Last night I had the ultimate nightmare. Pretty much all of my friends & family from all walks of life (past & present) and everyone I see socially were hanging out at my childhood home at some sort of party. NO ONE was wearing a mask. Not one person. Except me.
And for the first few minutes of the dream, this didn’t register. It was just ALL THE PEOPLE and I was walking around talking and hugging and laughing and joking AND THEN I SUDDENLY REMEMBERED PANDEMIC and freaked out because everyone was going to die and I had a mask on and it didn’t matter.
In case you’re wondering where my headspace is lately…
Things that used to be safe, such as visiting grandparents and attending a friend’s wedding, are now potentially deadly.
When everyone is left to write their own version of Choose Your Own Pandemic Adventure, no one is safe.
To belong to one tribe, people accept an outsize and sometimes irrational portion of responsibility for their own safety and that of others through self-abnegation and personal fastidiousness. To belong to the second tribe, people must refuse to care about others at all…Americans have no common conception of the pandemic, which means you can’t assume that someone you’ve trusted for years isn’t about to expose you to a deadly disease, or even that you live on the same plane of reality.
Leave a Reply