You see the phrase “As long as people wear masks and don’t lick one another” in an article in The Atlantic.
I was looking through some photos today and found some from November 2019 and it felt like looking back on a different world. Not just a different time, but a different place. I don’t know how much we will return to “normal” when the pandemic ends–especially as the world is also grappling with protests over racial and class equality, climate change and its accompanying litany of freak extreme weather (California on fire, multiple storms hitting the east coast simultaneously) and probably an alien invasion if things stay on track–but we will never be the same after this, I think. The memories will linger and carry into the next generation.
On the other hand, some argue, with some validity, that the average person has a memory comparable to the lifespan of a fruit fly, so maybe things will just go right back to how they were before and lessons will not be learned, or learned minimally as we slowly careen toward our next awaiting global disaster.
I want to say we won’t forget, in part because it’s going to linger around for probably at least another year or so in some form, that we are a good ways off from being able to put it behind us.
In the meantime, The Keg is running an ad that shows one of its restaurants bursting with activity, every table packed, people everywhere. I thought this was an odd thing to show with a virus rampaging across the world, but when I saw the ad again I noticed a small disclaimer at the bottom of the screen just as the ad started: Filmed before COVID-19. Now I’m really wondering why they ran the ad when they knew it was showing something that basically doesn’t match reality. Lazy, I guess. It’s an old ad and a new, more accurate one would just be depressing–a half-filled restaurant with all the staff wearing masks.
I won’t be eating in a restaurant until we have a vaccine, some kind of on-demand testing everywhere or benevolent aliens (maybe they won’t invade) make the virus magically disappear, like a certain sociopath south of the border mused it would. And though Tenet is now playing in theaters, there’s no way in hell I’m going to risk watching it in one. I can wait four months and watch it virus-free on a 60″ TV.
This concludes another kind of depressing post about the pandemic. Maybe in a year I’ll look back on this post and shudder over how bad things were then and how great they are now.
Maybe.
