"Mail - Missing are Letters"

Astute readers will recall that I wrote a similar essay a year ago, entitled “The Lost Art of Writing Letters.” But this is a subject that bears repetition.

 

Here in Essex we are having another beautiful late summer day.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Mail – Missing are Letters!”

September 14, 2024

 

“In an age like ours, which is not given to letter writing, we

forget what an important part it used to play in people’s lives.”

                                                                                              attributed to Anatole Broyard (1920-1990)

                                                                                              literary critic and editor, The New York Times

 

Personal letters are as rare as a Woody Allen smile. I love letters, but, sadly, I don’t often write them and even less frequently receive them. I have hordes of old family letters and once edited a book, Dear Mary, which consisted of letters between my parents during the Second World War. I do have copies of letters written to each of my ten grandchildren on their tenth birthdays. I have a collection of E. B. White’s letters and Philip Stanhope’s (Lord Chesterfield) Letters. I have framed letters from Noah Webster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, T.S. Eliot, Gideon Welles, and P.G. Wodehouse, reflecting bygone eras. This absence of letters saddens me. They once played a big role in my life, and I am sure in yours.

 

Recently, when I stopped by the mailroom the pickings were typical – a couple of bills, two requests for money, an unwanted catalogue, and a statement. The bills were put aside, the statement filed, the catalogue recycled, and one of the requests was tabled. The other was shredded. There were no letters, not even a postcard. Going to the mailbox has lost the breathless anticipation I remember from my youth.

 

In boarding school, opening my mailbox was fraught with emotion. Would anything be there? It was thrilling if the envelope had the cursive handwriting that only a fifteen-year-old girl could master – a girl met the previous summer, or at a dance with a sister school – a girl whom I would have liked to call a girlfriend, but I was too shy. More often the envelope bore my mother’s distinctive handwriting, with a message admonishing me to study hard and stay out of trouble. Those of us who served in the armed forces remember the excitement of mail call – We would gather around the corporal who dispensed the mail. Names were called. There were days – perhaps most – when I retreated to my bunk empty-handed. On others, I was happy. Since I had met the girl who is now my wife, it was her letters I cherished. 

 

I have always liked letters. They offer a snapshot of the author. Tucked away, my wife and I have letters from our parents and grandparents. They help us better understand them. Letters were once inherent to our culture. Twenty-one of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament are epistles or letters. The Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium is a collection of 124 letters by the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, written toward the end of his life in 65AD. But letters are rare in this internet age – e-mail, social media posts, and texts have taken their place. Some argue that the telephone, or even the telegraph, foretold the end of letters. 

 

That may be true, but if so their death was prolonged. My parents and grandparents communicated primarily by mail. A sister who died twenty-seven years ago was known as “the last of the letter writers.” But now the end seems to be finally here. In his poem “Birches,” Robert Frost ended with this line: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” One could do worse than be a writer of letters. Someone will be happy.

"A Winter Morning"

 This morning is quite different than from the day eight days ago when I awoke to the first snowstorm of the year and was inspired to write this short essay.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“A Winter Morning”

January 24, 2024

 

“You can’t get too much winter in the winter.”

                                                                                                                                Robert Frost (1874-1963)

                                                                                                                                “Snow”

                                                                                                                                Mountain Interval, 1916

 

For a New Englander born and raised, Robert Frost’s words ring true. Summer witnesses the smell of fresh flowers, soft breezes and warm temperatures, whose pleasures are enhanced because of winter’s snow, ice, and cold. We are reminded of how changing seasons reflect life’s journey, from spring’s birth through summer’s growth, to fall’s harvest and winters denouement – from nativity to death and resurrection. Or, as Shakespeare put it, through the voice of the ill-fated Gloucester, in Henry VI, Part 2:

 

“And after summer evermore succeeds

Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold:

So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet.”

