#VoxPopuli | Background Characters
By Samantha Nicole C. Sombrito
I don’t know what it is about history textbooks, but they never satisfied me. Something about them always felt dry and incomplete. Like something inside myself was screaming that this couldn’t be the entire story. That there must be something else that was just out of reach. Something that was never recorded. A voice that was never heard. One of my biggest wishes in life is to be able to talk to the people who actually lived and died through these events. One of the forgotten souls who history deemed a mere background character.
It occurred to me that, someday, there may be someone in the year 3000 who’s just like me. Someone who wishes they could have seen what these events were like, not from a birds-eye view, but from a first-person perspective. So as a gift to whoever may be out there, I want to give them what I never had.
I’m sure that your history books are jam packed with timelines on what happened in the pandemic, and who played key roles in it. But I’m not going to go over details like dates or political figures, since those are the elements you’ve probably already been told to memorize.
The pandemic at its earliest stages was peculiar, especially with the gift of hindsight. The panic didn’t start all at once, it slowly built up as people began to realize the weight of the situation at hand. The standard reaction went from “This’ll all be over by June” to “Are we all gonna die?” in just a couple months. I was never worried about getting sick, because my chances of death would be low even if I did. I do realize that this sounds incredibly selfish, but I couldn’t have possibly predicted the spiraling downhill turn of events.
As it became clear that this was going to last longer than we thought it would, the lines between each incident became blurry. No matter how hard I try, I can never pinpoint any of the specifics. When I inevitably ran out of hobbies to fill my time with, the only other significant thing going on in my life was my news feed. Even when I wasn’t checking social media, the topic would be persistent. You know the phrase “the elephant in the room?” Every conversation I had felt like a waiting game, waiting for someone to address the obvious elephant that was looming over all of us.
You can’t talk about the pandemic and then not talk about the misinformation that came with it. I’m not going to sit here and defend the people who are actively publishing fake news, but I also understand why they do it. When you have a mutated virus running rampant across the world, you’re going to want to find a reason as to why. Why did it come out of nowhere? Why has it advanced so fast? Why are so many people dying?
The scariest part of the pandemic isn’t the virus itself, it’s the idea that all the deaths were without purpose. There must be a reason for it, right? Because if there isn’t, that means that all of this was meaningless. If all those people died because they were just unlucky, then the rest of us could easily be obliterated at the roll of a dice.
Now, I’m aware this may sound like it goes against everything I’ve said so far, but if I were given the choice to take it all back, I wouldn’t. Whether there was a reason behind it or not, I think the world has changed so rapidly to the point that it would be a shame if all of it was undone. Even if it would prevent those millions of deaths, I would also be robbing a year’s-worth of community progress. I doubt that any formal history record will take note of any of this, but for what it’s worth, the pandemic isn’t a black-and-white freak event. You may think that these tiny experiences don’t hold a candle to the larger-than-life events that seem way more noteworthy. But sometimes the textbooks forget that there were people’s lives in the middle of all the chaos. So if anyone in the future is reading this, I’m glad I could take part in keeping a little bit of these memories alive. And thank you for reading through the thoughts of one of history’s many unremarkable background characters.
