How to survive this plague – 1 Slow Down

Like wars, plagues can make us see where we are.

- By Andrew Sullivan

IT’S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT BY THE END OF ALL THIS, almost every American will know of someone who has died. A relative, a friend, an old high-school classmate … the names will pop up and migrate through Facebook as the weeks go by, and in a year’s time, Facebook will duly remind you of the grief or shock you experienced. The names of the sick will appear to be randomly selected—the ones you expected and the ones you really didn’t, the famous and the obscure, the vile and the virtuous. And you will feel the same pang of shock each time someone you know turns out to have fallen ill. ¶ You’ll wake up each morning and check to see if you have a persistent cough, or a headache, or a tightness in the lungs. This is plague living: witnessing the sickness and death of others; knowing that you too could be next, even as you feel fine. The distancing things we ref lexively do—“Oh, well, he was a smoker”; “She was diabetic, you know”; “They were in Italy in February”—become a little bit harder as time goes by, and the numbers mount, and the randomness of it all sinks in. No, this is not under control. And no, we are not in control. Because we never are.

And this will change us. It must. All plagues change society and culture, reversing some trends while accelerating others, shifting consciousness far and wide, with consequences we won’t discover for years or decades. The one thing we know about epidemics is that at some point, they will end. The one thing we don’t know is who we will be then.