Raging Against the Wind

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Don’t misunderstand what I am about to say. Rage can be useful. Rage can move hearts. Rage can be what is needed.

But rage is only effective within and among those who recognize it, empathize with it, and, perhaps, understand it. I can fly into a rage and frighten my dog, make my wife understand that I really do care about this thing, or shock my students into really listening. (Honestly, I can’t complain about any of these constituencies. I am blessed beyond measure.)

But raging against a virus seems like simply raging against the wind. The wind won’t listen, it will probably drown out your shouting, and it may even deprive you of breath.

This virus is so much smaller than we are. How many times the mass of a Covid-19 molecule, is the mass of an average human adult? How much more self-aware am I, or are you, than this virus? How beside the point are these questions?

Yes, it is small. But in its numbers and its ubiquitous presence across our entire planet, it is so much bigger than we are. I may be assuming too much here, but I suspect that it doesn’t care nearly as much about the death of an individual virus molecule as we care about the death of individual humans.

So how should we respond?  I see two choices.

1. We can rage against the wind. We can respond to this virus as if it were a human adversary, or an anthropomorphized devil. We can present a defiant face. We can set our chins and draw lines and say, “no further!” (One of my favorite moments from Star Trek: First Contact!)
2. Or, we can recognize how completely useless all of that is in the face of a virus. It cares nothing for us, or our hardship, or our rage. It lives to serve itself, and no more. (Hmm. Sounds eerily familiar.) It will not respond to our rage. It will only look for something or someone else to consume. It isn’t evil. It simply is.

As a musician, I can choose to be defiant, and say, “You will not stop us from doing what we have always done.” That might feel good. And it asserts the primacy of human culture over an entropic vision of the future. But it’s beside the point. It presumes an enemy who cares.

Or, as a musician, I can stop. Find shelter from the wind—even while I recognize its cunning and effectiveness—and do what musicians do best: LISTEN.

This pandemic has already prompted us to stop doing what we were doing. We can dedicate ourselves to raging against the pandemic and making it our priority to go back to what we had always done.

Or…we can listen, act in humility, and learn how to express how it feels to be human in a new age—one in which we understand that we are not so smart as we might once have believed. If we have to let go of the past, so be it. Rage, in this case, will not bring that past back. It will only make it more difficult to move forward.