Diary of the Plague
3/18 I wrote this big riff in a business book I ghosted about how people are evolved to react to immediate threats, like saber tooth tigers and cave bears. That's why we are slow to respond to abstract threats that are distant in time, like systemic bank failures, global warming, and deadly pandemics. And yet our economy has been turned inside out and very likely destroyed on the basis of scenarios--best- and worst-case projections about what could happen if the chains of contagion aren't interrupted, extrapolated from incomplete and incompatible data (a cruise ship; a nursing home; an Asian or European nation).90 people die in traffic accidents in the US every day; only 100 Americans (that we know of) had died from the virus a couple of days ago. But in two weeks, it could be thousands, in six months to a year, a million or even millions. All of our belated social distancing responses, with all of the trillions of dollars in lost wealth that they entail, are in anticipation of something that hasn’t happened and in hope of preventing it. Shades of Schroedinger’s Cat. Maybe in two weeks we’ll open up the black box of that possible future and the cat will jump out, alive and well. More likely, we'll be looking at horrible numbers that could have been even worse.3/19 If all these other things hadn't happened, I would have remembered the last six months as a horrific season in my life, marked as they've been by sickness and death, my own (the sickness) and others'. I had cancer surgery in the fall; I have an endocrine problem now that requires surgery that I assume will be cancelled. A month ago, one of my oldest and dearest friends commit suicide.The hardest part of grieving for me has always been that daily moment, usually as I'm getting out of bed, when I remember that my world is no longer what it was. I had that a lot in the days and weeks after the Trump election too--that stark realization that this is irrevocable; that the worst is yet to come. I'm not saying that the world won't go back to normal someday, whatever that means. It did after Srebenica, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima; it did after each visitation of the Black Plague. A volcano killed 30,000 people in Martinique in 1902; people still live and work there and it's a popular vacation destination. Just for fun, I asked Google if Martinique is safe and it assured me that it is, though muggings are a mild concern.Life will go on here too. Biden may take office next January and erase every trace of Trump from the body politic, or the country might decide to reward Trump's exceptional leadership in this time of crisis with rule-for-life. Both of them may be dead. Who knows? But if I live through this, I suspect I will be too old and too shell-shocked to ever trust the idea of normalcy again.