 

As I roll out of bed – figuratively, not literately – on this morning following winter’s first storm, visions of past winter’s mornings dance through my head: as a child, the prospect of school closure; as a teenager, the anticipation of training with my school’s ski team; as a householder, the chore of shoveling the front steps; as a city-dweller, the necessity of trudging through snow-laden streets to my office.

 

But now in retirement my obligations are few, and I appreciate nature’s bounty. There are few scenes so beautiful as snow falling on a winter’s morning, especially when one knows that he does not have to leave his cozy and well-provisioned apartment. There are books, the internet, and a television that can transport me to distant places and faraway times. There is a fireplace – sadly, electric, but a fireplace just the same – to warm the soul and the room.

 

Winter is a special time, something recognized by poets and artists: “In winter I get up at night/ And dress by yellow candlelight,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his 1885 collection, A Child’s Garden of Verses. Or Christina Rossetti’s 1872 poem “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which begins, “In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan/ Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” Visual artists have long used winter scenes to capture and express feelings. In our apartment hang many such paintings, including a 2014 oil by Utah’s Warren Neary, “Winter Solstice.” It shows cattle on a cold snowy morning, with a hint of the rising sun through a snow-laden sky, outside a barn from whose windows warm lights dimly glow.

 

Even with the cold and the ice, we should not rush the days away. Each is special, as are the changing seasons. Winter is, after all, a harbinger of spring.  Hibernating animals, from bears and hedgehogs to turtles and snails, now in mid-slumber, will soon leave their nests as warm days restore the earth. The early 20^thCentury poet Annette Wynne who specialized in children’s poetry wrote: “One, two, winter’s through/ Three, four, spring’s at the door.”

 

But for now, I look through frosty windows at the new-fallen snow and smile.

"October"

The third quarter is now in the books. Year-to-date has been troubling globally, rancorous politically, and not good for financial markets. The DJIA is down 18.7%, the S&P 500 down 24.8% and the NASDAQ down 32.4%. It is possible the fourth quarter may see a snap-back rally, but the picture does not look great, (though I hasten to add the future is always unpredictable). But inflation remains stubborn; price-earnings multiples are still high, at least historically; interest rates, which have backed up as bond prices have fallen, remain high relative to inflation, and an inverted yield curve (the Ten-year at 3.83% versus the Two-year at 4.27%) is often seen as a precursor of recession. Global tensions are high, at a time when, economically, the world is increasingly interdependent. The annexation of eastern provinces in Ukraine by Russia, and the verbal threat of tactical nuclear weapons by Putin have not eased tensions.

 

Nevertheless, we live in the times we do, and. Looking back on history, most of the Western world should be thankful for when, where, and how we live. This short essay is a diversion from real world troubles, at least it was for me as I wrote it over the past month. I hope it will be for you.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essays from Essex

“October”

                                                                                                 October –

                                                                                                                     Cool nights

Tales of Ghouls

Orange foliage

Baseball’s world series

Eating apples

Raking Leaves

 

October 1, 2022 

 

I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.

It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November.”

                                                                                                                             Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942)

                                                                                                                             Anne of Green Gables, 1908

 

My maternal grandparents were born in October – he on the first of the month in 1878 and she, ten years later, on the 30^th. They were married on October 9, 1907. For their 25^th wedding anniversary my mother wrote “Ode to October,” a pictorial poem, which celebrated their years together. Our 6^th grandchild, Margaret, was born on October 6, 2003. The framed ode now hangs in her bedroom.

 

October transitions hot summer days to cold winter nights. Growing up in New Hampshire, most Octobers included a few days of what we called “Indian Summer,” unseasonably warm weather after the first frost. It is a month loved by New England’s inn keepers, as leaf peepers travel to view the foliage – God’s parting gift, when summer packs up to allow winter’s return.

 

The month evokes memories: of rolling in leaves and, later, of tailgating at football games and listening to baseball’s final games and, even later, of watching our sons’ row in Head races on the Charles, the Schuylkill, and the Connecticut, and now, seeing the finish of grandchildren’s cross-country races and watching their lacrosse games. It was not just on the playing fields of Eton where leadership was born. 

