Oh, wait.

It’s tough to tell what day it is. All I know for sure is that it ends in a “y.” As in, why am I here? What is my purpose?

I know it’s not Saturday or Sunday because the newscasters on TV are the ones who work on the weekdays. I can’t tell the date from the stories because they’re all the same: Some state official is arguing with the big orange guy in D.C., somebody is throwing a virtual birthday party for somebody else, a mom in Poughkeepsie is stressed because she can’t send her three kids, ages 6, 8, and 11, to school.

I start the day playing Brady Bunch on my computer. The game is always the same. Zoom this, Zoom that. Or Google Hangout, let it all hang out.

When we started virtual meetings, everybody had their cameras on, and it was fun to peek into co-workers’ living rooms and kitchens. Somebody had a banana in a wire basket hanging from the ceiling. Each day, it got older and blacker. The banana, not the ceiling. Fascinating.

But now, all the video shades are drawn, and coworkers hide behind avatars. Just disembodied voices, shouting into the void.

I saw a Saturday Night Live skit about virtual meetings recently. Or maybe last year. Time has no meaning anymore.

In the skit, one Zoom participant takes her computer into the bathroom while her co-workers beg her, for the love of God, to stop. It’s supposed to be funny.

At some point, I wander outside to get the newspaper. I could have sworn one day there was an inch-and-a-half of snow, but it’s April. Unless it’s still March, and my sometimes officemate, who is married to the only other human occupant of the office, got ambitious and changed the calendar early.

Some mornings I wear gloves and turn the newspaper pages gingerly, like they’re brittle artifacts unearthed from a dead civilization. Which, well.

The printed news is the same as on the TV — the COVID Chronicles. It’s the only show that isn’t on hiatus.

I kind of remember watching something about a Tiger King. And Carole, who maybe fed her officemate, who was married to the only other human occupant of her office, to a tiger.

It seems to me they said tigers can devour a person so completely that they leave no bones behind. I thought only pigs did that. I will have to look it up. Maybe this afternoon. Or next year.

Online news isn’t much different than the printed stuff. There’s just more of it. I skip all the big stories in the name of good mental hygiene even though physical hygiene has gone by the wayside.

I might still be brushing my teeth. The toothbrush is wet, at least.

I go straight to the arts and culture sections online. Somebody is writing about plague literature. Again. Did you know Shakespeare wrote many of his best works while the London theaters were closed because of the plague?

All I’ve written during our pandemic is this column. Way to overachieve, Shakespeare.

Anyway, most of those stories also mention Camus and “The Plague,” Stephen King and “The Stand,” and of course Edgar Allan Poe and “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Not so many mention Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend,” about a plague of vampirism. That’s one of my favorites. At the end, the main character is the only human left in a world of blood-sucking ghouls. Sorry if I spoiled the ending.

By the way, Carole is guilty. There, spoiled that one, too.

Lunch in this office sucks. The in-house cafeteria is serving three-day-old sloppy joes on stale buns, and I have to serve myself. A few oranges are still rattling around, too. At least I won’t get rickets.

Well, gotta go. A rerun of the Brady Bunch is starting.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Under cover of COVID, leaders reveal true selves

What a breath of fresh air Ohio’s leadership has been during the coronavirus pandemic.

Each day around 2 p.m., with few exceptions, Ohioans can tune in to a thoughtful press conference from Gov. Mike DeWine, Health Director Dr. Amy Acton and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted.

The trio provides current numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities. DeWine carefully and thoughtfully provides his rationale behind each decision he makes to fight the spread, from extending school closures to releasing inmates from state prisons.

Viewers may not always agree with the administration, but nobody can fault the transparency behind the explanations. Nor can viewers doubt the sincerity of Dr. Acton, who sometimes appears close to tears as she alternately explains the need for continued social distancing and praises Ohioans for saving lives by staying home as much as possible.

