Is this what optimism feels like?
On Wednesday afternoon just after 5pm, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong posted the following on Facebook:
Our COVID-19 situation has been improving, with the Omicron wave subsiding. Singaporeans are gradually learning to live with the virus.
I will speak on our situation and next steps, in a live broadcast at 11 am tomorrow (24 March). You can watch it here on my Facebook Page or on Mediacorp channels. – LHL
The Straits Times quickly added this announcement to the top of their evening program, which popped up on YouTube for me. I immediately had a pretty good idea of what this would mean — every time we’ve had a major change in COVID policies, the PM would give an address to the nation, with a follow-up presentation and press conference by the COVID-19 Task Force.
And for a long time, that change coming has been relatively clear, even if we would have to wait until Thursday morning for the exact details. Singapore’s Omicron wave, dominated as it has been by the BA.2 variant that’s only now spreading in the US, is now clearly in decline. At its peak on the 22nd of February, an astounding 25k COVID cases were reported to the government, which amounts to about 0.5% of the entire population of Singapore. And even that’s probably underreported by a factor of 2 or 3 — the official case counts followed a sawtooth weekly pattern you can see below with peaks on Tuesdays, likely corresponding to the timing of when people would request time off as a result of their infections.
On top of that weekly trend, we see the classic unimodal rise and fall pattern of epidemics that reach their conclusion as a result of population-level herd immunity (natural or vaccine-induced), rather than changes in mitigation measures. Apart from distortions in reporting on the first three days of Chinese New Year, every day this year up until February 26th saw more officially reported cases than one week prior, and every day from February 27th onwards saw fewer. I was checking the numbers every day around that point, and I remember when I finally saw that decline the night of March 1st. It was only a matter of time, I knew, when it would be apparent enough to allow the government to loosen restrictions.
After seeing the announcement on Wednesday, I immediately messaged my community group on WhatsApp:
👀 PM speech tmr 11am
We’ve felt the government cap of 5 household visitors particularly acutely in our CG, as it’s forced us to split up into 3 locations on Friday evenings. This has been especially burdensome as we’ve been welcoming new members to our group — we have to separately reserve spots for them before opening slots to the rest of the group, and it still takes like two or three weeks for them to even meet half the group.
So we celebrated when the news came that the cap on household visitors will be doubled to 10. With the growth of our group, we still probably need two locations, but with one of the other potential host couples 8 months pregnant, the need is urgent!
A bit less expected was the lifting of the outdoor mask restriction. Given the weather here, most of our time outside the home is spent indoors anyways, but we’re looking forward to being able to walk to and from Grace’s parents’ apartment without masks.
There was one other big announcement of relevance to us. As our pastor posted on Facebook:
We are allowed to sing at church again!!!
When in-person services resumed last year, congregational singing was disallowed, and they made that clear at the beginning of those first few services. I’ve gotten into a habit of emphatically mouthing along with the lyrics, a practice I’ve also carried over to the worship songs I incoporate into my personal quiet times — with headphones in, it would be a bit weird, and likely disturb Grace’s sleep, to start singing along out loud.
All of these restrictions will be lifted starting Tuesday, so today was the last Sunday of that mouthing along with the lyrics. We’re looking forward to full congregational singing, albeit with masks, next week!
Speaking of music, my emotional reaction to this news was, somewhat unexpectedly, to start binging classic 80s songs. It started with this Journey acapella medley by Jared Halley that also admittedly was (re-)recommended to me by YouTube:
After being reminded of it in the medley, I started listening to Separate Ways (1983) on repeat, which I’d never really done previously. I later returned to other early 80s hits like Don’t Stop Believin’ (1981), Africa (1982), Eye of the Tiger (1982) and Take On Me (1984) and felt myself emotionally resonating with their energy and… is it optimism? I’m not entirely sure.
Of course, the other big development in March 2022 that brings the 1980s to mind is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The moral clarity in the conflict between the two sides — one fighting for its very rights of self-determination and one which doesn’t even admit it’s at war! — has steeled the resolve of once-flagging institutions like NATO, the EU, and the US Congress. Just look at how Finnish opinions on joining NATO have shifted:
What causes such dramatic changes? I would say that there have been two major revelations in the past month:
Russian imperialism is still alive and well, in both the (potentially isolation-addled) mind of Vladimir Putin, and, we should be honest, in wide swaths of Russian society — from all indications, a majority support the “special military operation.”
Nevertheless, Ukraine could actually win.