 

October is the month when leaves turn color and fall to the ground, letting their summer’s hosts conserve energy through the upcoming winter. It is the time when many mammals, amphibians and reptiles hibernate. Their heartbeats and breathing slow and body temperatures drop, to survive long, cold months. 

 

Like all months, October is filled with history. On October 1, 1908, Henry Ford introduced a car for the masses – the Model T. Forty-one years later, Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China. On October 31, 1940, the Battle of Britain concluded, a battle that inspired Churchill to utter his famous line: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” October 31 is when we celebrate Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, the date in the Christian liturgical calendar dedicated to remembering the deceased, especially the saints (hallows).

 

In an unpredictable world – What will be the consequences of high inflation and rising interest rates? Which Party will hold Congress on January 1? Will the war in Ukraine intensify? – there is comfort in the predictable succession of seasons and months.

 

October is a time to celebrate our passage through winter, spring, and summer. It is a month of cool nights and warm days, a time when glorious colors adorn deciduous trees. But it is also a time when we experience shorter days and longer nights. Robert Frost, in “October,”[1]expressed our desire to hold back the ever-earlier setting sun: “Retard the sun with gentle mist;/Enchant the land with amethyst. /Slow, slow!” 

 

As we age, time moves with increasing velocity. We sympathize with Frost’s sentiment: We should slow down and absorb the scents of Autumn. Longer days will return after winter’s rest.

 

May the month bring peace and joy.

"Winter"

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Essays from Essex

“Winter”

November 13, 2021

 

“The summer days are over and the fields are waving gold,

The days are getting’ shorter and the nights are turning cold;

Autumn is a lonesome time when the year begins to wane,

But I’m eagerly awaiting those winter nights again.”

                                                                                            “Long Winter Nights,” 1989

                                                                                                                     Tommy Makem (1932-2007)

                                                                                                                      Irish Folk Musician

 

Winter in Connecticut will arrive at 10:59 am on December 21, probably after we see our first snowflakes. Those first flurries are harbingers of winter. In “A Winter Eden,” Robert Frost wrote about snowfall: “It lifts existence on a plane of snow/One level higher than the earth below/One level nearer heaven overhead…” Our first snow usually arrives in November, a transition month that marks the change from Autumn’s glorious foliage to winter’s leafless (but not lifeless) branches. As the first snow falls, children catch flakes in mittened hands, each appearing to be unique, an imagery spoiled by scientists who have determined there are only thirty-five unique crystals or flakes[1].

 

When I was young, before the onset of winter, seasonal chores had to be performed: Snow tires were placed on the car’s rear wheels, with chains easily accessible. Its radiator was topped off with antifreeze. The woodshed was filled with logs and kindling. Chimneys were swept and stove pipes and fireplaces cleaned. The coal-burning furnace was readied, and the bin filled. Insulating autumn leaves were banked against the house’s foundation. Flashlight batteries and candles were replaced. Winter clothes were taken out of moth balled-filled closets. Skis were waxed and steel edges sharpened.

 

Preparation is easier today. With all-weather tires there is no need for snow tires. A 50/50 water/coolant in radiators means less need to add antifreeze. Gas and electric fireplaces are replacing wood-burning ones. In 1940, 75% of homes in the U.S. were heated with wood or coal; today, the number is less than two percent. Mothballs have given way to cedar-lined closets. Today, we exchange a polo shirt for a sweater, a light jacket for a parka, a baseball cap with a wool hat. While wood is still the core of most skis, the use of carbon fiber or aluminum alloys and plastic bottoms have obviated the need for steel edges and waxes.

