P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
SEARCHING FOR PRECEDENT
MEERA ROTHMAN
We’ve been through this before.
JUNE
U
nprecedented times. Unprecedented deaths. An unprecedented president. In less than a year, unprecedented disruption. I am fucking sick of the word unprecedented, but I can’t escape it. It’s on every channel, email, and news alert. True, sometimes the unprecedented can be wonderful and liberating—the train is finally off the tracks. But the unprecedented can also be singularly terrifying. There is no reference point, no first or second draft to look back on. It’s just us–– people––free-falling through 2020 and making things up as we go. If you sit and think too hard about it (as I have been doing all of June), everything seems too strange to believe. Like we have detached from the natural string of time. It reminds me of a line from a story by Yalitza Ferreras. This geologist, who has a lifelong obsession with rocks, loses part of her hand trying to touch and feel molten lava. In the months following the accident, she’s lying in bed, unable to move, and her boyfriend comes to comfort her: This can’t go on forever, he would say, as she felt the layers of forever crushing her down. This is often how it feels. A global disease is killing hundreds of thousands of people, and all around us there is loss. Hospitals overflow with people who can’t breathe, workers lose their jobs, children can’t go to school, and everyone is being shepherded quickly and urgently into buildings and rooms, so that in the end we lose the ability to move. It feels like our lives have been unbuttoned one by one and flipped inside out. The school and city that I’ve spent the last three years digging fingernails and roots into is shut down, and we’re all staring at screens around the world trying to reach out to each other. But I’m also reaching desperately for an explanation. I don’t understand how an event so extreme can fit into the narrative of my life, or even the narrative of history. I feel that there must be a precedent––there has to be one. This can’t be the first time that universities shut down, or that the world spun into freefall.
4
I
t made sense to start my search for a precedent with the last global pandemic. The influenza pandemic of 1918 is
largely overlooked in U.S. history; I had never even heard of it until this year. Scientists initially thought the virus was just a common cold, until it started destroying people’s lungs, filling them with fluid and causing tissue inflammation. The virus infected about 500 million people, a third of the world population, and killed 50 million, far higher than the death rate of World War I. I wonder how people back then comprehended this degree of death and destruction. I wonder if they looked for precedents, too. Just like today, people in 1918 wore masks and avoided large groups. Just like today, Yale was completely shut down. There’s little writing about what it was like in New Haven back then––it’s almost like people have forgotten. But Julia Irwin has not. In 2008, the then-doctoral student at Yale’s History of Science and Medicine program wrote a deep dive historical paper about influenza’s impact on the city. Irwin’s paper is a goldmine. She studied how the pandemic affected group relations in New Haven, specifically the relationships between the city’s largely ‘Anglo’ majority and a newer group of working-class Italian immigrants. Irwin is now an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida, and she has been working from home during the pandemic. Through the Zoom screen, I can see that she has thick, layered brown hair and a warm smile. Irwin spent the bulk of her early career researching pandemics. Even though today her research focuses on international history, her voice picks up speed and inflates with energy when our conversation pivots to public health. “In epidemics, but also disasters more broadly, those sorts of moments reveal issues that are already in societies that are sometimes below the surface,” she explains. “Health disparities, for example, or economic disparities that are existing but people have become complacent about. An epidemic can bring those to life.” The influenza epidemic of 1918 was a prime example, precipitating a harsh nativist stance against the Italian immigrant community. According to Irwin, Italians died at a rate twice as high as Anglo residents in Connecticut. Public health officials used this data to confirm the theory that Italians as a ‘race’ had succumbed
