The hope for now

Harry Scherer
Class of 2022

(5/2020) What is there to say? We are living in a time unlike any other in modern memory. The word "essential" has taken on a new meaning in recent months with an unknown number of families being told to squash their productive instincts out of a concern for a potentially fatal viral infection. Our friends and neighbors transitioned to this quasi-monastic mode of living with us almost overnight, without an eye for an expiration date. Now, more than a month after a national shutdown, we are numb to the news of an unemployment rate shooting to the top of a graph and exploring new territory in numerical history. At the same time, while devastated by the premature deaths of our fellow patriots, we are relieved by the updated models that suggest a considerably smaller mortality rate than the previously disseminated predictions. We are stunned by governmental guidelines and advertisements from multi-national corporations that cry out with a striking Orwellian tone, "Staying apart is the best way to stay united." Our people, and by extension our nation, are asking existential questions about life in the future.

See you on Zoom tomorrow!

The transition from normal college life on our idyllic campus tucked away in the Catoctin Mountains to Zoom University has proved to be one of the most notable experiences of my two years at the Mount. I could not be more thankful for the hard work that my professors put in to transition their comfortable classrooms to accessible online education centers. No one could have expected the gravity of the situation and my professors have stepped up to this unprecedented challenge better than I could have hoped for.

I am blessed to have been surrounded by a supportive and loving group of friends from the moment that I stepped on campus in August of 2018. When the news broke in mid-March that every student would be sent home for at least two weeks, some of us were taking the, at the time, liberal view that we would more likely be returning after Easter. Now, colleges and universities across the country have transitioned to online learning for the rest of the semester, with almost all planning for the unknown in the fall. All of my friends and I were hesitant about leaving campus for an undetermined amount of time, with some beginning to accept the notion that we would not be seeing each other until the fall.

The one saving grace for this quick separation has been the technology that kept us together even while we did not need it. My friends and I continue to celebrate each other’s birthdays, ensure prayers for deceased loved ones and share what has been going on in our homes. To put it another way, we have been trying to maintain some normalcy during this strange time.

My family, with whom I spent all of the shutdown, has been as loving and caring to me as they always have been. I do not think that we have ever spent so much uninterrupted time together, which has silently taught us some valuable lessons throughout this prolonged period of quarantined existence. We have learned the importance of giving each other space and anticipating and cherishing the time spent together, especially at meals. A balance had to be struck at the beginning of the transition between my usual work habits as a college student and the new milieu of an at-home undergraduate workload.

The exhaustive list of reasons for which I leave my home consists of the desire to take a walk, go to the grocery store or pick up a pizza. I have never considered the action of taking a walk as essential to life as food and water. I am unsure whether my body has ever been this inactive in my entire life, including the period of infancy during which I was unable to walk. I marvel at the existence of other human beings when I go to the grocery store. My fellow store patrons, or ration gatherers as I have begun to refer to them, and I acknowledge one another’s existence either with a meaningful nod, one that screams, "when is this going to be over?" or with a seemingly intentional lack of acknowledgment out of a concern that the virus can spread through momentary eye contact. A third alternative to this mode of communication is a brief death stare followed by quickly darted eyes that meet the food in their cart, seemingly motivated by their disgust for my apparent desire to spread the virus, from which I have not been infected, to every person with whom I come in contact because of my willful obstinacy against unenforceable state suggestions to wear a mask.

Even in the midst of the death and dying and strange cultural developments, I find comfort in my belief that immense good is going to come from this shared deprivation and isolation. The greatest generation came about from a common acceptance of severe economic and personal suffering in the Great Depression and the two world wars that surrounded it. While I believe our generation has been poorly prepared for this crisis, we have the potential to develop a similar resistance to the fragility that our culture has paradoxically challenged us to accept. This crisis of solitude has proven that our attempts at communicating digitally, while wholly pragmatic, are unsustainable for long-term social existence. Because we are social animals who yearn to know and love each other, we demand physically proximate social relationships. Perhaps after this is all over and we return back to our lives, we return with a new vision for social interaction. Will a taboo against the use of technological devices in social settings develop? It is my hope that we grasp the ability that we, as individuals, have right now to make the best out of this pandemic and to anticipate the day that we all can greet each other with a warm handshake, or maybe a loving hug, lest we become silent victims of the sickness that has already damaged so many.

Read other articles by Harry Scherer