COVID’S LESSON IN UNCERTAINTY IS A HARBINGER FOR FUTURE PLANNING

This pandemic has not only taken close to two-thirds of a million American lives, it has also killed one of our most powerful life forces, the illusion of certainty.  Depending on how we play it, that latter loss could well offer a silver lining.

Think back to very early 2020.  The rhythms of our lives were as measured as the clicks of a metronome. Everyone was up at the sound of an alarm. Kids went to school; parents went to work.  Dinner was at a set time.  So was bedtime. So were the electronic payroll deposits, and the bill payments they covered. Sure, there were little surprises here and there, just to keep things interesting.  But, for the most part, there was a structured certainty to our lives.  Or so we thought. 

Then came COVID-19, updated a year later by the delta variant.  The metronome is silent now, while everyone – from essential workers to bank presidents, from middle schoolers to university professors, from bartenders to Fortune 500 CEOs – mourn the loss of what they believed was certainty. 

Quite clearly, COVID has two lines of attack. One comes through a deadly coronavirus that infects the body’s respiratory system. The other launches a brutal assault on the psyche. It infects the body’s equilibrium, diminishing or eliminating our senses of order, structure and certainty.  

Before you dismiss all that as so much overwritten hyperbole, take a look at a small sampling of news headlines from the past few weeks:

  • America’s Children Head Back to School Amid Growing Uncertainty. (U. S. News)
  • U.S. Mortgage Rates Fall Again as COVID-19 Delivers Yet More Uncertainty. (Yahoo Finance)
  • Uncertainty Is Back on Main Street as Delta Variant Rattles Reopening Plans. (CNBC)

On one end of the spectrum, is an unemployed single mother. She doesn’t know whether to take a new job, fearing that a sudden quarantine might close her 6-year-old daughter’s school without notice.  On the other end, is McKinsey & Company, the Cadillac of management consultants. From its recent client advisory:  “The COVID-19 crisis has undermined most of the assumptions of the traditional planning cycle. Meticulously prepared status reports are now outdated before they reach senior managers.”  

Everyone, it seems, is in their own individual hell of uncertainty.  And it’s about so much more than the efficacy of vaccines, masks, and social distancing.  Most of us thought we had a bead on the trajectory of our lives. It took a deadly pandemic to teach us what survivors of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires already knew: Life does not come with a warranty of certitude.   The axiom holds for people and countries.

In many ways, COVID has already shaken government and business organizations out of their cultural inertia and into meaningful change.  Before the pandemic, a $15-an-hour minimum wage was seen by the business community as a socialist plot. Many entry-level positions at restaurants and other establishments are now paying at least that much. Virtual “telehealth” visits between patients and medical providers exploded during the pandemic, and have become a significant component of our health care system.  There has also been a dramatic transformation of organizational structure built around the concept of remote work, all because COVID forced managers to discover that their employees could perform well from home. 

Comes now the potential silver lining, a long shot to be sure, but a very real opportunity to improve our lives. Ready?  We embrace uncertainty.  Once and for all, we rid ourselves of all spurious notions that it can’t happen here, that for all its foibles, the status quo is pretty darn good, so don’t mess with it. Put another way, we step out of our comfort zone, let go of our inertia, and build better a better life before a another crisis totally engulfs us. 

As the American Medical Association noted, our country was not prepared to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude.  Our illusion of certainty kept it off the priority list because nothing like it had happened in our lifetime, despite the warnings of experts.  

The same is true with climate change. A recent UN report called the devastating impacts of global warming unavoidable, with a small window to stop it from worsening. Scientists have been tracking this existential crisis for decades, with little to nothing in terms of policy changes.  The good news, says environmentalist Paul Gilding, is that things are so bad right now we will be forced to deal with the crisis. “We are slow, Gilding said, “not stupid.” The motto, sadly hopeful and optimistic, needs to be printed on our currency.

Then there is the matter of our democratic way of life. We were brought up to believe that our country was the envy of the world.  We wrote the book on democracy. We fought wars over democracy. It’s what American Exceptionalism was all about.  Yet, the majority of one of our major political parties still believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.  Some 147 Republican members of Congress voted against accepting the results of the Electoral College vote. Yes but, comes the certainty argument, Trump’s attempt to override election results was rejected by judges throughout the country.  Meanwhile, many state legislatures have passed, or are considering, bills, that would allow state officials to reverse election results on some of the same grounds those judges rejected last year. They would also make it more difficult for Black people to vote.  Alas, there is nothing certain about the perpetuity of American democracy. 