 

Perhaps it is because I was born on a January afternoon in New Haven, but winters have always been special. It may be because one of my earliest memories was Christmas 1944, with my father about to sail to Italy with the 10^th Mountain Division. We were in Madison, Connecticut, with our mother and her parents. Among my gifts that year was a pair of skis, suitable for the eldest son (about to turn four) of a Ski Trooper.  Or my love of winter could be because skiing became my favorite sport. But it may be because I met my wife on a cold, sunny day on New Hampshire’s Temple Mountain, on December 31^st, 1961; and ten weeks later, still in winter, she agreed to become my wife.

 

No longer skiing, I enjoy a walk through the woods, if the snow is not too deep. Snow hushes footfalls and many animals sleep through the winter. Most birds are in winter quarters. Leafless trees are soundless in a gentle breeze. The silence is audible. Yet life is all around. Roots provide nutrition to trees above. A hawk alights on a branch in Mud River Swamp. Tracks show that a rabbit preceded me down the path.     

 

I love winter, but a long season of short, cold days make one yearn for warmer ones. Winter prepares us for spring’s birth. “Winter will pass,” said Charlotte speaking to Wilbur in E.B. White’s eponymous story, “the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur – this lovely world, these precious days…” Spring days will come for all of us. Days will lengthen as we pass through January and February. By March we will be looking forward to spring’s return – listening to songbirds and peepers as they herald a new season, observing turtles as shells harden in the sun, smelling blossoms as they wave to us, and eyeing a shy garter snake as it makes its way through the grass.

 

Winter clothes will be packed; sneakers will replace boots, as we walk along trails once covered with snow.

"Summer Days"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Summer Days”

June 19, 2021

 

“In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life,

endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green

branches from the underside, translating them into s new language.”

                                                                                                            E.B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                            Here is New York, 1949

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Written, as White notes in his foreword,

                                                                                                           “…in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell.” 

 

On the eve of the summer solstice, June 21, 2008 Caroline and I, as guests of a friend, attended a black-tie benefit at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, one of the world’s most beautiful museums. At 58.8 degrees north, there were only six hours of night, a strange sensation for someone living in Connecticut, 1300 miles south and 4,000 miles west.

 

Forty-eight years earlier, in the summer of 1960, I had a summer job working with a Canadian mineral exploration company, which was owned by Thayer Lindsley (a friend of my parents) and led by Doug Wilmot, along the South Nahanni River on the border of the Yukon in Canada’s Northwest Territories. We were close to the 61^st Parallel, or about 850 miles north of the U.S.-Canadian border. I recall traipsing up dried-up-river beds, carrying a pick looking for minerals and a rifle, in case of an unfriendly Grizzly. At night, lying in my sleeping bag, I was happy that night creatures had only a few hours to make their rounds. 

 

Two years later, on August 11^th, I was at Fort Dix, beginning eight weeks of basic training. The camp, which no longer functions as an Army training center, sat on 6,500 acres in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Fort Dix had been integrated eleven years earlier. By my day all recruits, regardless of race or class, were treated with equal disrespect – a necessary tactic to mold us into the soldiers we were to become. I was assigned to Company A, of the Third Training Regiment, where we were taught to become “the ultimate weapon” – an optimistic goal for a bunch of Army reservists. That summer we marched along hot, dusty roads; crawled under barbwire with machine guns firing live ammunition over our heads; trained with bayonets (which I prayed I would never have to use); bivouacked in fields and crawled through swamps in night-time maneuvers. In my yearbook there is a photo of me with two friends, Jerry (Girard) Stein and Marcel Shwergold. Cigarettes in hand, we are on a ten-minute break.

