Coronupdate #2
Sometimes I just get struck by the surrealism. The strangeness of the entire world skidding to a halt; the strangeness of even being one world now, All-One like a Dr. Bronner’s soap label. All our astronomically advanced tech and this global economy you’d think would stop for no one and no thing, and then along comes a new little virus and collective humankind just goes oh noooooo, not those guys that’s our weakness!! And just like that you live in a completely different society, in a different era of history. It’s astonishing.
My best friend is a mental health care provider at a VA in Massachusetts, and in a letter to them all from the doctor in charge of Veterans Affairs, he discussed how part of their job is also to aid civilians in times of national crisis. Or as he put it, with this simple and homey word choice that got stuck in her head all day, “help support a worried American public.”
I love this, because that’s it, both aspects of it: we’re all worried, but it’s making us more familial, more one. You can see it just in what people are putting online during this time, things more quaint and unpolished and lo-fi and lovable. Capitalism is momentarily suspended, and so that ~content~ gloss is coming off, along with its attendant distance. Public figures and artists are just recording things in their living rooms, at their kitchen tables, not run through the usual fine comb to make it a Product, something marketable. Fumbles and interruptions are left in with a laugh, and with each of these we grow closer.
When I was in college they brought a speaker in to talk to us about the cult of effortless perfection, this social lie so many of us buy into where we pretend to one another that we Just Woke Up Like This. Covid-19 seems to be stripping away that facade, through the very same internet where it had been just flourishing prior. People everywhere are now revealing the true nature of humans, which is that we just ARE little lo-fi creatures. We’re all soft and dorky and worried right now, and the mods are asleep, so post Sam Neill washing all his shoes.