Ghost-town world: Coronavirus and the new abnormal

As we confront the velocity of the Wuhan novel coronavirus into modern life, there’s been a timed-release shutdown of the events and gathering places that are sites of our intersectionality as fans and worshippers and citizens — as human beings.

Health-care professionals have issued various pronouncements intended to give people the best possible advice to stay healthy in this time of contagion. Among the advisories is the imprecise advice to maintain “social distancing.”

In general terms, it means to create physical space between you and other people of at least six feet. Specifically, though, it’s meant creating the kind of space that’s forced the closure of any number of public events.

As COVID-19 rampages around the world, social distancing has meant postponement of the NBA and NHL seasons; a pushback to the start of the Major League Baseball season (mid-May at the earliest); a cancellation of the NCAA’s March Madness college hoops tournament; and a cancellation of MLB spring training games. Formula One canceled the Australian Grand Prix, and the Mormon Church has canceled services worldwide, as have mosques and synagogues.

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For now there are no activities at landmarks, theme parks, casinos, classrooms, and other wide-scale venues; conferences, symposia and other events rescheduled; the networks have suspended live-studio production, rendering late-night a wasteland; K-12 public schools have been closed in at least 33 states; sports from soccer to golf have ended competitions ... and there’s darkness on Broadway — no live theater in the district that defines theater to the world.

The fact of social distancing is relative. Despite the epidemiological frisson currently surrounding the phrase, the experience behind the phrase is hardly new. With teleconferencing tools and telecommuting as facts of modern life for years, we’ve already been living vast swathes of our business lives at a remove from live interaction with people. The almost-immediate gratification machine known as Amazon has spoiled us, over decades, with being able to shop for almost anything without interacting with a human being at all, and to do that shopping more efficiently than any human could.

And thanks to first-run movie theaters being shuttered to minimize COVID-19 risk — putting them under more financial pressure than before — home movie-streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime will keep growing in popularity and industry cred in equal measure.

With the new call for social distancing, we’re really being summoned to do more of what we’re doing already.

Some institutions face a complete retrofit. The thoroughly American physicality of retail politics — the candidate wading into crowds and shaking hands with abandon — has likely changed forever. In the wake of the virus, the Biden, Sanders and Trump presidential campaigns have canceled their live rallies, aware of the risks of rope-line exposure to thousands of people at a time. The physically-based social distancing left to us as an increasingly complicated society — siloed yet social, isolated yet integrated — is giving way to more of the tech-based interaction of social media, which (as we’ve lamented for years) engenders its own social distancing.

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There’s no alternative to what we’re doing right now; a plurality of health-care professionals, doctors and epidemiologists counsel that achieving physical space is one reliable avenue to controlling the virus’ spread. The need to do it is obvious. But there’s no escaping the collateral damage.

When chat rooms and online forums became part of the digital lingua franca, after the rise of the commercial Internet, they were adjunct venues of human interaction.

As society evolved, families diffused and the gig economy solidified, and 9-to-5 jobs became more of a luxury than an expectation, those forums and chat rooms filled a more central, immediate need for human interaction with someone — anyone — in similar experiential straits. They were a jumping-on place for discussion about anything and everything, discussions starring anyone.

Despite their prevalence, such online social venues were always just an option before. At least in the short-term, they’re not an option anymore.

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Enforced separation runs counter to what we’re hard-wired for as a species. We’re all social animals; social media didn’t change that. The rise of social media proved that our ability to connect as human beings doesn’t necessarily depend on face-to-face social interaction. Connection is possible. But the current crisis will test our patience, our hearts, and our imaginations in a way that social media (narrowly defined) never could.

Ironically, the social distancing demanded of the general population in the wake of coronavirus has led to a welcome, much-needed social closure: a building or a renewal of relationships between cities and their citizens, and a closing of gaps between groups of citizens — some of them among the neediest, others among the readiest to help.

The mission statement of My Block, My Hood, My City, a Chicago-based nonprofit started by Jahmal Cole in 2015, says it “provides underprivileged youth with an awareness of the world and opportunities beyond their neighborhood.”

That previously included “explorations” into careers in community development, health and the STEM fields. Now, MBMHMC is involved in outreach to citizens shut-in by coronavirus fears, delivering “care packages” of toilet paper, hand sanitizer and other essentials to at-risk communities all over Chicago.

And in southern California, the El Torito chain of Mexican restaurants has donated free meals for children 12 and under in the wake of COVID-19. “We hope this offering, without any contingencies, helps make this period a little less stressful,” said a message posted by the company on March 15.

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And they’re not alone. Twitter — too often dismissed by various bloviating wags as a misleading barometer of where we are as a society — has lately been crowded with tweets happily reporting random acts of kindness in the face of an indiscriminate epidemic.

Our ghost-town world is a challenge nobody saw coming. That’s led to a response that everyone’s been a part of — ecumenical and charitable. You can see what’s possible as the humanistic instinct asserts itself. You can see what’s possible observing the people of Italy, that country ravaged by coronavirus like no other (31,506 cases and 2,503 deaths as of March 17, according to Reuters).

Watch the You Tube videos of the quarantined citizens of Siena, Italy, standing on their balconies in this darkest hour, singing “Canto della Verbena” strong and full-hearted, as if their lives depended on it. And recognize:

There’s no social distancing better than that which brings people together.