 

In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck wrote: “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” An understandable sentiment for a child who grew up in New Hampshire. In her novel To Catch a Mockingbird, with Scout speaking, Harper Lee wrote: “Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat…” Looking back, my hotly anticipated summer days were full: Summer began with a 4^th of July baseball game in Wellesley where my father grew up, and it ended just before Labor Day with a trip to the East River section of Madison, Connecticut, where my mother grew up. In between, we rode horses through the woods and along dirt roads and sometimes competed in local horseshows. We swam in Nubanusit Lake, Willard Pond, Dublin Lake, but most often in Norway Pond, which is in the center of Hancock village, four miles from our home. In the evenings, we caught fireflies, which “never equal stars in size”[1], and inhaled the soft, sweet smells of New Hampshire’s countryside. We picked blackberries on Cobb’s Hill and highbush blueberries in the “next field.” We ate watermelon in the backyard off a table my father had made with wire mesh, so no need to wipe it clean. Going to bed on the sleeping porch, we witnessed eerie shadows cast by trees, as moonlight fell on the Goat Pasture. In his poem “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm,” Wallace Stevens wrote: “The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”

 

As I grew older, summer jobs consumed much of the daytime – working in gardens, haying, giving riding lessons and working with construction crews. Coming home for summers from boarding school, I felt like Nick Carraway: “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees…I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”[2]  In the evenings, we attended square dances in nearby townhalls and – four times a summer – formal dances at the Dublin Lake Club, with Lester Lanin in attendance, a strange contrast to my mornings working in a hayfield. In my 1947 Ford coupe (owned jointly with my sister), a friend and I would take girls to drive-in movies in Keene.

 

Sunday will be the start of my 81^st summer. Memories run together. In 1995, we left Greenwich for Old Lyme (with a small apartment in New York). Summer weekends were spent sculling the marsh creeks along the Connecticut River’s estuary; swimming, playing “at” golf and tennis and kayaking with grandchildren. We continued to spend August in Rumson, New Jersey where my wife had spent her childhood summers, and I would take the 6:00AM Fast Ferry into New York from the Highlands. June months of twenty-four and twenty-three years ago saw two of our children married, and during the summers of 2000, 2002 and 2008 three of our ten grandchildren were born, including the oldest and the youngest.

 

Looking back on all those summers, I treasure memories of childhood, summer jobs, falling in love, watching our children laugh, play and grow up, and then watch their children do the same. These memories bring wistful smiles on languid summer days when blue skies lure us to the fields and paths that surround where we live. We marvel at the gift nature has wrought – myriad shades of green, and the wildlife that share this precious planet. “Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream.”[3] The days will get shorter as August melds into September. It is preparation for the autumn, which will see much of plant and wildlife take long siestas, storing strength for the long winter and spring’s renewal. In like manner, we store up memories for our fall and winter evenings. But in the meantime, we have the start of summer days.

Robert Frost & "The Road Not Taken"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Essay from Essex

“Robert Frost & ‘The Road Not Taken’”

May 16, 2020

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”

                                                                                                Robert Frost (1874-1963)

                                                                                                “The Road Not Taken,” 1915        

                                                                                                Mountain Interval, 1916

The Preserve is a thousand-acre tract that abuts the one hundred acres owned by Essex Meadows. A fire road wends through it. A few weeks ago, Caroline and I were walking, when we came to the fork depicted in the attached photograph – two roads diverging, not in a yellow wood as this was spring but at least in a wood. Being New England bred and born, Robert Frost’s poem burst into my consciousness.

“The Road Not Taken” is Frost’s most famous poem and is considered his most misunderstood. It was written in June 1915 for his friend, the Welch poet Edward Thomas, with whom Frost would go on long walks when visiting in Britain. “Thomas,” wrote the American poet Katherine Robinson five years ago, “…was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and…[he] often lamented they should have taken the other.” It was a habit about which Frost teased his friend. When “The Road Not Taken” was published in 1916, Europe was engulfed in a war that would kill 700,000 British soldiers, something a reader should keep in mind. One of the victims was Edward Thomas who went to France in late 1916 and was killed on the first day of the Second Battle of Arras in April 1917. He was thirty-nine

The following is the opening stanza of one of Thomas’ “war” poems, “Lights Out:”

“I have come to the borders of sleep,

The unfathomable deep

Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight,

Or winding, soon or late;

They cannot choose.”

One can see why Frost admired his friend.

