(no subject)

[oakfarm]

So I can’t help but writing about the pandemic again, I have had stupid meltdowns over it. It’s a weird time, I’m somehow still a child of the 1990s and the optimism of that era (the wall has fallen, liberal democracy has won, soon everyone in the world will live in their own house with an own pool...). And in this pandemic the optimists are always wrong. Here I can also add that you think 11/9 should have “cured” one from 90s optimism. On the other hand, one could still rational optimism. If the pessimist would have had right, New York shouldn’t “just” have lost 3000 humans and it’s skyline, it should have been reduced to radioactive ruins, many, many times over. Plus, the sad truth is that historically speaking 3000 death is a small mass grave. Somme, Treblinka, Nagasaki ... even Srebrenica that happened just a few years before were bigger.

You see I could just rationalite optimism after 9/11, I can do the same thing now. But when negative, a few times even hyperbolical, headlines or posts on social media shows up, and I get the meltdowns. Not fair, not fair to anyone. My older BiL one time praised me for not being afraid of hard physical work. Yeah, but I have a hard time handle physical pain. And no, this shouldn’t be about me. I’m not the victim in the pandemic. I usually isn’t the victim in the bad things happening in society.

Comments

[wantedonvoyage]

Yeah, I think 9-11 was magnified by American exceptionalism. It was terrible, but it was more shocking because it happened to us. How many people in the Northern Hemisphere are still talking bout the Rwandan genocide of 500,000-1,000,000 people just seven years prior? Or the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 (200,000 killed)? The general optimism you talk about could be stoked by the assumption, based on experience, that "these kinds of things rarely if ever happen to us". COVID has been the great equalizer in that regard, though there is still a gross disparity in what kind of testing/treatment one can get, and thus one's chance of surviving.