Real Life in the Time of Cholera
or, STFU with the Doom Porn Already.
Every time my wife receives a message or phone call - and that’s pretty much always… She’s keeping busy and connected to the outside world more than I am.
I’ve gone through the motions and the platitudes with work colleagues:
“Hope you’re well!”
“Stay healthy!”
“What a world, huh?”
“We’ll get through this!”
“It WILL be over!”
After the umpteenth round of this, what is there really left to talk about? It’s like an eternal chorus of Frère Jacques, empty words building upon themselves with no room for anything else in the song. Work life goes on, abeit remotely.
My wife, though, talks endlessly, to co-workers and friends.
And every time she gets a message or phone call, I bristle like a porcupine. It’s not that I know who her friends are, and know they dislike me, most of them. Nor is it any kind of professional contest, some ‘my team is better than your team’ weird thing…
On edge that my wife has a job and friends, too… secretly hoping the calls will dry up for her (as one does!).
No, none of this.
I just prepare for incoming.
Because every time Liv gets off the phone, she’s newly (al)armed with horrific reports from the outside world. This friend ‘disappeared’, he’s in ICU… This one ‘dressed like an astronaut’ to care for an afflicted son… This one couldn’t ‘escape’ to Canada, because her husband ‘got it’, and by the time he recovered (They all recover), the border was closed. Now they’re ‘trapped, dying’ in New York City.
Air quotes above, for examples of hyperbole. To my ears, “trapped, dying” is an unnecessary embellishment to an otherwise potentially interesting truth.
Nobody we know, to our knowledge, is dying. Nobody we know, thank God, has died. Nobody I know myself, save for a few work colleagues I know of, has been sickened. At least symptomatically.
The people I’m in touch with myself, on a regular or daily basis— including elderly couples, middle-aged, mostly men, who live and work between New York and Florida, traveling back and forth to this day; Europeans, municipal workers and students — are all physically fine.
I’m not saying in any way that my wife’s phone reporting is not what she’s hearing. I’m also not dismissing this contagion, whatever it is, nor who or what caused it. I’m not denying the sickness and death of many thousands worldwide — far beyond my own admittedly tiny (plainly fortuitous) sphere… We’re all, for the time being, physically fine.
It’s psychologically, permanently, that the damage is being wrought.
Give me liberty, or give me COVID!
This is the binary option presented.
Everywhere online, there is the constant barrage of worst-case scenarios, inflated projections, suggestions of Never — returning to “normal”, ending lockdowns, restoring freedoms, etc. — and, thankfully, inaccurate models.
On this website alone, there is one stentorian screed which pissed me off enough to respond, telling me ‘Covid-19 has just begun’ —and was actually subtitled,
Why every U.S. city and county should brace for severe outbreaks, a possible second wave, and even a resurgence of the coronavirus later this year and next
REALLY??
There are other vexing pieces on this crowded platform (no social distancing here on Medium!) warning, Coronavirus isn’t all we need to fear, disease-wise; we may Never get a handle on things; that the seemingly healthy can spread disease.
Public shaming related to Coronavirus has also apparently just begun; and of course, we’re all being “gaslit” now, by egregious suggestions that it might be time to start thinking about changing our drawers, stepping out of our PJs, getting out of the house and the hell back to work!
There are many worse “ideas” on Medium — more infuriating, insulting, inciteful to me, and no doubt to the millions of others who prefer to remain emotionally, necessarily, in a glass-half-full state — that I could easily cite here.
I won’t bother.
Suffice it to say, doom-and-gloom ghouls do not lurk exclusively @Medium. Across ‘air’, there is perpetual hysteria and ceaseless stoking of fear and anxiety writ large.
As always, the mostly unwatchable CNN and, especially, MSNBC are “best” at what they do… and for some reason, also overtly (though not unexpectedly) politicizing their coverage of the global health crisis, with one goal, only one focus in sight: to minimize/belittle, and defeat, Donald Trump.
Of course, to the 24/7 news vacuum monster, there is no other discourse, and nothing. else. matters. Certainly not the physical, mental, financial, especially emotional health of a terrorized people… A populace kept not “informed” at all, but afraid and on edge, and perversely misled by assaultive discourse and mis-, and more troublingly, disinformation.
Yes, it’s bad. Yes, people are dying. My insulation, my wife’s daily doses of real life outside of lockdown… are absolute truths.
What’s not absolute, nor at this point, truthful, is how things will end. And especially, when.
The only thing we have to fear
is Coronavirus, we’re being told.
It’s not “irresponsible” to question WHY we’re being told, in fact sold, this so vehemently… Nor should anybody ever expect to be bludgeoned, reprogrammed, with virulent messaging (pun intended) seemingly engineered to discourage dissuasion, encourage assent.
The consent of our nation, it seems, has been granted. Or has it been taken away from us?
And was our blind consent informed?
Historically, we’re not there yet. We don’t yet know, and won’t know for some time.
Epistemologically— and anecdotally — in our Trumpian era of fake news and false hopes, doom porn and oversharing, I no longer know what, or who, to believe. This leaves only myself to trust… Or to blame, if I step outside and someone happens to die.
I choose responsibility, freedom to choose, over isolation without an end date.
I pray that the choice remains mine (ours) to make.
Jeff Glovsky is a reader, a writer, a photograph maker
and, like every one of us, collaterally damaged.
