― C.S. Lewis
- Henry David Thoreau
I spoke briefly with a woman who came into my place of employment yesterday; she assured me in a voice muffled by her mask that she had just taken a quick COVID test before coming in, and it was negative. I hadn't asked and didn't particularly care, so just nodded politely through my government mandated mask. She then proceeded to ask what I thought about the last COVID update by the premier; impersonal chitchat with strangers used to be about the weather. Now it's only ever about COVID-19. The particular update to which she was referring was an announcement that children would be returning to in-school learning after their extended Christmas vacation. I said cynically that the premier was probably just telling parents what they wanted to hear, and would probably reverse this decision by next week. She evidently mistook my cynicism for approval and said that was exactly right: would no one think of the poor teachers? She continued indignantly, asking did I know that they were discontinuing contact tracing, too? I didn't- I hadn't listened to this update, or any of the preceding ones- but pointed out mildly that, considering the large case count, contract tracing would be impossible without shutting down the entire economy. She appeared to think this would be a feature, not a bug. And, she continued, how could teachers be expected to be in class with those disgusting kids when some of them haven't even been able to get their boosters yet? Why, her daughter is a primary school teacher and did I know that the children didn't wear their masks right, always fiddling with them, pulling them down, and even chewing on them? I focussed on my computer screen, breathed as deeply as my mask allowed, and reminded myself that there was no doubt some sort of company policy against throwing a stapler at a potential customer. I managed to refrain from fiddling with my own mask and restricted myself to merely commenting that it was a bit much to expect five year olds to sit masked all day, and that my sympathy was entirely with the children. She huffed and muttered something about sacrifices having to be made, then proceeded to tell me about her own personal sacrifices. Why, her grandchildren had come down from Ontario for a Christmas visit this week but- she said exasperatedly- they're at an age (in college) where they think nothing of going around visiting all kinds of friends. So, she said, she and her husband refused to see them, despite both of them being triple-jabbed (and their grandchildren also being vaccinated, or they wouldn't have been allowed to travel under our current regime). She bemoaned the thoughtless selfishness of the kids especially since, she explained, she and her husband hadn't seen them last year either; they disinvited their daughter's family from Christmas dinner because their son-in-law had just had a COVID test the day before and hadn't got the results back yet. You can't, she concluded righteously, be too careful. By this time I was staring at her in slack-jawed horror. I mean, you know these people exist, but you don't expect them to admit to being ghastly human beings right to your face- and worse, be proud of it.
We ended up with an extra person at our Christmas dinner this year (we were already breaking restrictions so what the heck) because my sister invited a young college aged guy from her church. His family is in Montreal and he's down here going to school. Another family from the church had invited him to dinner, but called and disinvited him when the new restrictions were brought in, despite being well under the required limit. They didn't want to take any chances, they explained apologetically. I won't write too much about that now- my opinion of the response of most churches to this crisis would fill several posts- except to say that, in my opinion, leaving a lonely 19 year old boy to sit alone in a small dingy apartment on Christmas Day because you were too cowardly to take the tiniest risk is a far greater wrong than breaking some arbitrary nonsensical rule. And don't even get me started on people who would turn their family from their doors. I honestly can't fathom the mindset of people who behave like this and don't know how we'll ever go back to pretending that we have anything in common with them. In the back of our minds we'll always know that these people were willing, because they were afraid, to snatch basic rights from their fellow citizens, repudiate family, tell homeless people they could no longer eat inside soup kitchens, inform on their neighbours... how do we ever step back from that terrible knowledge?
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds. — C.S. Lewis “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays