Our Finest Hour, If We So Choose
March 30, 2020 at 1:47 p.m.
Our Finest Hour, If We So Choose
By Mark Howe-
Frankly, I hate it.
Before I go too deep with this, I understand that sports are not essential to life itself. I know no one who has experienced a global pandemic before, but we do have a history of moving heaven and earth to save lives.
I hate that the student-athletes we cover locally aren’t being rewarded for thier off-season efforts with the opportunity to compete, and all the experiences that come with it. I feel for all those who are charged with coming up with plans for high school teams that may not be implemented.
And I really, intensely dislike the waiting.
Like you, my friends, I find myself with unexpected time, and I found myself thinking about “Apollo 13,” mostly in the context of the movie of that name, but then about the events itself.
And I see many similarities between that situation and what advertisers are calling “these trying times.”
The movie dramatically documents how everyone at NASA had to come up with new, innovative plans to save the lives of the three astronauts. Spoiler alert (if there is such a thing for a 25-year-old movie): the astronauts lived.
My favorite scene is when technicians had to make a new air scrubber. “We have to make this (holding up a square air filter) fit in the hole for this (holding up a round filter), using nothing but this (parts available onboard the spaceship). It reminded me of some science projects I had in school, but would be more interested in doing now.
We, as humans, have a front-row seat to such innovation right now.
As you read this, operations are being streamlined to produce more coronavirus test kits in less time and for less money. Treatments are being developed for the virus, and after things settle, vaccines will be developed so we don’t have to do this again anytime soon.
Stress tests any system, and we’ve found out our supply chain has kinks in it. We are also a generation or two removed from a time when emergency preparedness was a way of life. I’m old enough to remember civil defense classes, and to prepare to hunker down for two weeks after a nuclear attack.
We have found time and again, when the chips are down, humans will come to the aid of one another. We’re reproving that, albeit with a little more complaining and moaning.
Personally, I’ve had a front-row seat as my wife and her teaching colleagues have, effectively, reinvented e-learning on the fly. That process was designed to get through a couple of snow days, not mass closings for weeks at a time. But now teachers have come up with new ways to educate. No doubt after this time passes, as it surely will, that kinks will be addressed.
If you think teachers are just sitting back eating bonbons, please keep that thought to yourself. You’re wrong. Period.
I say all that to say this:?I believe this can be, as a human race, our finest hour. It’s a choice. I’m sheltering in place, writing this from a card table next to the living room. I hate not being able to go and get a cup of coffee, but that’s far easier than to living with the fact that, if I had the virus, I gave it to someone who died because they stood next to me in line while waiting to buy a cup of coffee.
Each of us has a choice to make, and sometimes we need to re-decide on a daily, or even hourly, basis. “Am I part of the problem, or a part of the solution?”
To borrow a line from an Indiana Jones movie (that I’ve seen twice in the last 10 days):
“You must choose ... wisely.”
Frankly, I hate it.
Before I go too deep with this, I understand that sports are not essential to life itself. I know no one who has experienced a global pandemic before, but we do have a history of moving heaven and earth to save lives.
I hate that the student-athletes we cover locally aren’t being rewarded for thier off-season efforts with the opportunity to compete, and all the experiences that come with it. I feel for all those who are charged with coming up with plans for high school teams that may not be implemented.
And I really, intensely dislike the waiting.
Like you, my friends, I find myself with unexpected time, and I found myself thinking about “Apollo 13,” mostly in the context of the movie of that name, but then about the events itself.
And I see many similarities between that situation and what advertisers are calling “these trying times.”
The movie dramatically documents how everyone at NASA had to come up with new, innovative plans to save the lives of the three astronauts. Spoiler alert (if there is such a thing for a 25-year-old movie): the astronauts lived.
My favorite scene is when technicians had to make a new air scrubber. “We have to make this (holding up a square air filter) fit in the hole for this (holding up a round filter), using nothing but this (parts available onboard the spaceship). It reminded me of some science projects I had in school, but would be more interested in doing now.
We, as humans, have a front-row seat to such innovation right now.
As you read this, operations are being streamlined to produce more coronavirus test kits in less time and for less money. Treatments are being developed for the virus, and after things settle, vaccines will be developed so we don’t have to do this again anytime soon.
Stress tests any system, and we’ve found out our supply chain has kinks in it. We are also a generation or two removed from a time when emergency preparedness was a way of life. I’m old enough to remember civil defense classes, and to prepare to hunker down for two weeks after a nuclear attack.
We have found time and again, when the chips are down, humans will come to the aid of one another. We’re reproving that, albeit with a little more complaining and moaning.
Personally, I’ve had a front-row seat as my wife and her teaching colleagues have, effectively, reinvented e-learning on the fly. That process was designed to get through a couple of snow days, not mass closings for weeks at a time. But now teachers have come up with new ways to educate. No doubt after this time passes, as it surely will, that kinks will be addressed.
If you think teachers are just sitting back eating bonbons, please keep that thought to yourself. You’re wrong. Period.
I say all that to say this:?I believe this can be, as a human race, our finest hour. It’s a choice. I’m sheltering in place, writing this from a card table next to the living room. I hate not being able to go and get a cup of coffee, but that’s far easier than to living with the fact that, if I had the virus, I gave it to someone who died because they stood next to me in line while waiting to buy a cup of coffee.
Each of us has a choice to make, and sometimes we need to re-decide on a daily, or even hourly, basis. “Am I part of the problem, or a part of the solution?”
To borrow a line from an Indiana Jones movie (that I’ve seen twice in the last 10 days):
“You must choose ... wisely.”
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