No country or organization could have done it alone. Just as viruses aren’t constrained by international boundaries, neither are successful efforts to conquer them. Last week’s certification of Africa as free of wild poliovirus is an achievement in global partnership.

African soccer teams in the 1990s raised awareness with a campaign to “Kick Polio Out of Africa.” African rulers and frontline health workers worked hard for that goal. WHO did strategic planning. UNICEF managed vaccines. CDC headed a global laboratory network. Massive support came from Rotary International, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and dozens of donor governments.

Collaboration and commitment made this achievement possible. What other viruses might we conquer if we decide to work together?

My city-bred mother relished the novelties of rural West Virginia. She drove my brother and me to hand pumps outside one-room country schoolhouses, church ladies’ quilt sales on farmhouse lawns, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s experimental community at Arthurdale. The mailbox at the end of our street, which excited me with the possibility of a new Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, inspired her for its tie to the birthplace of Rural Free Delivery.

Urban door-to-door mail delivery became common after the Civil War. Farmers asked, why must we travel miles into town to pick up our mail, when we pay as much for stamps as everyone else? Pressure from the National Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance overcame Congress’s reluctance to fund vehicles, road improvements, and rural carriers. The Post Office began experimental routes in West Virginia in 1896. RFD expanded quickly and became permanent in 1902.

Long before American farm families had radios, telephones, or electricity, RFD connected them to the wider world. Rural delivery would never turn a profit. That was not the intent. Like roads and schools, universal postal service helped unite the nation and served the public good.

In my grade school long ago, each day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and a patriotic song. Recent events have me asking, to what were we pledging? The flag is a potent symbol, but of what?

Nation emphasizes people; country emphasizes place. “One nation indivisible” asserts a shared American culture, which my teachers called a melting pot. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner thought an American ethos of self-reliance and individualism arose from the interaction of people with place on the American frontier. “A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness,” we sang. “Through every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

​What our public officials and military personnel swear to uphold, however, is neither people nor place, nor any individual or agency, but the United States Constitution. The patriotic songs in my grade school didn’t mention it. It lacks the clarion call of “land of the free, home of the brave” or the tenderness of “land that I love . . . my home, sweet home.” Only in high school and beyond did I realize the Constitution's primary claim on my allegiance as an American.

Our neighbor’s Japanese beetle trap is brimming with dead and dying beetles. Maybe I should get one, too. It’s intuitively obvious: More trapped beetles mean a healthier garden, right?

Not so fast. The scent in the trap lures beetles from more than half a mile away. Some wind up in the trap. Others, attracted by the scent, nibble the roses. Unless the trap is placed exactly so and cleaned out frequently, more beetles infest the garden than ever.

I thought of the beetle trap on hearing a recent agency chief praised for overseeing a record number of arrests. I lack the expertise or data to know, in his case, whether more arrests improved or worsened public safety. "Intuitively obvious" doesn’t mean accurate. This I do know: To assess the well-being of a garden or a nation, how many beetles have been trapped—or individuals arrested, or guilty verdicts rendered, or jail cells filled—is the wrong question to ask.

Did Africans brought to Virginia in 1619 have the same status as “slaves” from Ireland? “Yes!” cry the white supremacists. “No!” retort the anti-racists. While reputable historians differ, today’s furor is more about politics than evidence.

Legal documents of the 1620s and 1630s call the Africans “servants.” Blacks in bondage toiled alongside indentured whites, intermarried with them, escaped with them, rebelled with them. Wealthy white landholders preserved their power through steps to divide and conquer.

• 1640: First recorded distinction by race. After the recapture of three escaped servants, the two white men were condemned to four more years of bondage; the African, to indenture for life.
• 1661: First Virginia law to use term slave. It allowed any free person to own slaves.
• 1662: Slavery made hereditary. In a departure from English common law, Virginia assigned children the legal status of their mother.
• 1691: Interracial marriage prohibited. Earlier laws restricted marriage by condition of servitude; now marriage between free blacks and whites was forbidden too.
• 1705: Virginia Slave Act. Among other provisions, this converted black indentured servants to lifelong slaves and allowed masters to torture or kill them.

To say race-based chattel slavery came into being gradually doesn’t diminish 400 years of suffering or the differences between black and white bondage for most of that time. Read Clyde W. Ford about why it matters.

If I had chosen a field related to medicine and public health, it should have been epidemiology. Detecting patterns, solving mysteries, analyzing maps, tracing history: What could be more fun?

