Time Capsule
Children ask the most fascinating questions. Our daughter is now entering high school, so her questions are more complex than they used to be. She asked a doozy the other day. She asked what we would tell our children and grandchildren about the pandemic. Every once in awhile I allow myself to go down that rabbit hole and this was one of those times.
It hit me like a ton of bricks when I was perusing my Facebook feed the other day. You get the unholy mixture of childhood friends reminiscing about childhood memories with a sudden heavy dose of Anthony Fauci. I’m not exactly sure why Fauci was on so many people’s minds, but the Facebook wall is a veritable Rorschach test of people’s thoughts and feelings.
In the span of just a few minutes of scrolling I found numerous posts that chastised people for doubting Fauci while others were poking fun at him. Strictly speaking, the future is yet unwritten and while we seem to be closer to the end than to the beginning of the pandemic we don’t know for sure how this will end. More than anything else, we don’t know if there will ever be a return to “normal”. They did following the 1918 flu epidemic (it is in fact 1918 despite what our former president said). It just took awhile.
We will be traveling and others will as well, but things are not back to normal. That might never return to normal. We might be looking at the new normal. Obviously, that will be a large part of the story we tell. It could be something as innocuous as telling them what we did during the two or three years of the pandemic or as earth shattering as telling them how we did things before all of the changes.
However, I think Fauci is the key to it all. How people view someone that has spent over 50 years studying infectious diseases is fascinating. We have a very clear divide in the population. Some exist in the current century as they trust subject experts to bring the most up to date information. Some exist in the dark ages where scientific information is met with distrust and disbelief. That information becomes replaced by rumor, innuendo, and “alternative facts”. The vast difference is that the internet seems to be the vector for both.
Specialization is almost as old as time itself. One could argue that job specialization could be the most significant advancement in society itself. Others will argue the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire. Some might argue for the domestication of animals or farming techniques. We each become subject experts in something and society gets by because we have everything covered. Apparently, that’s not good enough anymore.
At least, it’s not good enough for some people. It’s also not good enough for only some specialties. The ones that require more education and training are disdained. Instead some trust their gut. Some trust the random YouTube video from the neighborhood yahoo. They trust anyone but the people trained in this very thing. How our children explain that to their children and grandchildren will be fascinating from a historical perspective. In the here and now it’s just plain sad.
I remember what my grandmother told me about the 1918 pandemic.
1Whole families were wiped out.
She said between the war and the pandemic, it was a terrible time.
She was 15-21 years old during the war/ pandemic.
The way I see it the worst thing about Fauci is that he was forced to report to Trump & sycophants & minions. Nobody whose job and reputation is based on working with objective facts can survive that unscathed.
Remember when climate scientists in Florida were outright banned — under penalty of being fired — from even saying the words “Global Warming?” Or what happened to Rebekah Jones? Same thing.
Republicans in charge and that is what you get.
So when I hear complaints about what Fauci “got wrong” in the early days of the pandemic I am perfectly willing to give him a pass on that. Everyone should. Mistakes were made all right but it isn’t Fauci that made them.
2The 1918 pandemic killed 675,000 Americans and maybe 50 million people worldwide. I have never seen any of the statues or monuments that are supposed to be essential to remembering our history. Only Katherine Anne Porter’s novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” reminds us that it happened. People just wanted to forget.
3Reminds me of how conservatives hang onto a fantasized version of Reagan and cannot be convinced he was nothing like they think and that his administration was a pack of criminals.
4I can remember when polio was a big problem. People went about their lives, holding their breath that no one got it. I also remember being vaccinated at school. My parents didn’t tLk about it, yet I’m sure there was a sigh of relief!
5Beyond the death toll, it will be impossible to calculate the extent of the damage done by the previous administration. Just the economic impacts of many businesses dying and others forever shrinking will be massive. Then, there’s the impact on our daily lives that likely will never fully go away. Social distancing will likely always be a thing. Yearly shots will likely be a thing. Every industry and walk of life will likely be impacted in some form or fashion.
I suppose some of it is for the better. Some people get to work from home which likely saves money for those families and subtly impacts the infrastructure and traffic patterns in a positive way. I remember my parents talking about how much money they saved by not working. There are lots of hidden costs included with traveling to work and incidentals like lunch and other assorted costs.
