Dystopia

"But I must go back again to the beginning of this surprising time. While the fears of the people were young, they were increased strangely by several odd accidents which, put altogether, it was really a wonder the whole body of the people did not rise as one man and abandon their dwellings. . . and that all that would be found in it would perish with it."

Have you read Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year? It was published in 1722--written about one of the years that the bubonic plague hit London--the Great Plague of London--in 1665. It's readable--I read it a couple of decades ago and enjoyed it--and oddly timely, don't you think? It's available online for free, through Project Gutenberg.

"It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy. . ."

The plague wiped out one-third of the population of Europe at the time. This wave of the new corona virus, Covid-19, is expected to kill 100,000 to 240,000 Americans. (Remember when trump said it would be gone, down to zero, by this time? Remember when he called it a Democratic hoax? Lol. Funny, right?) The bubonic plague came in three waves. Just as Covid-19 is expected to come. The first wave of the plague in London was not the deadliest one, the second wave was. The second wave made the first wave look like a walk in the park.

This, the first wave of Covid-19 is expected to peter out sometime in June or July. The second wave of Covid-19 will come in the fall. That's six months from now.

You've been warned.

"I had two important things before me: the one was the carrying on my business and shop, which was considerable, and in which was embarked all my effects in the world; and the other was the preservation of my life in so dismal a calamity as I saw apparently was coming upon the whole city, and which, however great it was, my fears perhaps, as well as other people's, represented to be much greater than it could be."

Dave and I went grocery shopping last night. It's the first time I've been grocery shopping since the shelter-in-place edict came down in our city a little over a week ago. We went out at night, just before 8:00 p.m., not to the co-op that we usually go to (that had closed earlier than we expected) but to the more mainstream grocery store in our neighborhood. Inside the grocery store, it was surreal, almost dystopian.

I wore a mask and gloves. Dave wore gloves. We were not the only shoppers in masks and gloves. One man had an N95 mask on. (We have a few at home, but I'm conserving them. For what, I have no idea. Maybe the second, deadlier wave of the virus.) One man in his 30s--long hair, skinny, tattooed, in cut-off shorts and a black t-shirt--had a lime green bandana tied around his face. He pointed out the salsa to us, having overheard a conversation between David and me. I had a surgical mask on. Dave had a sewn mask but it slipped off soon after we began shopping and he did not want to touch it with his gloved hands, so it stayed off.

The cashiers stood at the registers behind sheets of plexiglass.

Shoppers avoided contact with one another, as they should. There were handwritten signs at the register reminding people to stand back. (We're supposed to have six feet between us and the next person.)

We bought hard cider, coffee and creamer for me to take to the techs at the hospital, cheese, chips, chocolate, a few vegetables. My brother had asked if we could find him dishwashing soap--the stuff he uses to clean his CPAP was going for $47 a bottle online--and we were lucky enough to find it for the usual price of $3.49. We bought two.

There were empty shelves, too--no disinfectants, no toilet paper, no gallons of water.

Are we great again yet?

"But in the whole the face of things, I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and, as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger."

I was talking to my therapist yesterday. (We meet via FaceTime and I put a check in an envelope and mail it to her when we are done.) I was telling her about how growing up in chaos with an unpredictable, abusive alcoholic father has prepared me for this time, for the abusive, drug-addicted, mendacious president who will overseeing the largely avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Could there be a worse combination than a deadly virus and a sadistic leader? If there is, maybe it's a sensitive child in the hands of an unpredictable, abusive alcoholic father.

 Years of hypervigilance from PTSD have prepared me for this time when we are supposed to remember to wash our hands and sanitize our little worlds. Years of depression have trained me to isolate myself, to stay inside and away from the world. 

 "Were it possible to represent those times exactly to those that did not see them, and give the reader due ideas of the horror 'that everywhere presented itself, it must make just impressions upon their minds and fill them with surprise."

My therapist brought up how she has been carefully conserving food, now that she can't go out and shop. (She's in her 70s; her son orders groceries online and has them delivered to her). She talked about her parents, especially her father, who grew up during the Great Depression and was as careful as my grandmother who grew up in the same time.

I had to laugh-- not because I had absorbed similar lessons from my grandmother, who also grew up in a Depression era family, but because we had just had a grocery delivery from Whole Foods, $64 for a bag of canned goods and a $5 loaf of bread. My grandmother (who collected government commodities like cheese and powdered milk and cans of juice and who made meals out of onions, potatoes and 3 for $1 packs of hot dogs sliced up) would have been shocked at our extravagance. Canned beans of all things! You can buy a sack of beans for a few dollars and make your own. Five dollars for a single loaf of 100% organic whole wheat bread? You can buy white bread from the bakery outlet for seventy-nine cents a loaf--less when they're having a sale--or make your own tortillas or soda bread.

I miss my grandma. She didn't like me nearly as much as she liked my brothers, but every once in a while I miss her fiercely.

TBC