Summer is almost here and, thankfully, nature carries on regardless. I can hear a bird singing and a motorcycle without mufflers barrel down the street. The day outside is perfect, but there is no real freedom within presence, and that is the grind.
The virus is still out there and the numbers in the states whose belief that they could open soon have been proving very wrong. Biology knows not of our hopes and desires. We here in the NYC area are getting better but people have started going out to bars without distancing. The west coast seems to be steeping up the number of their cases. There is even talk of a vaccine out by the end of the year.
In "The Plague", the main characters, all of them, are within the heat of the battle by the end of the book. Okay, fine, the character Cottard is not within the center of any helping with the plague, but he is within the bootlegging business and was very very busy making lots of money. But there was one character whose listlessness in the book has been haunting me.
Raymond Rambert was a journalist who got caught there as he was from a Paris newspaper doing a report on the health conditions of the Arab quarters. After the city is closed to plague, he spends most of his time trying to get out via official means, and later by illegal means. All his thoughts are, in the beginning, placed upon memories of his wife that fuel him to get out. But after a time, he forgets about her and is simply consumed by the fight, forgetting all about the reward.
But, when there is nothing to do between battles and hope, he wanders the abandoned train station and looks at the time tables as he sits on the empty seats. He stares at the posters about vacation places that he cannot go to. He sees the time tables that now mean nothing. He leaves and continues to wander the streets.
Maybe that is where we are all at now, or at least some of us. That fire that burned in us for a hope for a better time, a quick cure, and our old life maybe kinda sorta still lingering in the ether is now gone. We have wandered the streets of Netflix and the internet and are still lost. Even if we very partially open up the community, it will still be, at best, muted via the threat of infection. We will all be on an invisible leash.
In the book, the plague just keeps on getting worse and worse without abating. The bubonic plague (as in the book) has a 50 to 70% mortality rate if not treated and around 15% is treated. Those are astounding numbers. As of today we are at a little above 117,000 deaths with the believe that we will go over 200,000 by the end of August. But like in the book, we have become numb to the numbers. Also helping is the media not really focusing on the virus and dealing with other issues. This whole thing is, for many, behind us.
But it isn't and that is the problem. What will make people realize that this is here for at least another year in one way or the other? Hey, I want this thing gone as much, if not more, than the next person. This life is crushing. But there is this lack of desire to "know thy enemy". There is still no cure or vaccine. The battle is still on but no one is paying attention. We are treating this like an invasion happening in a far-off third world country, something we can just brush aside when either know it will no longer concern us or we simply get tired of it. And we are all very much tired of it, but that is when you have to double down and dig in harder, so you don't get punched in the face with your guard down.
We are in the middle of history, letting our guard down and, in the end, that will speak for itself.
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