Angry Writer Woman
I’m kind of pissed off right now.
You see, fiction writers have warned for years of global pandemic.
Robin Cook wrote Outbreak about Ebola in 1987, which has a similar name and content but very different story line from the 1995 movie of the same name.
Stephen King initially released The Stand in 1978. It’s about an earth ravaged by the release of a genetically modified strain of influenza and the ensuing chaos.
In 1995, 12 Monkeys was released; it detailed a convict going back in time to try to stop a deadly virus that appeared in 1996. It was based on an earlier short film from 1962 called La Jetee.
Robin Cook is both a doctor and an author. His creativity developed medicine as a subgenre within thrillers. Stephen King is just a writer. David Peoples, the screen writer for 12 Monkeys, is also just a writer and editor. Chris Marker is both writer and director for La Jetee.
And that’s why we don’t take them seriously… with the exception of Robin Cook, they’re all just writers. In this culture, we tend to think that writers are a dime a dozen. Anyone can do exactly what they do.
Writers are more, so much more. They have to understand the subjects they’re writing about well enough to retell it to a general public that refuses to do the work to learn to read anything above a fifth-grade level. They then have to know and understand human nature well enough to portray it accurately, but they also have to portray it in a well that sucks their readers in so well that the readers don’t want to let the story go.
Science, technology, psychology, politics, military science, grammar, communications… writers have to know it all. And that’s why I’m pissed.
Writers have raised the issue of global pandemic for decades. Our government and academic leaders have missed the mark. They have refused to plan properly with the times as the times change. They have been willingly deaf to the warnings of writers who are the prophets and oracles of our age.
Writers tell the dark stories about things that go bump in the night so the rest of us face fear square in the eyes and have courage to bear light and fight night when darkness falls.
Had they listened, we would have had pandemic preparedness plans, similar to the ones we have for earthquakes or severe weather. The stock market wouldn’t be so bipolar in response to the changing infection numbers and business attitude in facing the unknown. We all would have known what to do and when, without impulse hoarding of toilet paper and cleaning supplies. People in Virginia would have known bleach was still toxic, even in the face of corona. People in Iran would not be getting alcohol poisoning in another attempt to avoid corona.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
— Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”
