History Repeats Itself

I'm sitting in front of my computer, hunkered down, waiting for the storm that hasn't yet shown up, might blow over, or might blow us all to kingdom come. Epidemic! Just the word alone brings a level of fear I never imagined this time last year, last month, even last week. Our state will go on stay-at-home status this coming Monday afternoon, although I see little difference between that and what I have already started. Schools in North Carolina have been canceled, at least through April, and children and parents have already settled into the homeschooling/work-from-home mode.

Two words I hear thrown about in regards to much of what is happening now in 2020 are "unprecedented" and "unchartered." While those appear to be convenient words as we flounder about looking for solutions to this virus epidemic, they are incorrect when applied to our response to this horrid coronavirus. There is a precedence. We have chartered a path before, although it was in vastly different times.

I'm talking the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. Three years ago I uncovered a fascinating detail when I was working on a project about a school in western North Carolina. Deep inside a box labeled principal's reports in the archives in Raleigh, my researcher, Diane Richard of Mosaic Research and Project Management, found, copied, and sent me the mundane, run of the mill school year reports I requested. Like this one:

I read it with casual interest, just like I read all the other end-of-year reports pertinent to the dates of this Spring Creek School. Further down the page I found this:

Note two things. Under the number promoted, zero. Not one person in the entire school (okay, thirty-two students, but it was a small school tucked in the far away mountains of the state). Under the number of graduates, again none. But then the note, "School was closed because of epidemic."

Later in the report, Principal Woody penned in the details: school that year ran from August 5, 1918 to March 21, 1919.

Her closing remarks:

And here we thought 2020 was unprecedented. In 1918, this school closed for the year on March 21 because of an epidemic. Sound familiar?

Of course I included this in the book I wrote with Jasper Reese, Back in the Time: Medicine, Education and Life in the Isolation of Western North Carolina's Spring Creek.

Never in my wildest imagination did I consider that history would repeat itself. But it did, and here we are. Parents in 1918 were as fearful for their child's life as parents are in 2020. A hundred years can't erase the protection emotion of a parent. That is basic and hasn't changed, won't change. Medicine and computers and stay at home, keep the child busy techniques have changed, however. My grandchildren are doing lessons on computers. Their great, great, great grandparents did chores. They worked on the farm. They helped their parents. Wait. My grands are doing more chores now than they ever have. They are helping in the home, doing chores and classwork as their parents telecommute their daily jobs. They are learning what family does in crisis.

Don't tell me the children of this calamity have no future. They will be strong. They will learn to overcome. Just like their ancestors.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen