Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Future results

Everything will be all right one day. 
Scientists will develop a vaccine that works and even deniers will clamor for it, except for a stubborn few who,
coronavirus
sadly, may become victims of a kind of social Darwinism. Most won't be affected personally by it and when they encounter something that sparks a memory of its reality—a can of beans in back of a cupboard, a faded receipt for an absurd amount of toilet paper in a drawer—a question will flash: Did all that really happen? 
It will come up in random conversations. A few lines with a cashier at a drug store when buying hand sanitizer. People with the flu talking about how staying in for a few days means nothing to them now. A remote connection: a friend who's wife's boss's uncle died from it. There will be books and movies with it as a major plot point. Critics will describe the best ones as being fair in their telling, but they will be seen by others, needlessly, through a political lens, as most things are now. 
People will travel again and visit places that were much harder hit than their own. Unlike a war or a tsunami, there will be nothing visual to remember it by. No rebuilt buildings or beaches, no memorials besides graveyards. 
Other than those who lost people important to them, those who died from the disease, and loved ones they couldn't visit in their final days in places where the elderly lived, the hardest hit will be the young who graduated from schools that spring and found no opportunities due to the economy's stoppage. Some will have remained positive during the hard time. Others will be like dogs too often whipped, their expectations lowered, grateful to find anything, in fear of capricious workplace superiors, who gained ample experience in firing others.   
London plague





4 comments:

  1. This is amazing, it's almost given me chills. Of course I hope you are right! And eventually I'm sure you will be. Probably not in my lifetime. Made me think of other things write about, mostly involving things like sea life returning to areas previously too polluted etc.

    One small typo, switch the words their and capricious in the last sentence.

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    1. Thank you for your kind words and pointing out my error (I deleted the "their"). When I wrote it I was thinking of how I feel about 9/11 now versus in the days immediately afterward when, like many of even those who don't live in New York (I lived in Philadelphia at the time), I curled into a fetal position in bed and never felt more alone. (Online dating sites had a surge in users following that event.) I'm looking at a two-year window or so on my own lifetime yet I think the current crises will have been dealt with and its sting will have faded. Hope I'm around to find out and that you are too!

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  2. Hi B,

    You haven't posted anything in nearly a month--are you doing okay?

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    1. I'm well, thank you for asking. Just the pandemic blues, sapping any spark. I've been thinking about something and will probably write about it today or tomorrow.
      I hope you're well, too.

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