It’s the End of the World as We Know It

(Photo by cottonbro from Pexels)

The Jewish Talmud says that every single blade of grass in the world has an angel above it, whispering, “Grow. Grow. Grow.”

An Islamic Hadith tells how the Prophet said, “Even on the Day of Judgment, if you’re carrying a seed, plant it.”

In Batman & Robin, George Clooney’s Batman somehow knew not to kiss Poison Ivy even though Uma Thurman was hella hot. It was a tough time for Gotham, but they did the right thing.

Just like we’re doing the right thing now. Washing our hands. Staying home. Treating everyone outside like lepers.

But it’s not all bad.

Every day feels like Sunday. It’s kinda nice. You never rush to get out the door. There’s no traffic. It’s quiet, and there’s more empty space on your schedule than stuff that needs doing. You don’t even have to change out of sweatpants. The couch will catch you, and there you can sit. All day.

All day until tomorrow.

Every day feels like Sunday, and you can’t escape. You remember how rushing out the door was done with purpose. There’s no traffic. It’s quiet because everyone is sheltering. There’s a lot of empty space and time on your calendar to feed your anxieties and resurrect monsters. You don’t even have to change out of sweatpants. But you should. But you won’t. The couch will trap you. And you can sit on those existential thorns all day. Every day.

Yeah, it’s not all bad. But it can get pretty bad. Who you were two weeks ago wouldn’t recognize the world you’re living in now.

Back then, I had a buffet line of choices as to where I’d spend my afternoons. Now I’m so excited to go to Wal-Mart, I’m starting to believe the Confederate flag is about heritage. I see people wearing masks, and I want to pull them off, and say, “Cut it out! You’re being crazy. It’s gonna be okay!”

But it’s not. In my head, I’m mixing a cocktail of denial and desperation, calling it optimism, and saying there’s no chance a casual hand touch is a fatal move. It could be.

People are afraid. They don masks and only venture out for food. It’s like there’s an apex predator outside our caves, and we only risk it when we have to. Our needs no longer include social gatherings, commerce, education, or even being outdoors for some of us. We can’t risk it. A microscopically invisible pathogen could enter our body as effortlessly as an intake of breath. It would then multiply, begin warring with our physiology, tax our ability to function and even breathe.

No wonder one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse will be pestilence. Infectious diseases turn everything that makes us human against us. They exploit our need to connect and touch to spread their contamination. They can cross oceans with impunity yet promise to injure anyone we would hold or hug first, while still having the range and chaos to reach anyone who turned the same corner we did days ago. They can build inside us without our knowing, slowly, so that we share the sickness with as many as we can. And they often kill the most vulnerable, the elderly, immunocompromised, and sometimes even an otherwise healthy person.

That’s scary. Scary enough to put whole nations on house arrest without end. When we carefully and selectively venture out, we drive past locked doors and lights out to get to grocery stores with bare shelves missing what we assumed would always be there. We stock up on what we can and go home. Complain and wait for our gripes to give way to calamity.

And the calamity is coming. Thousands will die.

Thousands will die, and we’ll consider it a victory that the numbers weren’t higher.

Let’s say what we need to hear. The well-meaning and repeated platitudes. The mundane mantras: We will get through this. This too shall pass.

I hear it over and over, and the cynic that fortifies in my body gags, but it’s not a lie.

This too shall pass.

Today, I sat on my balcony, on the greyest and coldest of late March days. I thought about how even with these unprecedented life and death stakes, our leaders quibble in pettiness and don’t play by the rules they ask us to abide by. I remembered a publication I saw replacing the word recession with depression. I thought about the multiple doctors I have in my extended family, some of them still working in their 60s.

And I stay at home with my newly out-of-work wife and oblivious four-year-old. We laugh at all the corona memes and find something to stream. We say that by doing nothing we’re doing everything we can. And it is in every sense of the words, the greyest and coldest late March day.

So I close my eyes and indulge in a fantasy:

It’s 2021. I’m enjoying spring break at a crowded bar on the beach. A cocktail is being passed around to strangers. It’s loud. You have to get right up to someone’s face to talk to them as a band plays in the corner and three different sports are on in the background. Without asking, someone squeezes my shoulders and hurls a folksy aphorism right into every ear canal within range. I turn around. It’s President Joe Biden.

I thank him for a universal basic income that’s made this vacation possible. In fact, we just stepped off our cruise ship for a quick dinner. Everyone working onboard is overpaid. It was scintillatingly clean and bereft of pathogens. My wife doesn’t make fun of me for writing that last sentence.

That’s not going to happen. None of it will.

No, the victories I’ll have this year are on par with me telling my bathtub I’ve figured out what a scam daily showers are.

But that’s not all of it. No matter what happens, there will be more.

Through the unknown and uncertain. After the lost jobs and lost lives. After we’re boxed in and broken, and we give up hope. We’ll look at the horizon of Armageddon and drop our seeds.

The angels above every single one of us, whether we believe in them or not, will whisper, “Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.”