Floodwaters always recede

For many years, decades even, movies about doomsday cold war apocalyptic scenarios in Hollywood were part of American culture.  Think about the movie The Day After or Patrick Swayze’s Red Dawn, & Mel Gibson’s Mad Max.  It was resource competition, and sci-fi theorizing on what came next.  In each movie there’s a protagonist (the good guys) and the antagonist (the baddies) clearly defined.

Today, deep in the throws of our corona virus reality, we find ourselves ill-equipped to combat the baddies because of our general lack of movies regarding viruses and contagions or public health officials wearing blue tights and a cape.  It’s not readily available in our imaginations to envision both, what day to day life looks like, or how this ends.  The closest thing matching the spread is likely some zombie flick but since Covid19 affects people in different ways it’s not a perfect match as there is no spectrum zombie disorder in any of the movies I’ve seen.  But perhaps the part that gets everyone the most at this point is the lack of patience in arriving at finality.  Two hours after we sat for the movie Outbreak they at least mixed antibodies and antiserum together to save the day and return us to our comfortable, familiar normal. 

So let me pose a hypothetical question to you:  Is the baddie Covid-19? 

If you answer yes then what happens when Covid-22 shows up? Or 37?  Is the baddie then isolation or perhaps loneliness? Is it the Chinese people or even our own government? Is it our inability to demonize an enemy we cannot see or label? Is it our lack of patience for a vaccine that is still over a year away? Is it the quiet time we now have to be introspective because we’ve been sidelined from our respective rat races? Or is it the things we’ve discovered about ourselves during those introspective times? 

I have some good news:  returning to normal, or what we perceive as normal, will come.  Nature always achieves balance and floodwaters always recede. 

Todd El-Taher