Plague Journal (6)

I spoke yesterday about a sense that the tedium of these days is gradually increasing, but I also spoke of the fact that many people are out walking through the neighborhood, smiling and greeting one another from a safe distance. Maybe I was feeling a little dour because I was not able to get my own walk in, owing to the fact that I thought the cable people might be coming (my mistakes tend to fall under the category of "unreasonable optimism").

People ask me how I'm doing and I say, Fine, just fine, we have all we need. I ask them how they're doing and they say the same. Neither of us is lying, but if prodded we would have to admit that fine doesn't mean exactly what it used to. Fine changes as the surrounding conditions change. Fine is relative. Fine is accompanied by an implicit shrug that means you know, all things considered.

When I was a boy my betters taught me to be pessimistic about the future. It held nothing but environmental degradation, race riots, and nuclear winters. Or so we were told. Somehow my innate (but qualified) optimism survived all that. As a young man I would have said the glass is definitely half empty. Now I say, it's both half full and half empty, and so it shall ever be, this side of the Great Day.

Anyway, whether we're pessimists or optimists will determine what kind of pictures of the future our brains project in the darkened cinema of our minds. None of these pictures are really reliable, though some occasionally do turn out to come true. We all give ourselves too much credit as prophets. 

So if you're a pessimist the images will have to do either with the devastations of the plague, or the devastations of economic collapse engendered by our strategies for combatting the plague. Is this a classic rock-and-hard-place scenario? 

But if your an optimist you'll wonder if people won't be a little more caring after this is all over. We'll see through the BS better and won't spread rumors. We'll help our neighbors and appreciate our first responders and pay our teachers more generously, etc. We'll always have enough respirators on hand and we'll take time to hug people and tell them we love them and material things won't matter so much.

Maybe for a while, and for a few, yes. As I've mentioned before I have a bad case of normalcy bias, which means I don't expect things to be as bad as we fear, but also that things will continue to be as bad as they have always been. And as wonderful. Perhaps it's up to us to find our way to the wonderful, moment by moment, sometimes beating against the current, sometimes forgetting that anything was ever wonderful, and then remembering again. 

Until the Great Day.