Perspectives on the Pandemic

As we all hunkered down in our homes, watching TV, trading emails, playing games on the internet, and putting together jigsaw puzzles, I realized that some people, like us, can be slugs, while others are so industrious and enterprising.

I read an article about Julian Assange, the wikileaks perp, who had been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years. He and his lawyer found true love, the outcome of which was two children. Now that is enterprising. It made me wonder about the bumper crop of babies who will be born during the next nine months or so. What is more fun than making babies and, on the bright side, all those ventilators can be retooled as incubators or cribs or perambulators. 

We watched a number of videos showing very enterprising people wrapping mens’ underwear on their heads and magically transforming the article into a face mask. One friend transformed her bra into a mask for grocery shopping, while another wore a mask but not a bra; the produce manager smiled gratefully while he organized his melons. 

Every day we have watched President Trump talk about the pandemic and its current status here and around the world. Interestingly, North Korea has had no known cases, presumably because those offenders were shot dead (you know, it’s how North Korea takes care of things), so there were no disease numbers to report.   

We all worried about our families, those with us and those not with us. Alarms rang when we learned that Pennsylvania’s governor determined that liquor was a non-essential item and closed liquor stores. We wondered how long it would take before housebound women shot their husbands dead. What is life without the five o’clock glass of wine. Some drank wine right out of the bottle but learned that drinking prosecco out of the bottle had consequences. 

Home schooling children raised parents’ awareness that perhaps the kid’s  problem was not a bad teacher after all. Some parents graduated their children early while in other households children phoned in bomb threats. Ah yes, how sharp the serpent’s tooth, etc. 

It appears that we are never to learn about the genesis of hoarding toilet paper, or eggs. Even chicken farmers bought their eggs at the grocery store. Perhaps free range chickens decided that their eggs were not free. No one knew why eggs or toilet paper became such rare commodities. 

And if you remember telephone party lines, you may recall the luxury of listening to local gossip. It was so much easier to just pick up the phone and listen in rather than reading facebook tirades; no worries about attending Zoom meetings and looking good. This pandemic has changed us all. 

But, at the end of the day, this generation’s pandemic still has not suffered the consequences of life that previous generations have had to endure. Cases in point: 

Remember the Blitz, the heavy bombing attacks on London from September 1940 until May 1941. German bombers attacked British cities, ports and industrial areas every single day and night for 11 weeks. If a Londoner woke up in the morning, and that too was an if, the next door neighbor, or the neighbor’s home, might no longer exist. Now that was harsh. Today we are bombed only by mosquitos. 

Then there was the Spanish flu. While that global pandemic lasted for two years, a significant number of deaths were packed into three especially cruel months in the fall of 1918. An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during that pandemic; ten times as many as in the world war. The fatal severity of the Spanish flu's “second wave” was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy. War is hell. 

And the polio pandemic that caused paralysis. Outbreaks occurred regularly in the United States throughout the 1950s. Of the 57,628 reported cases in 1952 alone, there were 3,145 deaths. People who survived would live the rest of their lives in an iron lung.  

Don’t get me started on the Holocaust. Six million people. Wearing a mask is not the same as wearing a yellow star. So, contemplate, and compare this pandemic to other past ‘pandemics’. Our homes are standing, there is food in the grocery stores, our families are near and we can walk the dog. So, chin up; keep calm and carry on.