It will only be temporarily, out of an abundance caution, and definitely not a major grinding to a standstill. It won’t be for two years.
It was certainly not for the hundreds of thousands of Americans that were there in mid-March 2020. They watched it unfold, worried about it (or didn’t), and now are gone.
The man who was the president of the United States said, “Just a brief moment of time.” It took just a few weeks. Only a few months. Only a few months.
March 12, 2020, nobody really knew what it would turn out to be. They couldn’t have known.
Flattening the curve — such an innovative term back then, such a frozen moment in a phrase now — seemed possible two years ago this weekend when Major League Baseball’s Spring Training games came to an abrupt end. Universities told students to stay away. Then Congress began talking about whether it could work remotely.
Two years ago, the nation’s top infectious diseases researcher stated to Congress that large crowds should be avoided. was referring to two years of debates over that exact statement. He was Anthony Fauci. He would be one of Pandemic America’s most polarizing figures. His position was caught between scientific evidence and accusations of alarmism, incompetence, and malice, sometimes even from the former president.
For a time, however, there wasn’t a lot of people. Except for the times when they were.
In those early days, Americans were almost shut down in many parts of the country for weeks. Faces vanished when masks were used to fight the invisible enemy — if they could be obtained. Some distilleries switched from whiskey to alcohol antiseptics after hand sanitizer was applied so liberally. People talked ventilator shortages during family meals. Zoom was a household name.suddenly, your coworkers were displayed on a screen right in front of you, like personalized, workaday opening credits for “Brady Bunch”.
These were all new things once.
As the scope of the world became more apparent, there were questions that we knew how to ask and questions that we didn’t.
We knew the right questions to ask: How did it spread? And how easy was it to do so? We can keep it out. Can we keep it out? Do I need to wash my clothes? Is there a vaccine?
We didn’t. How do we combat the extreme mountain of misinformation around the virus? How can you manage the anger and national division that flowed from the political arena into protracted virus discussions and burned in conversational garbage fires throughout the country? How do you navigate the emotional turmoil of an whole generation of kids whose lives, and educations, would be upended.
These are the questions that, at this moment, seem to be relevant. These questions seem immediate and fresh, and they remain unanswered today, a time when it can sometimes be difficult to recall the beginning of this whole thing due to all that has happened since then and all that is still happening.
The American memory is a bizarre beast. Although the nation is older than most other societies on the planet, it loves to tell its storyline of action , but has struggled for years with acknowledging or even recognizing its past — be it racial, military, or economic. Pandemic history is not uncommon, even in the two-years since March 2020.
Do you recall those times when people talked about working together? In when the word “COVID was still a little bit new and everyone was talking about the coronavirus.
“If we ignore each other and listen the scientists, maybe it will be better,” Koloud Tarapolsi, Redmond, Washington told The Associated Press March 11, 2020. She said about those early days “I wish we would have taken that more seriously.”
Now: More than 6,000,000 people have lost their lives around the globe. Nearly a million people died in the United States. The polarization that had been tearing at American society’s fabric was now redirected into pandemic anger. This set masked neighbors against unmasked ones, creating a fertile soil for mistrust and misconception.
History is a complicated thing. We often talk about “now” like it was the culmination all that has gone before, the ultimate destination of everything. We often forget to realize that “now” is simply another stop on the track, another place to go before we reach the next thing.
Yes, it applies to the “now” March 2020. It also applies to March 2022. It is helpful to look back at the 2020 year. You try to learn from the past, but it also gives you the opportunity to consider the future. How will we view the present two years later? What will it take to measure what we have done two years later? Is this the end of this? What happens when it’s done?
“Who are you after?” “Who are we going to help with this new situation?” Hilary Fussell Sisco, an professor at Quinnipiac University, who studies how people communicate during troubled times, stated exactly two years ago Saturday. When a crisis strikes, you find out who your true self is.
