Trillions of words are already expended on the immediate coronavirus but not so much beyond the immediate emergency motions. Here is a loose rendition thereof, a part I.
I’ll start where a lot of others will probably end; where are we headed? ‘Memento mori’; or ‘Remember that you must die’, attributed to Socrates. The matter of saving lives is almost always prioritized in public policy, at least if the matter is out in the light of day, but in a pandemic, we’re not ready to deal with our limitations. Some lip service is paid to going through the motions of assessing risks and benefits but in the glaring spotlight of the world’s attention, it’s instantly politicized. No one – our leaders – will blink, and the first to do so, looses.…. they are a ‘killer’. But at the root of this is our personal impulse to flee from death. The later twentieth and early twenty-first century placed the notion in our heads that mass indiscriminate deaths such as came from pandemics and natural disasters, were history in the past and foreseeable and escapable in the future, and of course avoidable in the West if not so much to the less fortunate over-seas. So, once a real pandemic comes along, our response is based on the impulse to cover up the fallacy that we are in control. We are not. While we certainly have to take cautions and evasive actions, what I see is a clear distortion of those perceived risks and benefits to the point that we’re starting to run in a panic to evade the inevitable; death comes to our sophisticated door. We will inflict ourselves with a great deal of damage in order to avoid confronting the memento that awaits all of us, the mori.