Working On Old Cars: Lost Lessons and a Pandemic
Maybe people need to work on old cars.
Or old appliances.
When I was growing up, this is what a lot of us did. Hood up in the driveway, toolbox on the ground, a weekend afternoon spent with your pops tinkering (occasionally cursing), and eventually you got the ol’ family car running again. There was a sense of pride in the sore back from leaning over the work for hours, and those grease stained hands adorned with random scrapes. That smile of satisfaction and relief as the engine fired up is familiar to anyone who spent a successful afternoon doing something like this.
I felt similar pride when the drum in my very old clothes dryer suddenly stopped rotating last year. I took it apart to investigate, removing everything that made it a clothes dryer until only a metal shell remained. The drum belt had broken, apparently quite violently, as it also destroyed the pulley wheel that turns the drum when it let loose. I discovered that the drum wheels were also quite worn, as to be expected with so many years of use, I suppose. I bought the needed parts and replaced them all. I reassembled the appliance and felt absolutely delighted when it not only turned the drum as it should, but was quieter than I ever remember it being. Though I’d had that old clothes dryer for nearly two decades prior to placing much of its interior working parts, I never appreciated it as much as I did after I repaired it with my own hands. I felt proud of myself, and grateful that I could delay purchasing a new appliance.
We now live in a world of planned obsolescence. Kids spending a weekend afternoon in the driveway holding a flashlight while their dad works on a car is no longer the norm; you just trade in your old car and buy a new one. The repair shops that used to exist in every neighborhood are mostly a thing of the past. That vacuum cleaner your grandparents received as a wedding gift that still worked just fine by the time you came along had likely visited a repairman, a person your grandparents probably knew by name. Now we’re lucky to get four or five years out of a vacuum, and when it fails, we throw it in the bin and go buy a new one the same day from a large, impersonal, multi-national corporation. Our furnishings, appliances, and cars are no longer an investment. Not only are they deliberately designed to fail after what would have been brief use by past definitions, they’re assembled in such a way that critical parts can’t necessarily be accessed or repaired. If they can, it’s still often cheaper to buy new than to invest into something that was literally created to fail.
Sadly, this waste mentality has spread to other areas of life. If we want a nicer ballpark for the kids, we tend to abandon the old one and build an entirely new one. The former sits as an eyesore, collecting various garbage and attracting unwanted pests, often for many years. We do this with homes, shopping malls, schools, and even people.
Yes, actual human lives have become part of the things our society has deemed easier and more convenient to throw away than to put effort into maintaining or fixing. One need look no further than America’s abysmally-deficient, expensive healthcare, or Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) to see that we’ve stopped valuing human lives. But if that wasn’t enough, the Covid-19 pandemic has certainly given us a real man behind the curtain moment.
Until recent decades, medical science was making advancements which added years to lives and improved the quality of those years. Childhood just a century ago was a minefield of diseases that caused many children to arrive at the graveyard instead of adulthood. Many of these diseases are easily treated with medicines now, or entirely preventable with vaccines, like measles. The most recent three or four generations have enjoyed lives where childhood illnesses once common are something we only hear about at the doctor’s office or in books. Getting sick became mostly an inconvenience for the majority of people, unless their health or immunity was compromised in some way. And in those situations, precautions were generally taken, like masks being worn in NICU and cancer centers in hospitals.
When Covid-19 arrived, we should have been prepared. Clearly we were not. The response began as a panic, fraught with conflicting advice and myriad different approaches depending on the nations in charge. The United States had a clear opportunity to be a leader, and we were. Unfortunately, this leadership was into a quagmire of capitalist and political greed, overshadowing and eventually completely ignoring any science-based pandemic strategy in a way that will surely go down in history as one of the most tragic and needless failures of humanity.
It became clear early on that fighting Covid-19 would be costly and require some changes being made to the ways we had lived, worked, and spent our free time prior to the pandemic. Air systems upgrades, better PPE in healthcare, crowd size reductions, expanded options enabling people to work from home, reducing unnecessary travel, and basically living lives more in harmony with the planet and all other life on it made more sense than ever. However, those who profited most from the world as it was would rather people die than invest in any of these changes. We also had the grave misfortune of a new President who had been extremely unpopular in every previous attempt at a Presidential run, and he wanted to thoroughly enjoy his term having secured it in his 80s, pandemic be damned. And so the efforts shifted from finding ways to eliminate or reduce the spread of the virus to downplaying its impacts and risks, obscuring and manipulating data, and turning Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into Campaign Damage Control.
As each new shocking revelation emerged about what the SARS-CoV-2 virus is capable of doing in the long-term, the greater the efforts became to silence discussion about what the vaccines were and were not capable of. Notably, that the Covid mRNA vaccines do not reliably prevent infection, nor do they reliably prevent the long-term sequelae of infection (PASC or Long Covid). Regardless of these findings, governments continued to push the vaccine-only approach. PPE was dropped and even discouraged, not just from places it had only been added for the pandemic, but in places like ICUs/NICUs, dialysis clinics, heart centers, and cancer treatment centers, putting the most vulnerable patients at high risk of disabling conditions, poor outcomes, or death.
Meanwhile, the public increasingly chose and continues to choose blissful ignorance. Much like a child will feel and express negative emotions about visiting the pediatrician or the arrival of a new sibling if parents say the doctor will give them a painful shot or the new baby will take their parents’ attention, the public was led into negative feelings about our most effective and convenient tools by capitalism-guided “health” policies. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky called masks “the scarlet letter”, and said the quiet part out loud when adding that they “remind us we’re in the middle of a pandemic”. Had masks been framed as something people could feel good about, by helping others and having a simple, effective way to breathe clean air in real time, the reception could have been wildly different. Instead, PPE and other strategies were framed as restrictions, restraints, and threats to our personal freedom. Sadly, many have come to realize that the real threat to our freedoms is being saddled with one of the numerous chronic illnesses Covid leaves in its wake, the risk of which increases with every infection.
Like the old cars our dads used to work on, or the old dryer I was able to keep running a while longer with a little bit of effort and a minor investment, we should be investing in our health and our future. Yes, there would be costs, changes, and growing pains, but nothing as extreme as the path of destruction we’re on.
Instead, our society has normalized chronic illness, plummeting life expectancy, losses in the gains we’d achieved in cardiac outcomes for decades, children with aortic aneurysms like my teenage son developed from his Covid infection, damaged placentas and worsening maternal outcomes in pregnancies affected by Covid, chronic absenteeism, lower IQs, soaring rates of dementia, and more.
There will come a point when we have no choice but to face Covid and create a society where its harm is substantially reduced, or there will be nothing left of society. The longer we wait, the more costly it will be, in every conceivable way. We should invest in and participate in the preservation of what matters. Hint: it’s not a crowded brunch. We tend to appreciate what we are part of creating, especially in this world of planned obsolescence. Human lives, and structures and systems that it took entire lifetimes and countless sacrifices to build, should never be thrown away.
Maybe we need to work on old cars to understand.
I just hope we get there before it’s too late.