What to expect when you're coping with the unexpected
Congratulations, everybody. We’ve gotten to a point where we can maybe see the first tickle of the end of the crisis. Or maybe, to be more precise, the beginning of the transition to the next stage of the crisis, since I expect at least another year of getting ourselves vaccinated, oriented, and aimed in the general direction of whatever the new normal winds up being.
Possibly even two years, depending on how well we manage to get worldwide vaccine rollout going and how much push we can get behind that, overall. I’m concerned about the state of things in places like Brazil, where the government remains actively obstructionist to vaccination programs. There’s only so much organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières can do in the face of direct opposition. (I’ve been giving them regular donations for a couple of decades now; it’s not a bad idea if you have a few bucks to spare.)
And for those of us who are coming out of the trauma and crisis of the last eighteen months? A lot of that trauma and crisis is, alas, going to start sinking in. A friend sent me a link to this twitter thread of illustration students doing mockup New Yorker covers for the current moment. It made me cry.
We’ve all been subjected to a massive stressor that is arbitrary and out of our control. We have all been forced to come face to face with our own fault lines, the fault lines in our relationships, and the fault lines in our societies.
We all have so much grief to process. So much harm has been done to everyone, and it’s going to take a long time to figure out how to manage that in active rather than reactive fashions. It’s likely that we, as a species, will be managing this disease forever, now—just as we manage the flu, or cholera, or other plagues.
The good news on that front is exactly how game-changing mRNA vaccine technology is likely to be. Not just for coronaviruses but for influenza, malaria—possibly even diseases like Lyme and babesiosis. If a vaccine for a parasitic disease like malaria is possible now, does that mean we can someday vaccinate for river blindness, for example?
How much quality of life would that preseve?
I don’t know how any of this is going to work out, obviously. I’m not paid to dish out unfounded hot takes, so I’m just going to say this: a paradigm shift is happening, and most of humanity is in a vulnerable and fragile state, which will increase the effects. I don’t know how it’s going to shake out, but comparisons to the 1920s and the 1950s are probably not off-base at all.
Stay safe out there and be gentle to yourselves and your loved ones. We aren’t yet home.
Best,
Bear