What it feels like now

A friend wrote that what's going on right now, the coronavirus pandemic, feels to her like a slow moving

tornado. A great description. Tornadoes are powerful, have mysterious origins even now, and even when one's in plain view you don't know exactly where it's going to go. Maybe it'll destroy your house. Maybe the houses next door or across the street. Maybe your entire neighborhood, including your house, or maybe it'll shift direction and blow itself out on an empty field. 

Another image came to me, which is that of the December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami that hit northern Sumatra hard and other places too, killing over a quarter million people. There was no warning system in place at the time and the first thing that happened was the sea retreated, as if an extreme low tide were occurring over the course of minutes. Fish were stranded and many ran onto the sand to gather the free bounty. They weren't thinking of the classical mechanics that dictated that the ocean would surge back, or if they were thinking about it they assumed it would do so as gently as it had receded and not go its prior reach. 

I spent a couple months in that region in 1989, much of it on an island called Nias, which was famous for its surfing. I was living on a dollar a day. Every morning after I'd have breakfast I'd go on the beach and read, swim, talk with other travelers. A girl around twelve would come by with a basket of cookies she sold for very little. My favorite ones were made of coconut. Often, I'd ask her for those and she'd say, "Coconut habis," which meant she was out of them. I wonder now what I would've done. Of course, I think I'd have been the one genius in my group who would've headed for higher ground immediately, but the truth is that at that time I'd have probably stood on the beach and marveled at the sight of fish in shallow pools, crabs running around, gulls overjoyed, feasting. 
I'd have been one of the quarter million to drown. 
That's how many are acting now and it's partly out of arrogance, and partly out of ignorance resulting from poor leadership, the kind that looks only to how anything it does will serve its interest and its financial masters in the very short term. We are standing on a beach on a sunny day, gawking, not knowing what's to come.