As a joke, I donned a MAGA hat back in 2015, saying to friends that I totally supported Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, simply because he could never be elected president.  Of that, I was certain. That’s why I am done with the mirage of certainty.  Horrible things we were certain could never happen can, indeed, happen. And have. To avoid, or mitigate against, future catastrophes, we need to be mindful, vigilant and intentional in our actions.  In a perfect world, we would have figured all this out earlier.  But it’s not too late.

After all, we are slow, but not stupid.

A HURRICANE SEASON AIMED DIRECTLY AT THE EYE OF OUR DENIAL

Tornadoes are the only weather emergencies I remember from my days as a wee lad in Minnesota. Sure, there were blizzards, but we didn’t see them as emergencies; they were just part of winter. Tornadoes never did much to raise our anxiety levels. The city used to sound a siren if a tornado had been spotted. It meant we were supposed to hightail it to the southwest corner of the basement for maximum protection. Most of us, however, went out on our front steps instead. We waved to neighbors under a foreboding sky, and tried to catch a glimpse of a funnel cloud that sounded like a freight train. None of us ever saw a darn thing, except a few dark clouds and a little rain. There were no evacuations. FEMA never showed up.

Those flashbacks to a genteel, stoic relationship with weather seemed as quaint as they were ancient last weekend, as many of us not in Florida worried about those who were. Houston’s Harvey was Irma’s opening act. Burnt deeply into our psyches were images of stunned Texans airlifted from their roofs, tightly clasping all the prized possessions they could squeeze into a 13-gallon garbage bag. As Irma headed for Miami and the Keys, she was said to be bigger and stronger than Harvey, the nastiest hurricane to ever sweep the Atlantic.

The thing about a natural disaster in Florida is that it has empathic legs. Almost everyone knows and cares about somebody in Florida. We all either have people down there or are close to someone who does. That means somewhere in those news story statistics – 2.4 million evacuations, 6 million without power – are the faces of actual people, folks we care and worry about. As we apprehend reports of 170 mph winds and 15-foot storm surges, we confront, in a very real sense, the fragility of life and the insecurity of shelter, not just for those we know in Florida, but for all of us.

The inconvenient truth is that our world is nowhere near as safe as many of us thought it was. And it keeps growing less secure every day. It’s not just hurricanes and flooding. California just experienced the hottest summer on record. As Irma made landfall in Florida, at least 81 major fires raged across 1.5 million acres in the west, from Colorado to California and north to Washington. If there is any good to come from these late, turbulent days of summer it is that our heightened anxiety and insecurity will chip away at our collective denial of the inescapable truth that climate change is destroying our planet.

No, the warming earth is not responsible for hurricanes, fires and other destructive weather events. But, say virtually every scientist, climate change significantly ups the ante. It makes everything worse, more destructive. Warm air carries more water than cool air. That means hurricanes now carry more water from oceans and then dump it on land. Kenneth Kunkel of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies said extreme rainstorms are up more than a third since the early 1980s. The increase has dovetailed with the gradual warming of the water. The same is true of the fires. Obviously we had fire eons before we ever combined the words “climate” and “change”. The warming of the earth’s surface makes those fires worse and harder to control.

The cable news buildup to Irma was, as always, filled with inanities, like a reporter using a hurricane simulator to show viewers what was coming. Yet, the prize for pure insipidness goes to Scott Pruitt, the guy in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. His department has removed mentions of climate change from its website. Asked by a CNN anchor to comment on the intensity of two back-to-back monster hurricanes and the need to deal with global warming, Pruitt said discussing climate change right now is “very, very, insensitive to the people of Florida.”

Well, Pruitt’s fellow Republican, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado, begs to differ: “This is the time that the president and the EPA and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change,” he told the Miami Herald. “If this isn’t climate change, I don’t know what is. This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.” Science is on the mayor’s side. According to Zillow, climate scientists predict that one of eight Florida homes will be under water by 2100.

Days after Harvey devastated the Houston area, Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, sounded optimistic about being able to use tragic weather events to break the wall of denial. “The most pernicious and dangerous myth we’ve bought into when it comes to climate change is not the myth that it isn’t real or humans aren’t responsible,” she wrote in an email to the New York Times. “It’s the myth that it doesn’t matter to me. And that is exactly the myth that Harvey shatters.”

Sociologists have a term for the “dangerous myth” Hayhoe described. It’s called “pluralistic ignorance”. It happens when members of a group adopt a norm, belief, or habit because they mistakenly believe other members of the group share it. Far too many of us, for far too long, have turned a blind eye toward climate change because it seemed that so many others were doing the same thing.

Enough is enough. How many hurricanes on steroids, how many floods, how many fires, how many more inches of global sea level rise, how many evacuations, how many deaths will it take to make us shake off our pluralistic ignorance and save what is left of our planet? Whatever we do, let’s not let the answer to that question blow in the winds of bigger and bigger hurricanes. We need to act now.