Antonio was born to a family of dirt farmers in the hills outside Genoa in the late 19th century. One day, when he was a young man, he bought a roll at the market to bring home, but he dropped it and it started to roll away down the hill.
Antonio ran after it, through the streets, dodging pedestrians and horses. Down the hill he went after it, but the roll just wouldn’t stop. Through alleys and streets they went, man and bread, predator and prey. Eventually they made their way down to the waterfront, where the bread finally came to a rest.
Antonio grabbed it, triumphant. Suddenly, the ground beneath his feet started to move. He lurched to the side with it, confused, then realized he had made his way onto a boat that was leaving port. He watched northern Italy recede before him as the ship sailed off into the Mediterranean and, eventually, the Atlantic.
And that’s how my great-grandfather always claimed he came to America.
As of this writing, Italy is the country that has suffered the most from the coronavirus, with more than 6,000 people dead and hundreds more being added to that total every day. “It’s a grim harbinger of what’s to come” is a sentence I could write if it weren’t appalling to treat thousands of people dead in another country as nothing more than foreshadowing in the story of America, The Place That Matters.
I mean, it’s not not a grim harbinger of what’s to come, but that’s not all it is.
I am technically an Italian, though “technically” is the only way I’m an Italian. In all the decades Antonio lived in America, he never became a citizen, so all his descendants (and there are a lot of us!) have unclaimed Italian citizenship; I claimed mine, along with my brother, my dad, and several cousins, back in 2013. I have an Italian passport that I’ve used to travel internationally, though that was mostly to avoid paying for a visa in Bolivia.
But I’ve never been to Italy. I don’t speak Italian, try as I did to learn on Duolingo. I’m not particularly connected to Italy. So the mounting horror that I’ve felt every day at the rising death tolls hasn’t been more personal for me than the mounting horror at the rising death toll in Spain, for example, or the horror at the almost apocalyptic death tolls experts are predicting in Iran. Italy’s just had more deaths already, so there’s more horror.
Italy is doing what it needs to do, though. It’s been 15 days since they started their national lockdown, and the numbers of new cases and deaths are both starting to slow down. They are by no means out of the woods; the woods are dark and scary and Bigfoots keep attacking and that’s not going to stop anytime soon, but they are a little closer to the parking lot today than they were yesterday.
Still a lot of Bigfoots, though. Can’t emphasize enough how much the Bigfoot problem is ongoing.
Here in America, our lockdown is piecemeal, state by state, and our president would very much like it to already be over because he thinks the stock market declining every day makes him look bad. We haven’t even started to hit the bad part yet — all these measures are us trying to avoid the bad part, the part where we look at 600 people dead from this virus in one day and think “At least it’s been down for two days in a row” — and the White House is already desperate to quit.
In Italy, they’re sacrificing. Most Italians are staying home, which is the smallest sacrifice a person can make. Some have to go to work to keep the country fed or supplied, and in doing so are knowingly exposing themselves to the virus. Then there are the nurses and doctors, wearing themselves out and taking even more health risks to heal people. Then there are the sick and the dead. They’re all in it together, and most of them know it.
(Side note: this video is great)
We could be looking to Italy right now to see what’s necessary to avoid, and what’s necessary to do. Some of us are. Some of us aren’t. There will be suffering coming, and pain, and deaths that could have been avoided with foresight and action. Some of it was unavoidable after our bad decisions in February, and some was unavoidable after our bad decisions over the first 20 days of March.
There are still deaths we can avoid by acting right now at the national level. We won’t, though. Our leadership is too worried that stopping a pandemic will hurt the economy, and not worried enough that not stopping a pandemic will kill a lot of people, and also everyone will be scared to go outside because there’s a pandemic going on, which will hurt the economy.
Some of us don’t want to kill our grandma, Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick.
Well, I don’t have any grandmas left, but you get my point.
We haven’t seen the mass deaths yet, but we will. And there will be more of them than there have to be. We could act tomorrow and start containing this virus, but we won’t, so the outbreak could last for months. For a while, I was worried that the US would end up like Italy. Now I’m worried we won’t.