Our state leaders also practice what they preach. Organizers go to great lengths to keep officials separated by at least 6 feet during the conference. Reporters ask questions from a separate room to comply with the directive against large gatherings.

Last week, DeWine and Acton received a measure of pop-culture fame when an animated spoof, in heavy rotation on social media, cast the two as sitcom legends Laverne and Shirley, teaming up to battle the virus. Even the state’s interpreter for the deaf had a cameo.

The news conferences have become such a lifeline for Ohioans that they’ve been dubbed in some quarters as Wine with DeWine, and virtual-viewing parties have popped up on Facebook so that stay-at-homers can feel some measure of solidarity with one another during the broadcasts.

Despite such fanfare, DeWine, Acton and Husted never lose sight of the situation’s severity, keeping the focus squarely on facts and the impact the coronavirus has on all aspects of the state’s health — physical, financial and emotional.

Contrast this with the almost daily dysfunction coming from Washington, D.C., where our president treats the presence of cameras and microphones as an excuse to contradict established science and his own experts, advocate for unproven treatments, shift the blame for bungled responses to past administrations and state leaders, change the description of a stockpile of medical supplies to dovetail with his son-in-law’s interpretation of same, crow about his ratings and Facebook popularity, and berate the press for not praising him enough.

Behind the scenes, under the cover of COVID, one might say, Trump has fired the inspector general who filed the whistleblower complaint about his call to Ukraine, fired the person who would have overseen the administration’s pandemic relief fund, and continued his administration’s rollback of environmental protections and healthcare.

And this week, Americans learned the administration largely ignored a pointed early warning from one of its own about the seriousness of the coming crisis. Instead, the president continued to downplay the novel coronavirus publicly, calling it a Democratic hoax and predicting the handful of cases would soon dwindle to one.

Monday-morning quarterbacking is always far too easy and often unfair. Just a few weeks ago, many of us, myself included, were far less concerned with the coronavirus than we should have been.

Then again, we aren’t the president. And we didn’t have access to the sort of the information that Trump was apparently disregarding.

This wasn’t the president staying positive in the face of a serious challenge, as some supporters claim he is doing with his daily intrusion into the nation’s living rooms.

No, this is a man who is almost criminally ill-equipped to lead this charge, who cannot crawl out from beneath his own ego to provide the leadership so vital in such a problematic time.

For that, the country needs to turn to people like DeWine, Acton and Husted, who are showing each day how to set policy and provide comfort and solace to a frightened and hurting nation.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Virus hits home, and it’s time to heed experts’ advice

The coronavirus became much more real to the Alliance community over the weekend with the passing of Jeff Holbrook.

His wife, Kimberly, posted on Facebook that Jeff died on Friday at The Cleveland Clinic of complications from COVID-19. He was only 55 years old.

Nobody knows how Jeff was exposed to the virus, the post noted. It was community-acquired.

I didn’t know Jeff well, but I saw his intelligence and sense of humor reflected in his three children, all of whom I had the honor and pleasure to teach at Alliance High School. They were wonderful kids who grew into wonderful adults.

The fact that, in their time of mourning, the Holbrooks took to social media to share the news as a cautionary tale about the dangers of the coronavirus and the necessity of following the advice of medical professionals speaks volumes about their empathy.

Their pleas to the community to listen to science stand in stark contrast to some of the other spurious ideas floating around the internet, including a still-persistent belief that the media is overhyping the pandemic and that the virus was created in a laboratory as part of a deep-state plot.

Please.

I know two things about the people reading these words — and the person writing them.

First, the vast majority are not epidemiologists. We have not spent our professional lives studying diseases, how they are transmitted and how best to slow their spread. We laypeople know more than we did a few months ago, but reading newspaper stories and webpages isn’t the same as a deep dive into the research through an accredited program.

This is why, in times like this, we must lean heavily on the informed opinions of people who know the science and best practices. We see this reflected daily in decisions made by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, guided by Dr. Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health. DeWine is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know, and to listen to Acton, who in turn is guided by other professionals, disease modeling, and a lifetime of intensive study.