To return to “The Road Not Taken,” the poem’s obfuscation added to its fame. David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times and professor at Cornell, wrote that Frost “wanted to juxtapose two visions …”, the first in which the poet rues that he “…could not travel both,” and then later congratulates himself, as he “…took the one less traveled by.”  Professor Orr described the poem as a “kind of thaumatrope,” an optical toy with two opposing pictures that when spun merge into a single picture.

Some of the images add to the ambiguities Frost employed. He describes one road “as grassy and wanted wear,” yet a few words later “…that the passing there/Had worn them really about the same.” Then, does the “sigh” in the last stanza invoke disappointment or contentedness? And, in the last line, do the words “And that has made all the difference,” refer to a positive or negative experience?

I read poetry without analyzing it – my imagination and feelings determine what is meant, at least for me, and I recognize my interpretation may change from one day to the next. This poem is short, consisting of four stanzas of five lines, with four stressed syllables per line; the rhyming pattern – ABAAB – is pleasing to the ear. To me it invokes the woods through which my wife and I now walk and reminds me of my youth in New Hampshire, and the mile-and-a-half trek through the woods to my grandparent’s summer home. We would pass by a watering hole, proceed through an iron gate and make our way to the top of the hill, where cows grazed, and white clouds skidded across the blue sky. And on the way, of course there were birches – “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” One could do worse than be a reader of Frost.

As a conservative, I look upon the photograph as a metaphor and smile. I know these roads. The one to the right climbs and leads west toward the future, while the one to the left descends into the nether regions of the east and the past. 

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

"Risks and COVID-19"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Risks and COVID-19”

April 11, 2020

“There is freedom waiting for you.

On the breezes of the sky.

And you ask. What if I fall?

Oh, but my darling,

What if you fly?”

                                                                                    Erin Henson (1981-)

                                                                                    Artist, Designer, Poet

Most decisions we make involve some measure of risk. Generally, the consideration is fleeting. Do I take the stairs and risk falling, or the elevator and risk it breaking down? At times, the choice is more absolute: Do I take the double-black diamond with moguls, or do I go around on the bunny trail? Sometimes the odds are important: Is my need to cross the street against traffic so great that the attempt should be made despite oncoming traffic? Risk is ubiquitous. It is embedded in the friends we make, where we go to college, what job we take and in our choice of a marriage partner – a risk my wife and I took fifty-six years ago today. A wise friend used to say that he was never upset with mistakes he had made but was troubled by risks he never took. Risks vary depending on what we do. To a soldier in combat, risks have different consequences than the ones we encounter daily. In his 1916 collection of poems, Mountain Interval, Robert Frost included “The Road Not Taken.” At a fork in the road a traveler pauses, knowing he cannot walk down both paths, so chooses “the one less traveled by…”  The reader never knows whether the choice was a good one or not, only that it “has made all the difference.” As well, progress is impossible without risk. A baserunner cannot steal second without taking his foot off first. Neither can we avoid risk. “Security,” as Helen Keller once wrote, “is mostly a superstition.”

Risk is defined as the interaction with uncertainty, a measure of the probability of danger or loss, against safety or profit. In our daily lives, we try to mitigate risk. We are encouraged to look before we leap. Insurance companies employ actuaries to assess risk and calculate premiums. Investors use algorithms to quantify the risk of loss against the potential for gain. While these calculations are never perfect, they are Darwinian in that those who are best at measuring risk tend to be the most successful, what Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction in industries as they adapt to change.

Politicians employ risk to further agendas: we are told we will be overrun by illegal immigrants if we do not shut our borders; we are frightened into believing that anthropomorphic warming will destroy the planet, and that an ever-expanding population will lead to mass starvation. Now we have the health risk of COVID-19 that was first downplayed by professionals, the media and politicians, but which now dominates the news. As well, COVID-19 has created enormous economic risks.  

