Hope

March 23, 2020

In Friday’s Washington Post, retired four-star Admiral William McRaven describes an experience during his SEAL training when his class was trapped overnight in cold, neck-deep mud. Men around him were about to quit. Then one voice began to echo through the night—one voice raised in song. One voice became two, then three. He writes: “Those of us stuck in the mud believed that if one of us could start singing when he was up to his neck in mud, then maybe the rest of us could make it through the night. And we did.”

He goes on, “coronavirus has thrown us all in the mud. We are cold, wet, and miserable, and the dawn seems a long way off. But while we should not be cavalier about the dangers of this pandemic, neither should we feel hopeless and paralyzed with fear. Hope abounds.”

McRaven commanded the U.S. Special Operations Command until he retired in 2014 and, before the SOCCOM job, the SEAL unit that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. In his Post piece he advances a unique take on the pandemic—not another throwaway opinion, but a way of looking at life that’s largely alien to the spouting from the current slate of TV pontificators. One example: Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management and a certifiable billionaire.  “Hell is coming,” Ackman warned last week, if Trump doesn’t “shut down the country for 30 days.”

“America will end as we know it, I’m sorry to say, if Trump doesn’t take this action,” Ackman went on. “The hotel industry and the restaurant industry will go bankrupt first, Boeing is on the brink.”

Very soon, maybe this week, we’ll see network ads for “The Stand,” the interminable movie version of Stephen King’s bleak 800-page novel about a manmade virus that kills most of the world’s population.

At the other extreme, the deniers still are out there, picking up where Trump left off a week ago: covid-19 is a hoax staged by the Dems to wreck the economy and steal the election; it was manufactured in a weapons lab in China; the flu is way more serious; it’s the “beer (Corona) virus.” Until a few days ago, college kids were still having fun on spring break.

We drove home last Tuesday, the last leg of our 16-day odyssey to Florida and South Carolina. Traffic was light through Charlotte and Durham and didn’t pick up much in Richmond or in northern Virginia. Folks seem to be listening to the warnings. Arriving around 6 PM, we unpacked and watched the evening news: Trump at the lectern, more cases, more deaths, more warnings. The Congressional debate over a gargantuan mailing of cash to nearly every American citizen and business, without regard to actual need, was exploding in slow motion, as Republicans and Democrats fell over each other to buy the November election.

I went for a slow run Thursday. Traffic on the main street near our place was busy as folks still headed for work or, I imagined, to the supermarket, mentally preparing themselves for combat over stuff they think they’ll need in case of political and social collapse.

The sun was warm and comforting. Landscape workers with the local HOA were mowing lawns, cultivating flowerbeds, pruning trees. Roofers and plumbers were working on projects around the neighborhoods. A pack of kids in shorts and tee-shirts was heading for a neighborhood playground. The parking lot at a nearby strip mall was nearly full.

We are wrestling with the suspension of daily life. Some recognize the risk, some don’t. We know, or should know, the danger is out there, surrounding us. What distinguishes U.S. urban neighborhoods from those of Italy’s cities, where hundreds are dying? Is the risk lower for less densely populated suburbs? On Saturday, the local emergency room was empty when I stopped by, staffers were wearing masks. Social distancing is all we’ve got: wash hands, don’t stand next to somebody and sneeze. Still, it’s a crapshoot. We still need groceries.

Getting back to McRaven’s take, his Post piece was excerpted from his 2014 commencement speech at the University of Texas, his alma mater, in which he advised the graduates to make their beds. Make their beds? Make your bed, his message for brand-new college graduates?

He goes on to talk about the challenge of his SEAL training, which apart from the physical and mental intensity, actually is like making your bed, which is: face the task at hand and complete it, every day. If your day is filled with disappointment and failure, you still come home to a task completed. And that task is one completed, one act accomplished, no matter how simple and mundane. A task completed represents the exercise of will, it represents discipline and perseverance. And discipline and will point to a singular virtue: hope. For McRaven, through the daily torture of his training, hope remained, and sustained him.

For Christians, for all believers, hope is a theological virtue. In the Catholic catechism, hope “responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man … it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity.”

These lines express one more fundamental truth: hope is personal, a quality of the soul. McRaven seeks to inspire, to frame the inner blessings of hope for the nation, or nations struggling to confront a still-mysterious plague. He seeks what FDR sought to achieve with “nothing to fear but fear itself” nearly nine decades ago: to raise the public spirit by elevating the individual soul.

The discourse that pounds us daily with the parlous litany of covid-19 statistics alongside the continuing fumbles of government tempts us to anger, despair, abandonment of any sense of hope. McRaven, one eloquent dissenter—and there are others—reminds us to make our beds, to stand fast as we face the nightmare, to complete our tasks, to hope, to overcome.