Every generation gets a paradigm shift of some kind and this one might be ours. Those of us still young enough to have grandchildren in the future get the joy of explaining what life was like before the shift and what might have been if idiots hadn’t been at the wheel. Who knows, maybe we would have gotten here eventually in due course.
6What’s going on with the far right media, repugnantican politicians and the trumpf family frantically attacking Fauci is just more of the same- deflection to shift the blame away from the last administration’s handling of the pandemic. And now it’s taking on a life of it’s own. It’s another big lie that they’ll use in future elections.
7Like our before “normal” was nothing to write home about.
8Sorry… was “anything to write home about.”
9As I said above- the latest big lie:
Lindsey Graham turns COVID press conference into screed against Trump’s ‘deep state’ opponents – Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/lindsey-graham-lab-leak-theory/
10Nick, I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said here, but I’ve been thinking along remotely, vaguely similar lines lately and this seems like as good a chance as any to throw it out there.
I’ve talked ad nauseam about repugnantcan propaganda infrastructure.
I’ve talked a lot in the past about comparing trump to a 17 year old bully
I’ve talked a lot about people getting their news/reality from Facebook instead of actual journalism.
Remember cliques in school?
The way I remember them is groups of kids banding together for community, acceptance, and more importantly status.
The bigger the group, the more status
And with status comes the feeling of empowerment.
The empowerment of belonging to the group that decides everyone’s status.
Funny thing, those decisions weren’t usually made based on anything other than petty bullshit, childish disdain, and just sheer meanness.
11But it was fun for them.
Being in the group that dishes it out was SOO much better than being the kids being shit on.
The main thing though is what was accepted truth.
Kids in the cliques would act like they believed outlandish crap about someone they knew wasn’t true.
Because someone in the clique said it, somebody else agreed, and voila! Accepted truth.
But it was all harmless because it’s just kids being kids, right?
And after kids get out of school, go there separate ways, it’s all forgotten, everybody realizes that their high school cliques were tiny microcosms in a huge world.
And realize that without the influence of the cliques to keep reminding them of how disgusting their classmates were, turns out they’re not so different after all.
Who’da thunk it?
First, that isn’t how the shit on kids remember it.
But to the point, our situation now with social media has made the cliques nationwide.
And they never go away.
They metastasize.
People don’t grow out of them like they used to with high school cliques.
The imaginary empowerment grows stronger with the size of the…
group. cult?
IMHO this phenomenon is one of the repugnantcans’ most effective weapons.
“I saw on Facebook.
Must be true.
Sounds about right.
F**kin librls.”
The “time capsule” has a quick half-life, diminishing in importance as years go by. The stories from those directly involved may be vivid — but even they peter out after 50 or 60 years.
The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic had a massive impact, killing over 600,000 of the 100 million or so in the United States (proportionately, over three times the impact of our current event) and 5 times the number of US soldiers killed in WWI. It wasn’t in my school books and I have no recollection of reading about it until I was in graduate school. I’d heard family tales, but had never linked the deaths of my grandfather’s first wife and two children and why my grandmother married him in 1920 to the pandemic.
12Grandma Ada–I remember polio very well; my mother had it when she was very young (under 5 years old) and had to wear special shoes she kept taking off to play when she was outdoors. As an adult, she nursed polio patients in iron lungs in an epidemic in Chicago during WWII. She had post-polio syndrome in her later years, and her spine was twisted some. One of my friends in elementary school had had polio and was in braces, using crutches–the only returnee we had from the “polio rehab centers.” A second grade teacher in my elementary school came down with it (permanent disability, early death, in her case; her father taught me physics later.) Several friends caught polio at a birthday swim party–one brother died, one lived with some disability. The town’s public pool was closed bc of polio that summer, but private pools weren’t. I was at the same birthday party; I can still hear the terror in my mother’s voice when she turned from the phone giving her the news and said “Touch your chin to your chest! Now!” I remember block quarantines, when no child was supposed to leave their own block. No movies except drive-ins, and playgrounds at the drive-ins closed.
Then came the Salk vaccine. Lined up in the halls of an elementary school getting the shots. And as it proved effective, the immense relief of parents and kids old enough to understand. Movie theaters and swimming pools and parks opened. Fear level dropped like a rock. We still had sporadic diphtheria outbreaks in the Valley, but the public health nurses were out in force, vaccinating.
13This is my first time pay a quick visit at here and i am really pleassant to read all at one
14place.