Lessons From a Pandemic
What lessons have we learned from the pandemic? It seems near enough to the end to form some take-aways from the last year or so of absolute shit. Or with the COVID variants, we’re stuck in a never-ending loop, and we’ll never escape, and all is lost — but probably not.
People are really good at taking things seriously for a month or so and then they stop caring. Social distancing, quarantining, self-isolation, these things were fresh and exciting at first, but around the week eight or so, most everyone was over it. And then the question became how to look like we’re trying while keeping things as normal as we possibly could.
When the first person you knew got COVID, you checked in on them daily, offered to get them groceries, brought them medicine with get-well cards, but now, half your social circle has had it, and unless they’re elderly or at-risk, you barely care.
We can develop a vaccine pretty fast — but it’s still not Amazon Prime fast. You thought the pandemic would have been wrapped up by last June, but it wasn’t, and this was disappointing. You definitely looked up a make-everything-go-back-to-the-way-it-was-right-now kit and couldn’t find it on the Internet, and you’re like, What the hell Amazon?
Conservatives will be the first to, you know, die in any health-related crisis. If the pandemic was more contagious or more deadly, you can be guaranteed that the South would not exist at this point. This means a post-apocalyptic world looks to be filled with paranoid liberals, which may or may not be better than being dead.
Netflix can fill so many holes in your soul. When the whole world was falling to pieces around you, you were held together by one thing. It wasn’t your friends or your family or God. It was TV shows and movies and a couch that formed perfectly to your body and said, “You don’t have to get up. What is there to get up for? Just stay here with me forever.” And this couch spoke the truth, and you believed the truth.
Maybe the reason you love your family so much is that you don’t have to spend every single moment with them. Working from home has many benefits — no commute, no coworkers, no dress code. But when everyone is working from home, going to school from home, sleeping at home, eating at home, and is told by the government to stay home, home can be hell. And you’ve learned that as much as you hate going to work, it might be better than staying with your family. Or maybe you haven’t learned that lesson but your partner definitely has.
Our government can make up trillions of dollars, and nothing bad happens. According to traditional economic theory, terrible things happen when the government injects a large amount of money into the economy because they’ve run out of ideas. Apparently, this wasn’t the case with the pandemic, seeing as the US economy is if not chugging along, then not burning in a ditch. And with all of the traditional excuses of fiscal responsibility and inflation and the implosion of the economy out of the way, you’re just getting greedy, like, They’re only sending us fourteen hundred dollars this time? Cheapskates.
Your ideas are either getting more authoritarian or more libertarian. If you’re a liberal, you’ve probably thought sometime in the past year that maybe, some people shouldn’t be allowed to exercise their freedom and that maybe, these people should be locked up because they’re a hazard to society and that maybe, we shouldn’t ever let them out.
If you’re a conservative, you’ve probably thought that government is getting way too handsy and as the days pass, you’re getting more and more uncomfortable, like you’re next to a gay couple on a bus. And at some point, you might just jump up, grab your trusty gun, and storm the White House.
If another pandemic came along, we’d like to think we’d do much better… but we probably wouldn’t. The struggle is not knowing what to do, but doing what we know to do and having the will to enforce what we know to do. And when doing what we know to do is impossible because no one agrees on what to do nor wants to do it, well, you can expect nothing to be different.
