Sunday musings…5/17/2020
Sunday musings…
1) Lockdown 1. One of my annual meetings, some 15,000 typically in attendance. Cancelled weeks ago. Somehow they managed to transition the whole shebang to a virtual setup. How’d it go? No idea. After 8+ weeks of nothing but online Zoom-type “meetings” I just couldn’t make myself log on to yet another one no matter how many friends were watching.
Sasha took me for a walk instead.
2) Lockdown 2. “[F]acts and data are independent of your credentials.” Aaron Ginn
Some of the most educational (and educated) pieces on the corona virus have been published by a few of my ophthalmology colleagues. You read that right; the so-called “eye dentists” have done excellent work both fishing out interesting ideas for treatment and testing and assimilating available information to form some sort of coherent whole.
You may remember that the first doctor to sound the alarm in China was an ophthalmologist.
The point? There are all kinds of degreed and pedigreed experts who have been belittling and lambasting very smart people outside of their little professional circles for having the audacity to opine on facts that are available to anyone to parse. The possession of a degree or an appointment does not confer upon you an exclusive right to set policy, or advise those who set policy, in your area of study. It certainly doesn’t inoculate you from having your conclusions questioned by other smart folks who may see something different in the data.
Data are what they are. Ideas sprout from data. It is those ideas that should be addressed, not who it may be who proposes them. Lofty credentials do not entitle one to an exclusive on the ideas.
3) Leadership. Have you been watching the epic 10-part series on the 6th NBA championship won by the Michael Jordan/Scottie Pippin Bulls? It’s fascinating for dozens of reasons, none the least of which is the insight we have gained into the leadership style of Jordan. MJ comes across in episodes 7 and 8 as, there’s really no way around this, kind of a jerk. He bullies, berates and belittles his teammates, pushing and pulling them to heights most of them were wholly unaware that they might reach. No one, it seems, was immune from his attacks, though they took on terrifically different forms when applied to different teammates.
We’ve seen this type of leadership before in otherwise lauded and revered leaders. Steve Jobs comes instantly to mind. Jobs was infamous for how badly he treated subordinates at all levels. His impatience with underlings who failed to deliver was matched only by the vigor and venom with which he made his displeasure known. Now you could surely say that Jordan spent his career in a perpetual zero sum setting; winning was the only acceptable outcome and there would only ever be one winner. Jobs, it should be noted treated every market his company entered as if it, too, was a zero sum game. It wasn’t enough to simply succeed, to be profitable. Nope. The goal was to win so completely that the competition left the game.
Was Jobs an asshole? During his career was Jordan? I have to admit that I simply don’t know enough about the rest of Job’s life, how he treated people who were not in his chain of command, to opine of his overall asshole quotient (though it is rather common knowledge that he was quite unkind to his daughter from his first marriage). Jordan, too, was private enough that one can’t really say what his non-winner life was like. Did he treat Bulls staffers (other than the GM) better than his teammates? The guy who parked his cars, did the laundry in the locker room, mopped the gym floor? If he did does that lower his asshole quotient? There are some who say that it was the naming of Bill Cartwright as co-captain that catalysed the dynasty. Does a toxic leader need a consoler to be effective?
One thing you can say about MJ and his leadership style is that there was no subterfuge involved.
4) Unlocked. We finally cracked. Just a tiny bit, but crack we did. Not being able to force myself to log on to a national meeting with my peers was the first little leak in the dyke. A couple of videos of the grandchildren we usually see several times a week and hadn’t for 6 or 7 days, the announcement that our closest friends here in town were moving. Yet another series of announcements that our “new normal” was going to be around for 18-24 months. It all just became too much. One tiny bit of good news–it turns out that asthma is not the high risk problem after extensive research–and we took stock of what it would mean to live for another year or two without a vaccine. In the end one must accept that up to 50% of our nation will contract the virus (though medical technology will inevitably reduce the % of people who die because of that).
Without putting others at risk the question one must now ask is what part of your life, which of your loved ones can you accept the risk of seeing because not seeing them is more a case of not dying rather than living?
All around us similar cracks are opening up for similar reasons. Mind you, this is not “we love to go out to dinner” so we’re putting ourselves out there to visit our favorite restaurants. No, as much as I pine for Veal Picatta served with a side of smiling snark on “Tina Tuesday” at one of our locals, this is much more personal. As close to need as can be. This is about seeing our children and their spouses, even if it’s 6 feet away, instead of viewing them on FaceTime. It’s a running, jumping hug from my Man Cub and a kiss on the cheek from his sister the Pipsqueak. A very special bottle of wine, 22 years in the waiting, shared across a ludicrously huge table for only four people, but around a real table pouring from the same bottle with cherished friends. No hugs or handshake there, but THERE.
There is an energy that exists in love extended and received in person, even if in person means 6 feet apart, maybe even a mask or face shield. That energy is real, and at some point being walled off from that energy is to be walled off from what it means to be alive. In no way am I telling anyone what it means for them to feel alive. It would be unforgivably presumptuous to tell anyone that they cannot live behind an impenetrable curtain of seclusion, or which of their people they can accept as so essential to living that being with them may be the source of acquiring the virus.
We may escape an interminable pandemic. A vaccine may be on the way along with all of the other blessings we each receive. Until then we must accept that we each have a responsibility to protect our fellow travelers from whatever risk we might personally represent. For ourselves we will all eventually need to come to terms with what it means for us to be living, and who it is we need to have along with us as we do.
This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2020 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.