Civic Duty When Your Impact Approaches Zero

Feels like the virus has been momentarily tamed. Attractive Dr Amy as lion-tamer. Just 3-4% increase each of last four days in Franklin County. About 40-50 new cases a day amid our 1.3 million. (Obligatory caveat is we don’t have testing of course, yada, yada.)

That’s the sort of increase one could live with although obviously it will increase as we open up. The peak, so far, was 4/17, which means the “caught-it date” was around Holy Week and Easter.

The odds of getting the virus here seem to be extremely slight (unless you’re in a nursing home, prison or hospital) and yet if everyone works from that knowledge the virus will take off again.

It reminds me of voting: my individual vote for president is infinitesimally small as far as impact. In fact it’s so close to zero in percentage terms that it is practically meaningless mathematically. But if everyone acted on that rational knowledge no one would vote. The civic duty of voting reminds me of the civic duty of socially distancing oneself and wearing a mask.

I think some vote like the play the lottery: Winning the lottery is mathematically close to impossible just as affecting an election is close to impossible.

But some people vote for other reasons than changing the outcome. They simply enjoy having their say or they want to run up vote total (by 1!) for their candidate. Or, best choice, they vote out of civic duty.
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The time we are in feels absurd. The social distancing, schools closed, the workplaces and sports gone. It’s funny how I’ve always thought that that the true measure of a crisis is whether sports continue. If there’s time for trivia of sports then things must not be so bad. This is what I’ve long thought of the basket case of Detroit - as long as the Tigers are playing how bad could it be there?

And now... we don’t have sports. The god of this world has been taken down!

And the economic front is pure carnage. Our government debt spirals faster than the virus. Justice is served in that our government spent trillions it didn’t have and now is in no position to pay for this rainy day.

And our spiritual capital is nearly all spent down as emotional carnage exponentiates.

As the old Italian proverb goes, “The situation is hopeless, but not serious”. I interpret that personally as, “the situation is hopeless but God is not hopeless and therefore neither are we.” Pope Francis recently said, “Optimism disappoints, but hope does not.”

I’m reminded of this meditation about Mary’s response to the Annunciation:

“Mary did not laugh at God, as Sarah did when she was promised a son. Sarah, being a sinner like ourselves, began from the difficulties; she focused on what was absent, on reasons to dwell on impossibility. Mary, being truly innocent and without sin, did not entertain cynicism even when historical circumstances made it difficult to see how God could fulfill his age-old promise of an eternal King and Savior. Mary does not start from absence. She does not focus on darkness and nothingness and impossibility, which leads to despair and to no! Mary starts from a presence. Her only focus is the light and love and limitless possibility that embrace her. This leads her to yes!”