Pandemic #2-News Flash: Your Dystopian Future Has Arrived
If the virus doesn’t kill us, a whirlpool of fear, conspiracy theories, and distrust in science threatens to drown us all.
Where did we go wrong?
As I sit in isolation, three weeks after the order to stay put, I find myself more unable to wrap my head around everything that‘s happening. And it’s happening all at once. Everywhere. I call it “The Thing.”
First, disaster in our largest cities. An apocalyptic nightmare, featuring the Four Horsemen of germs, ignorance, crowds, and mistrust. The hospitals are collapsing daily, and soon people will be left dead on the floor after the last of the healthcare workers have fled. After The Thing has swept through the most significant cities, it will move down into smaller ones to attack the least prepared (and the least worried) in mostly rural (and redder) states. They say it will overwhelm these places, too — the ones with maybe a single regional hospital. Few resources, small staffs, and woefully inadequate equipment will most likely be the cause of even greater devastation among these populations. While some of the Trumpers in these places scoff and laugh at those “city folks and their miseries,” they will soon find themselves next up on the virus guillotine. There’s one thing for sure: when The Thing hits them, it will be a deathly civics lesson.
The constant stream of 24/7 news assaults us in waves of terror and fear. On TV, the video images take up just 1/4 of the screen, while the chyrons, the numbers dead count, and the who-is-soon-to-be-talking graphics take up most of the video real estate. It all comes packaged in emergency red and black, shouting in CAPITAL LETTERS about what’s likely to happen in literally the next 10 minutes. There are graphs and charts and endless explanations of “flattening the curve”– the buzzphrase of the month.
Our economy is wilting before the awesome power of the natural world. A tiny, non-living, invisible piece of RNA will now determine what‘s going to come next. All we can hope is that it will be merciful to us mere humans.
The images that flash across TV and social media have their own anxiety-producing details. Not that he doesn’t deserve to be portrayed this way, but almost every picture I now see of Trump shows him bathed in satanic red tones. The images often depict him leering into the camera or caught by the shutter in the midst of one of his tirades, in that unflattering, lips-squared-off-about-to-explode facial pose.
In an attempt to keep some sanity, most people I know have now limited themselves to an hour or two of coverage a day — the human brain simply unable to process or make sense of it anymore.
Pandemic how to’s, tips for what to do when you are bored, and various other memes, lists, and other divertisements appear hourly. Are these supposed to keep people calm enough, so they don’t go off to blow their brains out or immediately head into the streets to start a looting spree? I’ve talked to friends who are anxious or bored, or smoking whole bales of weed (or at least as much as they can get their hands on with the dispensaries now shuttered.) Some are using bleach to wipe down every surface of their house — on the hour. Others are washing their hands until they bleed–even though they haven’t stepped foot out of the house or been near any other human for weeks. We wear inside and outside clothes, keep spray bottles of rubbing alcohol at the ready and take at least two showers a day.
And the FOOD! Can we talk about how much people are not only binge-watching every TV series ever made but also binge-eating anything they can scrounge up from their cupboards or gather up from a clandestine (and often masked AND gloved) trip to the grocery store? What’s an entire tub of ice cream or two pounds of Oreos in a single seating if no one is going to see you for some time anyway? In an ironic twist of fate, dieting is now on the DL.
Lately, the far-right is spewing conspiracy theories about Anthony Fauci and pressuring Trump to get rid of him, too. The Governor of New York nightly begs for more ventilators while the national death toll jumps now a thousand or more in a single day.
A field hospital for people on respirators has popped up in Central Park. In the middle of a literal field. Why there? Maybe because it will at least be a comfort to them to hear spring birds chirping in the meadows nearby as they lay dying in fear and agony? Doctors and nurses are making gut-wrenching, life-and-death decisions, the ruthless triaging beginning in earnest.
With the grinding destruction and dismantling of the civil service bureaucracy by Trump and his minions, the Federal Government has become useless. We slowly realize that we are all left out here to fend for ourselves. Maybe those crazy “preppers” had it right all along? It’s already masks, medicine, and machines. Who knows when it might be food and water?
And yet…and yet there is courage rising through all the fear — courage born of difficulty, daily reminders of the soaring human spirit. Italians sing full-throated from their balconies. Canadians and New Yorkers come to their windows, clapping and whooping and banging metal cooking pots with spoons — all in a nightly cacophony of thanks to the countless health workers and first responders who are risking everything to keep us safe. There are even musical performances and dance parties and family dinners streaming live to keep us connected. Art keeps us connected and soars above everything.
So many artists live on the fringes of our societies. Most are poor, some struggling with addictions, depression, and other mental and physical frailties. Yet, we always look to them in times of great trial to remind us of the humanity we share. Painting, or singing, or writing until the final curtain falls, the artists among us offer up their gifts to balm our souls.
They, along with every doctor and nurse and first responder, every service worker and scientist, and every maker and caretaker — they are all heroes.
And they will always come before us with a song.