The first realization served as the catalyst to unite Europe and the world to impose unprecedented sanctions against Russia. The fear is also real — I’m sure that’s what’s behind the change in Finnish attitudes towards NATO.
But the second revelation has come more slowly. There were indications early on that things weren’t exactly going to plan for the Russian army, but they were making progress and there was always an expectation that their superior firepower would eventually overwhelm the Ukrainian defenses.
Now, it’s fallen back into a bloody stalemate, and one for which the entire Ukrainian populace is mobilizing quickly for. But even a stalemate for now is a shift from where the war began, and you could also say that the tides have turned, even if the counteroffensives have only just begun. As Eliot Cohen explained on Monday:
The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.
And it’s this second factor that requires us to alter the Western response further. We’re no longer just aiming to punish Russia and deter future aggression, but actually playing the proxy war in Ukraine for keeps. We should be sending the Ukrainians every weapon they can reasonably operate to repel the Russians all the way out of Ukrainian territory, yes, including Crimea and the Donbas.
As Garry Kasparov put it yesterday:
A new mindset is required as much as new weaponry. Ukrainians deserve not just to survive, but to win. It would repeat the mistakes of 2014 to allow Russia to continue to occupy an inch of Ukrainian territory, to let Putin claim victory and transition back to holding fake negotiations in nice hotels while he rearms and reloads to prepare for his next assault.
Playing for keeps means actually putting in the work to disentangle the global economy from Russia’s natural resources. This matters even in the industry I work in — chemicals supply chains need to reorganize to avoid reliance on Russian sources. This very well might involve finding and optimizing new materials or reaction pathways to replace those no longer available, exactly the sort of agility that my employer, Kebotix, aims to bring to the marketplace. The connection is admittedly tenuous, but it’s still motivating to think that what we’re building could play a small part in that global effort.
Both the announcement of the lifting of COVID restrictions and the war for Ukraine have a similar “already but not yet” feeling that brings to mind the common Christian conception of the times we live in now.
In Christian theology, we understand that Jesus has already died for our sins, and was raised from the grave, defeating Satan, sin and death. We know how the story ultimately ends, like first-time readers of the Lord of Rings trilogy who still know the last book is called The Return of the King.
And yet, we still do spiritual battle with Satan and his minions, struggle with sin, and physically die. Myriad Christian heresies have started by trying to reconcile this tension. Most common in the church today is toxic positivity, which denies the depth of that suffering and utilizes a strategy of relentless cheer. One of my very first blog posts on the WordPress iteration of my blog touched on this subject in the context of Good Friday:
Without a healthy balance, negative emotions can feel unwelcome at church and in Christian community. We can tend to get the idea that we need to be feeling the right emotions before we can go to Jesus in prayer. But Jesus’ message is completely the opposite. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus gives us the prototype: We can go back to the Father with nothing to show for our squandered gifts, and he will come out and embrace us before we even get home.
And yet, the opposite heresy is also alive and well in the American church, that which centers destruction, rather than redemption, in its eschatology. The world is falling apart, and Christians first and foremost need to separate ourselves from it like Noah and his family in the flood.
This heresy denies that God’s ultimate redemption is also reflected, partially, in the here and now. Jesus’s very first message in the gospels is clear: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2). This isn’t “Make sure to get around to repenting before you die, so you’ll go to heaven” — it’s clear that there’s some aspect of this “kingdom of God” that takes place in this life.
Elsewhere, Jesus instructs us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10). This isn’t “let your justice reign on Judgment Day” — we’re literally praying that God would bring his kingdom and his will to bear on earth today!
As is usual with Christian heresies, the faithful, small-o orthodox solution is to resist the urge to simplify the picture painted for us by Scripture. Yes, there is tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of our own salvation and sanctification, both individually and corporately. But the world is complex, and we need both sides of that tension to accurately describe it.
How does this parallel what’s going on today? The pandemic is clearly in decline here in Singapore, but it isn’t over yet. I had been anticipating the lifting of restrictions all month, but it’s not happening until Tuesday. Ukraine might be winning the war, but that road to victory is still going to be incredibly costly.
And we should also be avoiding the analogies to the twin heresies of toxic positivity and pessimistic eschatology. We can’t become complacent about Ukraine’s successes and forget to actually help them, or simply ignore that COVID is still spreading in Singapore, even if it’s in decline. Nor should we resign Ukraine to Russian conquest or expect COVID restrictions to last forever.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel. Let’s stay the course and keep going ahead. Don’t stop believin’!