So when these people tell us to maintain social distance, to shelter in place, to wash our hands frequently and to avoid exposing susceptible members of our community to possible infection, we should listen.

Because the second thing I know about the people reading these words is that any one of us could have the coronavirus right now. Some of us could be asymptomatic, going about our lives without any of the telltale signs associated with the virus, but nonetheless potentially exposing every person with whom we come into contact.

This is why the idea of quarantining only those people with symptoms, known exposures, or underlying conditions that could make them more susceptible doesn’t work. By the time people who test positive are isolated, they could have exposed dozens of other people, all of whom could have exposed hundreds more.

Many Ohioans are following the advice and orders from our government. They are waving at loved ones through the windows of nursing homes, holding birthday parties where “guests” drive by the house and honk without coming in, and checking in on each other by phone and Skype.

But some are not. They are inviting relatives to Easter dinner, letting their kids play together, and congregating on porches and garages where an uninvited guest, COVID-19, could tag along with any one of them.

Look, everybody wants to get back to normal. Employees want to go back to work. People want to go back to church, to restaurants and movie theaters. Kids even want to go back to school.

That day will come. But if it comes too soon, everything we have done so far will have been for naught.

Don’t base your decisions on gut feelings, sketchy blog posts or stock-market forecasts. Listen to credible advice from experts.

This is the best way to help spare other families like the Holbrooks from loss.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com


@cschillig on Twitter

Coronavirus could change definition of school

When historians study the public response to coronavirus 20 or 30 years from now — assuming humanity still exists in some identifiable way (sorry, dark thoughts) — one of the conclusions they may reach is that it was a turning point for education.

Because of COVID-19, many of the nation’s public schools, including all of Ohio’s, are marching into remote learning, distance learning, e-learning, or whatever name is given to a delivery system that does not involve daily, face-to-face interactions with a teacher.

Distance learning is not new, of course. Correspondence courses, in the era before the Internet, allowed students to snail mail assignments to their teachers and wait weeks for a response.

And e-learning has been around for some time, too. In many cases, such courses blend face-to-face meetings a few times a semester with copious online interaction. Other models are completely digital, with students and instructors never meeting in person. This type of e-learning is tailored to students who can’t commit to in-person attendance because of work schedules or illness.

Readers may remember the uproar over Ohio’s ill-fated digital academies, where lack of government oversight mixed with greed on the part of service providers created a crisis when it couldn’t be determined how often students logged into class, or if they did at all.

But this is the first time when all of Ohio’s students, including those who prefer face-to-face interactions, have been funneled into computer-only classes for a limited (we hope) time.

In the short term, it should work, albeit with many hiccups. One unintended consequence: The experience will force us to grapple with the very definition of what school is.

For instance, time in the seat. While old models of compulsory attendance are crumbling, replaced by systems that favor demonstrated competence, many of us still equate education with completing (some say “enduring”) a set number of hours in a common location.

E-learning could challenge that assumption. If students can show mastery of two-variable equations in half the time, why should they have to wait for classmates to catch up? If students want to complete all the assignments in a composition course in four weeks, why should they have to sit in class for two more months? Showing mastery of a concept and moving on is easier online than anywhere else, provided the coursework is free of a lockstep structure to keep students from advancing too quickly.

Online work involves a ruthless paring down of curriculum to the bare essentials. It forces teachers to select outcomes that are the most important, along with the assignments that teach those outcomes, and to let the fluff fall aside. Under such a system, capable students could finish required coursework with time left over for activities they enjoy. A student with a natural inclination toward chemistry, dance or welding could spend more time doing that, and less time reading literature, or vice versa.

If schooling becomes more efficient, schools — and especially high schools — may find it more practical to run schedules that require students’ in-person attendance half as long as they are required now. A school could operate a morning and an afternoon shift, with the same teachers seeing different groups of students during the course of a day. Or schools could schedule some students for Monday/Wednesday classes and others for Tuesday/Thursday rosters, with little to no overlap.

