I have to tell you I consider one of my (rather few) talents is having a sense of where the future is headed.
So how did I miss the way this pandemic would engulf the world?
I’ll tell you. Give you a good laugh it will.
I figured we lived in a world where the germ theory of disease was well known. So all you had to do was understand how a given disease was transmitted, start the necessary public health measures, use the wealth of modern societies to pay for testing and tracing and treatment and provide the income support to avoid as much of the economic fallout as possible. And Bob’s your uncle.
After a few months of effort, it would all be over. We know how to do this, I thought.
…
Instead it turns out that we never really climbed out of the Dark Ages and we’re still living at the whim of so-called strongmen.
They’re not really strong, you know. They surround themselves with guards so they don’t have to stand much of anything. They don’t know how to persevere or take on burdens or never give up. Their only talent is not caring. They don’t care a used tissue’s worth about anyone else. About you or yours or your friends or your neighbors. To some people for some reason that looks like strength.
So now we’re dying by the hundreds of thousands. Once we’re done dying of this particular disease, the hundreds of millions of unemployed and bankrupt and ruined will continue dying with other causes listed on the death certificates.
There’s no point at all asking for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. Maybe yesterday already. Maybe now. Maybe again. Maybe tomorrow. Any minute, anybody.
Same as everyone else, I’m like the Frenchman who, when the doctor started speaking of dying, said, “But I always thought an exception would be made for me!”
There’s no other way to live life except to ignore that it’s a terminal condition.
Until you can’t and some tinpot dictator rubs your face in the fact that they can rip up your life in a heartbeat. Then you tiptoe through the days knowing everything can shatter, and that you’ll have to walk on the fragments till they’re ground into dust and blow away.
2 Comments To "Feeling Ephemeral"
#1 Comment By Branjor On 25 May, 2020 @ 12:09
Yes. I feel the same way. One of my facebook friends, author Susan Bordo, recently asked her friends in a post when it felt as though life had finally gone off the rails for them and she got a variety of responses. Many said election night 2016. Yes, that was a big one. I barely functioned for months after that. Another was the night Trump stalked Hillary all over the debate stage and nobody stopped him. Yes, that one blew my mind too. Another was when he suggested to his base that they murder her (the comment about “2nd amendment people”) and there were no consequences to him for that. I don’t even have words for that one. The disappearing of the Mueller report, the impeachment acquittal, etc etc etc etc etc. Now the hundreds of thousands who are or will be dead from this pandemic and he doesn’t give a flying f*ck, he’s told people to drink bleach and still no move to remove him via the 25th amendment.
Anyway, whether right or wrong, one of my main emotional responses to all that has happened has been a complete wiping out of any last shreds of respect I ever had for the people who support him and/or are rolling over and playing dead while he gets away with everything.
#2 Comment By quixote On 08 Jun, 2020 @ 00:45
Election night 2016. God yes. I could feel the world shift, like in some science fiction movie. Except it wasn’t. It was happening.
I try not to think about it.