At the peak of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election with a landslide victory over Herbert Hoover. In his 20-minute inaugural address, Roosevelt, whose eloquence was beyond dispute, was able to convince the American people that he would take the necessary measures to put people back to work (unemployment was then 25%) and restore the shattered economy.
Despite having never known poverty, Roosevelt was able to empathize with those who had lost everything. He was able to persuade the poor that he knew what they were experiencing, and that he would do what was necessary to give them jobs and restore their sense of self-esteem. My grandfather, who actually listened to this inaugural address on the radio, told me that the American people believed his promises. It was a moment of hope.
Roosevelt’s speech is best known for the following quotation: “the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”.
This quotation has become famous, probably because it is not only applicable to the Great Depression of the 1930s, but also to the present. Over the following decades, it has become a timeless truth.
In Times of Coronavirus, it is also applicable. Both the presence and absence of fear seem to pervade our daily life. There are people who are fearful of everything as opposed to those who fear nothing at all. Both extremes are dangerous since too much fear is just as bad as too little.
At the University, I have a colleague whose name is Professor Clairvoyant. She has been my friend for the last 30 years, and since I have known her, she has always behaved pandemically. Consequently, she has not found confinement so difficult because she has not really had to modify many aspects of her life style.
As reflected in her name, Professor Clairvoyant was instinctively able to predict the future. She foresaw the coronavirus. For years, she seems to have intuitively known about the threatening menace that would appear on the horizon in 2020. Her extraordinary perception of germs and the danger of possible infection was actually a prelude to the events that we are living now. We used to smile indulgently at her quaint habits, but in the end, she turned out to be smarter than all of us.
For years she had been practicing social distancing even when there was no Covid-19. If you approached her for a kiss-on-the-cheek greeting (pre-coronavirus norm in Spain), she would turn her face away and retreat since she wished to avoid any type of possible microbial invasion. Neither was she fond of handshakes, and carried hand sanitizer in her handbag long before it was the norm to do so.
Admiring her poise, I have seen her descend the university stairway in high heels, without once touching the bannister to steady her descent. For clumsy klutzes (such as myself) who perilously teeter on high heels, the germs and creepy-crawlies lurking on the bannisters are preferable to falling and ending up in a pathetic heap at the bottom of the stairs. However, Professor Clairvoyant has always been able to float down the stairway as though she were descending the Emperor’s Staircase in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. (Yes, I am envious of this talent.)
With her ebony black hair, she has always been a magnet for the opposite sex. Her relationships have been intense though relatively short. Pre-coital and post-coital disinfection protocols do not enhance passion (unless there is an unusual level of kinkiness in the relation). Sanitizer extinguishes Covid-19, but also the pink cloud of romance. However, now in the New Normal, the world as we once knew it has disappeared. Sanitized passion is doubtlessly the way to go.
One might think that now Professor Clairvoyant has found her perfect niche in Times of Coronavirus. Her way of life has been validated and confirmed as the path that all sensible people should follow. If she had set up an advice website in March, she would have become a Prophet in Her Own Time.
Although she admits that she is relieved that everyone has finally become aware of the pervasive existence of germs, there is the inevitable fly in the ointment. (But then there is no perfect world.)
Now, when faced with the test of a real threat, she has become paralyzed with fear. As one can imagine, ever since 11 March, she has not left her house, not even to buy groceries. She has opted for having everything brought to her.
Like all other professors in the university, she gives her classes online even though she hates virtual teaching. Like most of us, she hopes that it is a rough patch that will be over as soon as possible.
However, paradoxically, she is not looking forward to September when some form of normal classes may begin. It is her belief that the virus will still be around in the fall, and given her powers of prediction, she is probably right.
So, Professor Clairvoyant has a problem. She does not wish to continue online teaching because she does not enjoy it, but at the same time she believes that it would be certain death to give face-to-face classes. Unfortunately, she is not old enough for early retirement. She is up a creek, as the saying goes, and will thus have to find a solution for her dilemma.
In this sense, her ultra-perception of fear is just as dangerous as throwing all caution to the winds and living life as heedlessly as before. Professor Clairvoyant is evidently afflicted with Franklin Roosevelt’s “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”.
So much fear is not good, especially now that the worst is supposedly past (at least in Spain). After three months of seclusion, we must now venture out into the Brave New World and take a few calculated risks. Not doing so would be a mistake because the time has come to forge ahead and “convert retreat into advance”.
The only way that we can do this is to take one day at a time, learn to live by the new rules, and make those rules work for us. It is the only way that our horizons can become the same as they were before.