On their “off” time or days, students could complete coursework online, getting assistance during in-person visits the following class day. Classes could last for as little as, say, 20 minutes for students who understand the material, longer for students who require extra help.

Teachers would model the work to be done, and students would complete it outside of class, online. Discipline problems could be separated by shift; two students can’t butt heads if they aren’t in school together.

The implication for taxpayers would be profound. Districts could operate in spaces much smaller than the ones they currently occupy, since at any given time, fewer students would be in the buildings. Fewer buses would be needed, but they would run twice as much, for different shifts.

An online model would also force society to deal with inequities that impact education. Schools, in conjunction with private business, would have to provide Internet services for students, so that everybody could access class materials. Unequal online access is a major concern in this coronavirus-forced sabbatical.

Nothing I’ve described here is revolutionary, and much of it is happening already, but on a smaller scale. This forced exodus from the school building, coupled with a mandate that education must continue, could accelerate the pace.

Nothing good can come from the coronavirus. Indirectly, however, it could irrevocably change what it means to be “in school.”

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Betcha can't NOT touch your face

Fourteen.

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

I’m counting how many times I touch my face while writing this column. Face-touching is a no-no in this Era of the Coronavirus, and I read an article on the Internet, so it has to be true, that says one way to gain awareness is to count.

Obviously, looking up stuff took me 16 face touches. I’m a slow researcher.

But what constitutes a touch? I mean, obviously anytime my fingers make contact with my face or my eyes, but what about resting my chin on my knuckles while I read? Does an extended face-touch like that count as one strike, or do I give myself extra hash marks?

Seventeen. I just brushed my cheek.

I miss the days when you could get information and not question it. Remember the Dracula sneeze? Sneeze into your inside elbow, experts advised, so you look like Bela Lugosi in an old vampire movie.

That was advice to stop flu transmission, and nobody ever doubted it. It was better than sneezing into your hand and then using that hand to shake with new acquaintances, open doors or — wait for it — touch your own face.

Eighteen. Dammit.

The Dracula sneeze, stay home when you’re sick, and wash your hands were uncontestable flu-era cautions.

In this coronavirus debacle, everybody has slightly different opinions. The president indicated it might be okay to go to work while sick, that the virus will retreat when the spring arrives, and that everything is under control. He even suggested the whole scare was a hoax by the Democrats and the Fake News Media, although his cronies later walked back that assertion.

Ever notice how the role of many Republicans in Washington these days is to go on TV and explain what the president really meant to say? But I digress.

Most health experts say don’t go to work if you’re sick, that while the virus may subside with warmer spring weather it could roar back with a vengeance in the fall, and that maybe things are less under control, coronavirus-wise, than we’d like to hope.

Nineteen, 20. Ugh.

Older people should stay away from public places. Anybody who wants to be tested can be tested. The virus lives for X-amount of time on surfaces. It can’t live on food, at least not for very long — unless it can. The mortality rate is (fill in your percentage).

For every piece of information, you don’t have to look very far to find somebody saying something diametrically opposite.

And it’s not just the folks on Fox, who have always lived in an alternate reality. Conflicting advice is everywhere. Wash your hands, but not so much that you dry them out. Dry, cracked skin can be an entry point for viruses. So wash your hands a whole lot, but in moderation.

Then there are the opportunists. The folks selling protection kits at ginned-up prices. The educational companies pushing study-from-home platforms to schools where classes have been cancelled. Retailers who move paper towels and cleaning supplies to the front of the store, capitalizing on high-traffic areas even as experts tell us not to stockpile. Or to stockpile only a little bit.

Twenty-one. Rubbed my eye.

This coronavirus stuff is enough to make anybody stress out. And when I stress out, guess what I do?

That’s right.

Twenty-two through thirty.