There is little question that COVID-19 is dangerous, especially for the elderly and those that have under-lying medical conditions, like asthma, lung diseases, heart conditions, diabetes, liver or chronic kidney disease. Given the game of blame, as to who missed the seriousness of the virus, it may be of value to review some of what was said and done about COVID-19, from when it first made its appearance – a timeline, if you will, but a list that does not pretend to be exhaustive; but it is indicative.

November 17, 2019 – On March 14, 2020, Jeanna Bryner, Editor-in-Chief of Life Science, quoting the South Morning China Post, reported that a “55-year-old individual from Hubei Province may have been the first person to have contacted COVID-19…That case dates back to November 17, 2019….That’s more than a month earlier than doctors noted cases in Wuhan, China, which is in Hubei Province.”

December 31, 2019 – The New York Times reported on April 7, 2020 that on December 31, 2019: “The Chinese government confirmed that health authorities were treating dozens of cases.”

January 14, 2020 – The World Health Organization (WHO) said: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”[1]

January 17, 2020 – The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stated that, “based on current information, the risk from 2019-nCoV to the American public is currently deemed to be low.” The CDC and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that American citizens returning from travel-restricted countries were being rerouted to specific airports where they would be screened and isolated.

January 20, 2020 – Japan, South Korea and Thailand reported their first cases of the novel coronavirus.

January 21-24, 2020 – World Economic Forum in Davos – attended by 3000 individuals from 117 countries, including 53 heads of state. China sent a large delegation, though Xi Jinping did not attend.  

January 21, 2020 – The first case of coronavirus in the United States was reported of a man who had traveled from Wuhan, China.

January 22, 2020 – President Trump, in response to a question regarding COVD-19: “We have it totally under control; it is one person, coming in from China.”  On that same day, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), a hawk on China, sent a letter to Alexander Azar, Secretary of Health and Human (HHS), encouraging the Administration to consider banning travel between China and the U.S.

January 24, 2020 – The CDC confirms the second U.S. case of coronavirus, adding, “based on what we know right now, the immediate risk to Americans remains low.”

January 28, 2020 – The WHO, following a meeting between WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Chinese President Xi Jinping, issued a release: “The WHO delegation highly appreciated the actions China has implemented in response to the outbreak, its speed in identifying the virus and openness in sharing information with WHO and other countries.”

January 29, 2020 – According to an April 5th article in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman, Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade advisor, warned the White House on January 29th that coronavirus could “cost the Country trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.”

January 30, 2020 – The WHO declared a global health emergency of international concern. The CDC confirmed publicly for the first time the person-to-person spread of coronavirus. That same day President Trump created the White House Coronavirus Task Force to coordinate all efforts, with HHS Secretary Alexander Azar as chair.

January 31, 2020 – President Trump declared coronavirus a U.S. public health emergency and issued a ban on travel between the United States and China. On that same day, Joe Biden criticized the President for the travel ban: “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia.”

February 4, 2020 – The White House directed the FDA (The U.S. Food and Drug Administration) to step up coronavirus diagnostic testing procedures.

February 5, 2020 – The CDC issued a statement: “While we continue to believe the immediate risk of 2019nCoV exposure to the general public is low, CDC is undertaking measures to help keep that risk low.”

February 7, 2020 – New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot told a TV interviewer, “I want to be clear, this is about a virus, not a group of people. There is no excuse for anyone to discriminate or stigmatize people of Asian heritage. We are here today to urge all New Yorkers to continue to live their lives as usual.”

February 10, 2020 – New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio was interviewed on MSNBC: “If you are under 50 and you’re healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there’s very little threat here. This disease, even if you were to get it, basically acts like a common cold or flu. And transmission is not that easy.”

                  February 18, 2020 – The CDC reaffirmed, “The risk to Americans from coronavirus is low.”

February 20, 2020 – The White House raised travel warnings to their highest level for Japan and South Korea.

February 24, 2020 – Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco’s Chinatown, urging people to come along, mingle and shake hands with residents.

            February 26, 2020 – The first case of suspected local transmission in the United States was announced by the CDC. On that same day, President Trump replaced Mr. Azar as head of the corona task force with Vice President Michael Pence.

