I was recently talking—well, texting, as that’s about the closest to talking one can get these days, and, let’s be honest, I’m not the most social person in town so probably wouldn’t actually face to face with someone unless I had to—with someone who described life like living in the Bermuda Triangle: Social distancing combined with home schooling combined with everything else that’s happening means that even here, where life is mostly kinda still normal with the mines and wind projects still merrily chugging away, life is still off-kilter enough to throw everything off. “Nobody is getting out of this with their sanity,” she says.
Rude, as my daughter would say, to assume that I had any heading into this.
I’ve joked that this is my moment: as an introvert, I’m being asked to avoid people and stay inside. Like, dude! That’s all I do.
Or rather, did. Somewhere along the line, though, I’ve discovered that I rather like hanging around with people. At least some of you. (It’s not you, it’s me, honestly. I just don’t like you. Nononono that was a joke. It’s that I can’t relate. You want to talk muscle cars or oil rigs or sports. I want to talk about the use of alliteration in the Lord of the Rings, or how Love Never Dies, the sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera completely breaks all the characters save for Christine.)
I miss getting out and taking photos. While it is quite easy to social distance with photography (my 70-200 doesn’t even focus at less than six feet), most people are just feeling … meh. Want to do something, don’t want to do that.
To be honest, I’m just about done with 2020. It has been one of the most soul scouring, depressing years I’ve ever lived through, and we’re only a third of the way through. I feel broken and wounded and I shudder to think what will happen next month.
But look at me, talking about myself again, and what I really wanted to do was talk about you.
How you doing? No, seriously. How are you doing? That’s an actual question for you, the one reading these words right now.
You can stop reading, if you like, and send me an email telling me about what you’re doing to survive this whole apocalypse thing. How are you spending your time? What are you doing to stay sane (please, let me know)? What struggles are you having? What triumphs? Are you walking around with tears hidden just behind the eyelids (like me), or are you just living your regular life? Are you going to emerge from this as hunk, chunk or drunk?
What sort of things do you think we should be doing, as people, as residents of Tumbler Ridge, are a society? I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories about how this is a plot by the Chinese government, or by the Americans against China that went horribly astray, or about how poorly this government or that is handling the crisis. (The editorial was going to be about that: this is not the best way to deal with the crisis, but it is a way, and it is the way we are dealing with it. No, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s the advice of the smartest epidemiologists and medical people in the world, because, unfortunately, life isn’t like the movies; you don’t solve something like this in the course of two hours.)
I want to hear about you, personally, what you’re doing and what you think others could adopt or adapt from your experiences to survive into the coming weeks and months.
Because much as we’d like to think the world is going to go back to normal soon as summer hits, there’s a good chance that’s not going to be the case.
So, what have you been doing that isn’t the cliched “getting drunk at 10 in the morning” or “baking sourdough” (I saw someone suggest this whole crisis was precipitated by a sentient sourdough; I mean, look at who is really benefiting from this…)
And yes, be forewarned that I ask because I might use some of your best suggestions to fuel a story for next week’s paper.
I seem to still have some space, so I wanted to discuss my word choices. Earlier on, I asked what you’re doing to survive this whole apocalypse thing. The word “apocalypse” was used deliberately.
You see, we have taken the word to mean “end of the world,” but originally, the word meant “revelation”. In the bible, the book of Revelations starts: Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, or, if your ancient Greek is rustier than mine: apokaluyiV ihsou cristou. Apocalypse (of) Jesus Christ. The revelation of Jesus Christ. This what Jesus Christ has revealed.
The rest of the book goes on to talk about the end of the world, and after 2000 years, the concept of an apocalypse has become linked with the concept of the end of days.
But that’s not what the word meant originally, and not what I mean. I’m going back to the original meaning. This is a time of revealing. A time where we can see the flaws in the structures we’ve built.
We have drained the social pool, as it were, and can now see the cracks at the bottom. We have seen hundreds of women killed by their husbands and partners during this crisis, as they have no way of escaping domestic violence. We have seen outbreaks amongst the poor because they have no place to live save for shelters, where they are stacked like cords of wood. We have seen spikes in opioid deaths, as people who have been pushed to the edges are pushed even farther. We have been reminded that nearly 15,000 children a day die of starvation. In the face of this, coronavirus seems…trivial.
These things and far more have been revealed to us. The question becomes: what do we do with what we have been shown? How do we react? Do we as a society say “this is not acceptable” and move to change it? Or do we hope that things get back to normal soon so we don’t have to face the problems that have been revealed?
Do we re-fill the pool and hope it doesn’t leak to badly, or do we take the time to patch the cracks, to rebuild our society better and stronger? Are we going to be better at the end of this, or worse? That’s not something we should or can leave to chance. It’s a conscious choice we make as people and as a society.
I’m hoping we choose…wisely.