Coronavirus, here I come.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Serving Up a Sample of Jimmy's Jams

Jimmy’s Jams is not something to spread on toast.

Instead, it’s the name of a musical thought-project created by my friend, former English teacher extraordinaire Jim Christine.

Like any good puzzle, Jimmy’s Jams is deceptively simple: For every band or artist that you like, pick one song, and one song only, that you could listen to repeatedly without growing tired of it. Pretend the rest of that musician’s work doesn’t exist, because for this project, it doesn’t. You get just that one song.

I have the sneaking suspicion Jimmy’s Jams is a way to collect music to play at one’s funeral, minus the morbidity of calling it Heavenly Hymns or Coronavirus Compositions. But whatever.

The last time I talked with Christine, his list was around 500 songs. That’s 500 tunes by 500 different artists, no repeats. That in itself is intriguing.

The kicker is that each song has to have near-endless repeatability, which eliminates many selections that sound great the first four or five times, but then become the musical equivalent of a mother-in-law prattling endlessly in the backseat. (Jonas Brothers’ “Sucker,” I’m looking at you.)

For some artists, this is easy. The Rolling Stones? “Paint It Black.” Elvis? “Jailhouse Rock.” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” Alice Cooper? “The Ballad of Dwight Fry.” (Trivia time: The Cooper song is named for Hollywood horror actor Dwight Frye, minus the “e” in case Frye’s estate took exception.)

The more you like a band or an artist, the harder it is to cull the herd and find that one special song. I can listen to just about anything by Led Zeppelin frequently, but to narrow it to one song? “Black Dog,” “Rock and Roll,” “The Immigrant Song,” “Whole Lotta Love” — all great, but not enough to sacrifice the others. “Stairway to Heaven” or “Kashmir”? Classics, but overplayed. I guess I have to go with “In My Time of Dying,” which changes tempo and mood often enough to feel like several songs.

If I understand the rules of Jimmy’ Jams correctly, musicians with solo careers before or after their time in a band can have multiple entries, as can musicians who played in multiple bands.

This means the members of the Beatles can make repeat appearances on Jimmy’s Jams. I’ll scrawl down “Paperback Writer” for the band. I imagine John Lennon’s solo song would be “Imagine.” Paul McCartney and Wings land with “Jet.” Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy” comes easily to my list. I’ve got my mind set on George Harrison’s “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You.”

Harrison was also a member of the Travelling Wilburys. My Jimmy’s Jams entry for them is “Maxine.” Bob Dylan was also a Wilbury; he makes my track listing as a solo artist, after much soul-searching, with “Like a Rolling Stone,” but it could just as easily have been almost any song from “Blood on the Tracks,” the quintessential album from an artist with a career of quintessential moments.

What about one-hit wonders, you ask? (I know you’re out there because I can hear you breathing.) Does Billy Thorpe make the list with “Children of the Sun”? What about Nine Days and “Absolutely (Story of a Girl)”?

I could not listen to Thorpe endlessly, so no. But Nine Days, yes. And if you were listening to the radio in the summer of 2000, I guarantee you turned up “Absolutely” each of the 1,234 times it played each day.

I need to ask Christine about cover tunes. Specifically, I don’t know if Alien Ant Farm can make the list with “Smooth Criminal” if I’ve already claimed Michael Jackson’s version.

Mentioning Michael Jackson reminds me that Soundgarden’s lead singer, Chris Cornell, did a killer acoustic version of “Billie Jean,” and Alien Ant Farm prompts me to include Dave Matthews’ “Ants Marching” on the list.

Then there’s my opening mention of toast, which reminds me I still need to break the three-way tie among Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter,” “Rearviewmirror,” and “Man of the Hour.”

One song and artist leads naturally to the next, and before you know it, you have a pretty tasty spread of Jimmy’s Jams all your own.

Readers inspired to create their own Jimmy’s Jams may send it to me at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. I’ll pass them along to the original Jimmy.