            February 27, 2020 – Vice President Pence named Dr. Deborah Birx to serve as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator.

            February 29, 2020 – The first death in the U.S. from coronavirus was recorded in the U.S. On the same day, President Trump halted travel to and from Iran.

            March 11, 2020 – The WHO declared coronavirus a worldwide pandemic.

            March 12, 2020 – President Trump imposed travel restrictions with Europe.

            March 13, 2020 – President Trump declared coronavirus a national emergency.

            March 14, 2020 – The White House extended travel bans to the United Kingdom.

All the incidents mentioned above reflect risks that were either political, reputational or both. People on both sides of the aisle can find the fodder to satisfy claims of neglect or worse. But should that be our pursuit as we face the twin crises of a pandemic and a collapsed economy? As someone once said (or should have if they did not), “democracy is a slow process of stumbling to the right decision, instead of going straight forward to the wrong one.” Unlike dictatorships, democracies move slowly, as they listen to multiple voices and encourage debate. Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, after Pearl Harbor, is alleged to have said: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” They had. Was the President late in declaring a health emergency, or did the fault lie with the WHO and the CDC who downplayed its seriousness? Should Democrats have been pursuing a feckless impeachment when the coronavirus was invading our shores? Early on, with the exception of Senator Tom Cotton and Secretary Alexander Azar no one in Washington appeared to take seriously what became a pandemic. Why? Was it because of a deceitful China or a compromised WHO? Was it because Washington and the media were otherwise engaged? In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Holman Jenkins concluded: “Many things are worth doing; many risks are worth taking, and many are worth avoiding. It would be great to have more clear thinking about which is which in our current crisis.”  But that is the problem with forecasts. We deal with things as they are. “The future,” as the song goes, “is not ours to see.” At the moment the focus should be on helping the sick, finding cures and righting the economy. There will come a time to disinter the past and place blame where it belongs: who underplayed and who overplayed the risks of COVID-19?

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to point out missed signs, like the concern of Senator Cotton on January 22 or the warnings from Secretary Azar a week later. But it wasn’t until January 30 that the WHO and the CDC elevated coronavirus to a health emergency of international concern. The next day, the President declared COVID-19 a U.S. public health emergency and banned flights from China. So, should he have listened to two men, accomplished in their fields but neither a doctor, or should he have heeded the scientists and doctors at the CDC and the WHO? Keep in mind, the President had to navigate the ship of state through the Charybdis of a public panic and the Scylla of ignoring an unknown health threat. He chose a middle course. Given what we now know about the failure of a compromised WHO and a depleted Strategic National Stockpile of drugs and medical equipment, it appears, at least to me, that he chose well. But risks continue to propagate. The United States has lost 10% of its workforce in three weeks, a rate of decline faster than during the Great Depression. The President now faces a challenge – how to restart a twenty-two trillion-dollar economy, without reigniting the deadly virus.

It has been three months since coronavirus struck our nation. As a Country, we have rallied. It appears that social distancing, self-isolation and commonsense hygiene are working, and that the worse may soon be over – that the light at the end of the tunnel may not be a freight train barreling toward us, but the light of resurrection, appropriate in this time of Passover and Easter. But there remain risks our leaders must take – How to restart this economy from the somnolence of a six-to-eight-week shutdown? How to pay back the two to four trillion dollars borrowed to save businesses and jobs? This will require more choices, decisions (and risks) for the politicians who lead. We are in untraveled territory. COVID-19 has not been eviscerated. Re-starting the economic engine will not be easy. Money is not free, and we all know it is the private sector that generates the income the public sector spends. Voters in November will elect the individual they believe best suited to lead us toward a healthy, economic revival.    

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[1] Dates, not otherwise identified, come from a March 31, 2020 report by Cleta Mitchell in The Federalist. She is a partner in the Washington, D.C. law office of Foley and Lardner