COVID-19 Blues

I think the first time I heard of it (which is probably true for a lot of us) was during the cruise ship quarantine.  I remember it vividly because there was an obnoxious kid doing karaoke outdoors, singing "Crazy Train" over and over again, and a colleague joked that we were at a terrible resort.

Then it got worse.

In just the past few days, it's gotten even worse.  I'm still not sure most of the people talking about it are doing any real good, and it just goes to further prove that we live in an age of so much information that most of it is just plain...bad information.  Human beings don't seem capable of demonstrating any real command over rational thought.  You might even say that we're dominated by irrational thought.  Animals know what they need to do, and they do it.  Humans can think of a million brilliant thoughts, sure, and are capable of making the impossible happen.  But we're also capable of epic stupidity.  Half of what has been said in the history of humanity is probably a collective remark to exactly that.  It doesn't even matter if any given remark is fair in that regard.  It's absolutely true.

The family had a family reunion planned for the end of the month.  It was going to be a surprise birthday party for our dad.  The big selling point that was going to definitely get everyone to go was that it would be the first time everyone had been together since, well, our mom's funeral.  The brother who had already been the first to back out of the last attempt, my sister's wedding back in December, was the first to back out of this one.  He cited COVID-19 as justification this time.  He always has very good reasons for making decisions, and he has also been living a life for the past few years that some would consider a living nightmare, including himself, with an inability to get a proper night's sleep, likely because of the incredible strain he keeps letting work put on him.  But never mind that! 

Information about COVID-19 has been trickling in based on the level of danger it poses.  I was still calling it coronavirus, along with everyone else, just a few days ago.  We had a case at work of a child being provisionally diagnosed with it, and to prevent the spread of hysteria (because I think that is actually the basic function of what is supposed to be called civilization because we're civil), the decision was made to omit the term on the sign that ended up posted outside the room.  We had it explained to us that coronavirus itself is not horrible, but COVID-19 is.  I don't even know, and I don't care at this point, if the persons making these decisions were aware of the distinction, or if it even mattered, since COVID-19 seems, like most of these things, to mostly concern the mortality risks of the elderly (my dad reports an unusual amount of funerals from a mild winter in Maine), and as far as I now understand, it's not "coronavirus" at all that's the problem, but COVID-19, which of course is the version that's running amok. 

The situation escalated quickly late in the week.  The term "social distancing" entered the lexicon.  People started buying toilet paper.  A lot.  Other people pointed out how ridiculous that is.  But people tend to hoard and hunker down for these things.  When I worked at a video store (when those were still a thing), we always knew when bad weather was developing, because suddenly we were a popular destination.  It happened without fail.  I currently live in Florida, and here hurricanes are a problem.  I experienced a hurricane scare.  I know hurricanes are real, and that they cause real devastation, since one had just torn through when I arrived here, and another had torn up the last place I had been in Florida, which wrecked a dear friend's house.  But bad information does no one any good, and I watched as the hurricane's path was projected...everywhere.  Basically, to be safe, it was said to potentially hit...everywhere. 

I've had a lot of bad things happen recently.  Bad things that really happened.  To me.  There was the hemorrhaging event last fall.  There was an active shooter event at work.  I was struck by a car.  I never talked about that with anyone.  I didn't know what to say about it.  I was pretty sure the response would be, "You should be more careful!  Why don't you drive???"  Anything that didn't really address the trauma of the event itself.  The hemorrhaging thing had a response, that was sympathetic, and then petered out.  The active shooter event was almost completely ignored.  It was a real thing that I lived through, stuck in a closet, and the family was basically like, "Okay."  So I didn't really care to say anything about the car incident.  Why bother?

Then this.  This thing that has everyone cancelling everything.  Social distancing.  I consider it a case of unusually active response (I almost wrote "proactive," which will need more years before it sounds anything less than stupid) mixed with mass hysteria.  Once one thing was cancelled, it made it okay for another thing, and then another.  The funny thing is, the thing everyone is trying to prevent, the jamming of hospital services due to people who don't have it, won't get it, going to a hospital anyway, that's going to happen anyway, and is guaranteed to happen if you keep talking loudly about it.  Hospitals are always being visited by cranks.  You can't stop that.  All you can do is prevent real information from reaching people who really need it, because you're too busy trying to get on top of a story that you're making bigger than it really is by painting a big fat target on it.  Which is what we do with everything today, which to my mind is what this is all really about.  You tell people they can't go to a hospital to get themselves checked out because it's inconvenient, that's insane.  That's literally what they're there for.  But then you do have to screen between what's a common cold (because, of course, this is the season for that, and I had one, too, am still getting over it) and what's COVID-19.  And they will still tell you that...you treat it...like a cold.  Unless you're in the demographic for whom it's most likely lethal.  Do we have people pointing that out?  Is that the leading message?  Of course not!

The party should have been affected, since our dad is turning 70.  That's pretty close to elderly, and he hangs out with people who definitely are elderly.  But it didn't need to be cancelled.  Probably none of the stuff that's been cancelled needed to be cancelled.  Unless you're prepared to argue that something that's supposed to be lethal to one demographic disproportionately can't be rationally kept at bay with rational precautions.  But you can't tell old people, in an election year, to stay clear of everything.  So you tell everyone to stay clear of everything.  Obviously.

We could have had a gathering at our other brother's house, which is in Maine, like my dad.  This would have been a rational, viable option, until Friday, when the military cancelled trips outside a two-car-hours radius.  We could've compromised and did a video celebration with our dad.  But decisions, in my own family, were already escalating past rationality, past any reasonable conversation. 

On a selfish level, I wish I could get "quarantined" for a few weeks.  I could get a lot of writing done.  I mean, this whole thing is an introvert's dream, right?  The only people really suffering are the extroverts. 

Chances are, you're reading all this and some of you are wondering if my brother was right to say how badly misinformed I've been, how reckless I've been not to take all this more seriously.  I'm here to argue that everything about COVID-19 demonstrates the good as much as the bad of modern society.  We're so interconnected we have to deliberately disconnect in order to make sense of anything, or at least believe we are.  We'll pat ourselves on the back if that curve flattens appreciably, and say our measures worked, that we were absolutely justified in our response.  But that's like saying if I put a sock on my hand and didn't die from COVID-19, that it was the sock that saved me.  I love that we're taking such an active interest in everyone for a change.  It really does seem, sometimes, that we really couldn't care less about anyone else, especially if they have different beliefs.  It's a very peculiar age.  At this point it sort of feels like the COVID Age.

But all I can hear are the COVID-19 Blues...