People must always have noticed some diseases spread from person to person. The word quarantine comes from Italian for forty days, the time Venice made ships from infected ports sit at anchor before anyone got off. Romeo and Juliet could have had a happy ending if no one thought a house with the plague had to be boarded up.

Collecting and mapping data has been a basic tool of epidemiology since the 1850s, when John Snow painstakingly traced a London cholera epidemic to one infected well. I highly recommend Steven Berlin Johnson’s engaging account, The Ghost Map.

With the additional tool of genetic analysis, disease detectives can compare cases of an infection to determine the route it traveled. That’s how epidemiologists discovered coronavirus came to New York primarily from Europe, not China. Clues, suspects, red herrings—these sleuths have it all.

Down the road from my house, the luncheon meat smell has faded from Madison’s former Oscar Mayer plant. Armour and Swift were big names in Chicago, where I lived years ago. Meat packers spurred the growth of Milwaukee and gave Green Bay’s football team its name. To me, spikes of coronavirus in meat processing plants feel up close and personal.

Railroads used to carry livestock from the land-rich West to Chicago, Carl Sandburg’s “Hog Butcher for the World.” At the Union Stock Yards, immigrants from eastern Europe cut and packed pork and beef to ship east in refrigerated railroad cars. Upton Sinclair’s bestseller The Jungle (1906) exposed the horrors of Chicago’s assembly-line slaughterhouses. Public outcry led to the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, but no change in worker conditions.

Union organizing in the 1930s boosted wages and worker safety. For almost half a century, packing plants offered decent manufacturing jobs. However, refrigerated trucks freed the companies from a need to locate near railroad lines. Chicago’s stock yards closed in 1971. Dispersed rural sites allowed for lower pay and less union influence. To supplement local labor, employers recruited documented and undocumented immigrants. Wages plummeted.

Rapid, repetitive, shoulder-to-shoulder work with sharp instruments was dangerous even in better times. For a perfect storm, add a virus that thrives in cool, damp, noisy spaces and threatens anyone less than six feet away. The only way to produce as much meat as Americans want is to endanger the workers who process it.

The hero’s journey, defined by mythologist Joseph Campbell, is the archetypal story structure of most legends, films, and novels. Willing or not, the hero leaves the ordinary world for a strange and dangerous one, overcomes foes and challenges, and returns home transformed. Transformation happens because the hero must grow beyond old mindsets, habits, or beliefs to survive the quest.

We’re in the middle act of a hero’s journey now, thrust out of “normal” into an unfamiliar land of illness, job loss, fear, isolation, and grief. Though my dragons are relatively few, old patterns hold me back, like discomfort with technology or a penchant for family travel. I’m growing more tolerant of human error, more attentive to the here and now. Perhaps larger changes lie ahead.

What transformations may unfold on your hero’s journey as you face the dragons of this strange time?

I was five years old when my grandparents’ cottage burned down. A few years later, three feet of rainwater flooded our basement. All the photos, letters, and diaries lost to fire or flood held pieces of our lives, though their cash value was nil.

Amid campus unrest in the late 1960s, I made a sharp distinction between life and property. One day my stomach sank to hear of someone’s notes destroyed from fifteen years of research. It was only paper. It was also fifteen years of a life.

The line between life and property no longer feels so clear. Yes, murder is more vile than theft. In a fire, save the cat before the heirloom. But the small business or family restaurant that took years to build up is more than bricks and mortar. It’s also years of the family’s life.
 
Locke wrote governments exist to protect “life, liberty, and property.” For the Declaration of Independence, why did Jefferson make it “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? Some say he worried property might protect slaveholders. Some say he knew Locke meant more by property than land and goods.

​Property today goes beyond the holdings of the insured and the one percent. For some, it’s inextricably tangled up with liberty, pursuit of happiness, and life itself. 

. . . That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence has no legal authority. But its moral authority to Americans is, I hope, indisputable. The purpose of governments, it states, is to safeguard everyone’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

To do so entails laws. The Declaration charges King George with having “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” “forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance,” and “refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people.” Laws are necessary—as a means, not an end.

What changes when focus shifts from law enforcement (a means) to public safety (the end)? Instead of counting tickets or arrests, the measure of effectiveness becomes accidents averted, conflicts deescalated, homes and neighborhoods at peace. Officers need to know the law, both to stay within it and to protect the rights of everyone. If a law doesn’t help secure those inalienable rights, the law needs to change.