Lock the Doors

Recently I’ve found myself watching documentaries when normally I would sink comfortably into Weeds for the 10th time. It must have to do with the comfort in knowing the facts, in knowing that something, some problem has been solved. The investigation of the documentarian tells what really happened, or how they perceive what happened. It feels perfect, just so, wrapped up in paper. Complete. I know that that feeling is what so many of us are looking for right now, that feeling of understanding what happened, what’s happening, and what’s going to happen.

As the numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases rise for the second time, I can’t help but feel exhausted with all of the unknown. As many have put it, “I’m so tired of living through a historic event.” And it’s true. We are tired and we are living through one of the strangest times in history.

One of the documentaries I watched that I can’t get out of my head was about the Challenger explosion. I’ve never been particularly interested in space because of all of the vast incredible very unknowingness of it all. But I am always interested in people, in their actions, in their motives, and in their feelings. Initially what was so intriguing and devastating about this disaster was thinking about how the astronauts felt in the moments before the explosion or when the pitch black cabin catapulted into the ocean. The fear and the darkness. But then I was led to an incredible thread about the “normalization of deviance”, a term coined after the Challenger explosion by sociologist Diane Vaughan to describe the parade of small, forgivable errors that led to that tragedy.

That term strikes a certain familiar chord now, 10 months into the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. The normalization of deviance, or that constant marching parade of small, forgivable errors, is also what has led us to this exact point. The point where over 220,000 U.S. citizens have died from Covid-19 and there are over 8 million confirmed cases in the U.S. alone. You can travel back in time to December of 2019 and see murmurings about a new virus, tweets and small news stories that now reek of foreshadowing. You can systematically break down every single decision that has been made in the past 11 months and see that each choice was normalized deviance. From the first case in Seattle to the first ten deaths across the country to the USS Comfort arriving in the Hudson Bay. Every day and every data point has become so mind-numbingly ordinary because we have normalized the deviance of our government, our businesses, our families and friends, and even ourselves.

In the beginning: It’s just like the flu. It’ll be gone when the summer starts and the heat wears it down. It’s nothing to worry about. No need to change anything about your daily life, just wash your hands.

To: I forgot to bring my mask. We social distanced. I’m staying in my bubble. I tested negative last week. I don’t have any pre-existing conditions. I’m young. I’m healthy. I’ll be fine if I get it.

And to present day where there is a second outbreak in the White House and the Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, says during an interview with CNN that we’re not going to control the pandemic. That all we can do now is pray for a vaccine.

When Mission Control realizes that all hope is lost, that there is no saving the lives of the astronauts, that the shuttle won’t be coming back they say “lock the doors”. They do this so they can get all of the specs, reports, and data from each person in the room before it gets out. So that they can understand what happened, where it went wrong, and so that they can keep it from happening again.

The Chief of Staff may have given up, the White House may have completely succumbed to this virus and the consequences of their utter lack of control. But we have not.

We can examine the data, the reports, and the specs and we can find the deviances, we can find each abnormality that should have been treated as such.

Right now in the last few days before the election we can vote in a better administration, we can believe scientists, and we can do our part.

The doors are not locked. All hope is not lost.