Flipped on the news and I swear to god someone named Dr. Bright said this might be “the darkest winter in modern history.” At this point the news is just bad writing. I clicked through images of drive-in discos in Germany and drive-thru strip clubs in Oregon. I scrolled through predictions that cities will become wastelands of vacant office buildings now that so many people are working from home.
Somebody scrawled the word “unconstitutional” on the signs in our neighborhood park that remind us to stay six feet apart. As if the Constitution grants us the right to infect one another. The Federal Reserve says the economy might be permanently damaged unless Congress acts, and the World Health Organization says the virus might never go away. The White House wants to close America’s borders indefinitely.
I’m writing these things down tonight because I want to look back in a few months and see if any of these dire predictions came true. Right now there’s such a dizzying array of weirdness, dread, and hope that I can’t remember anything. Will the tensions between the alarmists and the deniers fizzle away, or will they produce new factions and psychologies? And hopefully the winter won’t be so dark that I wouldn’t want to know if drive-thru strip clubs and dancing in cars were blips of novelty or the beginning of something new.
