We are all just human beings, and we are all predictably stupid. It is easy to judge strange behaviors in times of Coronavirus, but we should not be surprised. This is how human beings have always behaved in the face of an “invisible enemy,” as President Trump so descriptively calls it. We cannot see it. We don’t even know whether we have it. We don’t know whether we are in danger, because all we have is statistical knowledge, and symptoms of the disease show themselves very late, but you are infectious much earlier.
At which point should we realize that life, as it was, is over for the time being? And if it is not over for the time being, it could be over, over over, permanently over for far too many people to have this be a trivial matter.
People congregate even though they should not. People visit aging relatives in virus-infested areas even though they should not. Everything we should be doing goes against everything we have been doing, all our instincts are being violated, all our routines, our most human self denied. To be human is to be gregarious, tactile, close, and social – at least for most. But even the most antisocial would appreciate closeness with other antisocial people. Like likes like.
It is spring, and it is beautiful outside, and yet, we are supposed to distance ourselves. Shopping becomes an epic quest just as much as an ordeal. This sucks. It is not fun. Blessed those in large enough houses even with some greenspace living with people that they actually want to be with. That’s not a given. If you chose to be with the wrong partner, now you’ll know.
We could solve this probably easily. But we all need to be in it together. But we are stupid. Individually, we are stupid if we insist on carrying on as before, or if we were unprepared, or living with the wrong crowd. Systemically, we are stupid if we have not understood that people need to have a decent space to live and work, that you have to have protections, and that your economy needs certain buffers and protections to be able to survive a prolonged ordeal. We should also know how to make critical stuff at home, and that we need to stockpile stuff. Hospitals must never again be underfunded, doctors and staff never again underprepared and underprotected. This is bare life, at the barest.
In the future, we will all have learned from our mistakes, and none of this will ever happen. Entire articles and eventually books will be written about the transformative effect of Coronavirus, and how it changed the world forever, and how it brought home the message that we should take care of nature if we want it to take care of us.
Bullwinkle. We are too stupid to do this.
We will go back doing what we always have done. All those people that apparently had to be told to wash their hands will probably go back to not doing it, even though there are other nasties out there. We will again defund our healthcare system, and most of all, destroy our environment even more (especially those darn animals carrying all those viruses), and yearn for a robotic workforce that can never be sick. They will be necessary, because all this working from home may give some people the idea that we should just pay people for being themselves, and have those robots do all the work.
We will be just stupid enough to do this. Come on, man! Stupidity, after all, is our only true renewable resource. Look at the beaches, the parks, the private parties, some churches, even some countries, and you will see that we may be from the “homo” genus, but the “sapiens” in our name is dripping with irony, so much so that it is almost sarcasm. The “wise” human, sure, very funny.
Ain’t gallows humor grand?
Erratic Attempts 