The New World

I had all these posts I was going to put up last week about the primaries and polls and telling people to vote blue, no matter who. With the coronavirus pandemic though, the world is changing at such mindboggling speed that much of that feels irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong, it matters more than ever, I get that. But maybe right now we are all trying to just figure out today, this moment. It's as if we walked through a veil and woke up in another dimension. The world has shifted and nothing that came before prepared us for this. No previous time seems like a relevant reference. This is the unknown. What we’ve experienced before – HIV, 9-11, SARS, Vietnam, none of those seem as disorienting and unknowable as this time. Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 feels like the precursor to Climate Catastrophe or whatever fascist state Trump is taking us to. 

On Tuesday of last week several universities, including Cornell, announced they were closing after spring break and having students finish the semester online, in order to slow down the spread of the virus. Then on Friday at 2 pm, Cornell administration announced the classes were ending at 5 that day, students had a week to leave, staff had a week to figure out how to work from home. After that only "essential" staff would be allowed on campus. I picked up Bruce from work without him having any idea if he would be classified essential staff or just placed on furlough for a month - maybe longer. 

We stopped to pick up groceries at Aldi's on the way home and found row after row of bare shelves. Only mushrooms and cabbage were left in the produce aisle. There was no bread anywhere. A lone package of chicken thighs and a few steaks were all that was left in the meat counter. Toilet paper was just a distant memory. Oddly enough, there was plenty of brownie mixes - people really have odd priorities when planning for the apocalypse. 

I walked out of the store fully expecting to see a meteor streaking overhead, or zombies shambling toward us. Is this the apocalypse? Are the zombies Trump's supporters? Does the world end by our falling down a rabbit hole and not recognizing any of the things we thought we'd always known? Is everything familiar and yet not at all the same? Where's the Red Queen yelling "off with their heads?" 

I went to work this Monday, thinking I might still have a way to keep the library open and provide people with some reduced form of services. By the evening we were closed, having the library system in conjunction with state mandates make it clear that any services would be detrimental to “flattening the curve.” I’m a worrier, who thinks I can, through worrying, prepare myself for any eventuality and I never imagined this one.

I wonder if this is what the Flu pandemic of 1918 felt like - the end? But still I think this may be different. Then they wouldn't have known it was happening until they were in the midst of it. This we can almost see coming, but we don't fully know what's coming. It's like seeing the water recede from the beach and walking out to where the sea used to be, wondering what is happening. Not realizing that the tsunami is coming. Not knowing that the time to run is almost gone and the wall of water will be upon us before we can reach safety. 

Zombies you can see and zombies you can fight - but a virus is both too small and the pandemic it causes too large to be able to fully comprehend. When my father died, I had cried myself into exhaustion by the day of the funeral. As people gathered in our house after the service, I fell asleep on the couch. When I awoke, the kitchen was still crowded with neighbors and family, holding plates of food as the spoke in hushed tones. I walked out into the living room, weaving my way through of forest of adult bodies. No one noticed me, as I made my way through the crowded floor. I was a beetle scurrying beneath leaf litter, invisible to the towering trees overhead. I worked me way through the house, finally arriving at an empty space by the back door and the world was different, everything had shifted, nothing I’d ever known or experienced before would help navigate this unknown and changed world.

This pandemic feels like that. All my life experiences haven’t prepared me to understand and comprehend this world we now live in. The unknown, the uncertainty is more scary sometimes than something frightening that is right in front of you. And not to scare people even more, but I can’t help feeling that this is just a precursor to what climate catastrophe is going to be.

There’s a line from Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline that says “Be wise. Be brave. Be Tricky.” I recognize that being tricky can go both ways – Loki after all was tricky. But it also implies being creative and innovative. We need trickiness governed by wisdom and courage. And most of all we need to be kind. We need a government that believes in science and most of all cares for people.