Apocalypses, Fast and Slow
A couple of months ago, my biggest concern about my health was my cholesterol levels. Now I am self-quarantined with my family to escape a deadly virus with no cure and no vaccine. My kids go around the house every day singing, to the tune of “Come On Eileen:”
Covid-19
Don’t know what it means
At this moment
I’m in quarantine…
A hundred years from now, it’s going to replace “Ring Around the Rosie.”
I always wanted to live in a science-fiction novel. I just thought it would be more fun.
***
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking (and reading, and writing) about the End of the World.
I read once that the Black Plague devastated Europe twice. First, when it hit the cities, and spread like wildlife, killing the people who lived clustered closely together. And then, when it spread to the countryside, where people thought they were safe, crops rotted in the fields because there was no one to harvest them. Some of the people who survived the plague starved to death. The first apocalypse was fast. The second one was slow.
So sometimes I wonder what kind of apocalypse we might be facing, and what that means for the survivors.
Zombies — Fast. Massive collapse, almost overnight, in every movie, with the survivors huddling in their homes and deserted malls.
Nuclear war — Fast, then slow. Most of the planet dies in the first exchange. Survivors comb the ruins and battle mutants and disease during the nuclear winter that follows. Plus, you know, Terminators or some other variety of killer robot.
Giant meteor — Slow, then fast. At first, it’s just a small glowing speck in the sky. Then people start to lose their minds as it gets bigger. See Ben H. Winters’ excellent The Last Policeman trilogy for how that plays out.
Alien invasion — Fast, unless they want to eat us. Then slow for the people kept in the human veal pens.
***
In case you were wondering, this is not the Black Plague.
We’ve been here before. This will come as a great shock to those people who cheerfully refuse to vaccinate their kids, but social distancing is what happens when you have a contagious disease and no immunity and no vaccine. My mother went through it in the 1950s, during the last polio epidemic in the United States (she was one of the only kids in town to get a polio vaccine, because my grandmother worked in the local doctor’s office). The entire world went through it in the 1918 Flu Pandemic.
It’s not Doomsday.
But this could be an apocalypse.
Apocalypse is from the Greek word for “revelation,” and sure, it sounds bad. It’s come to mean what was promised in the Book of Revelation: fire and brimstone from the sky, the seas turning to blood, the dead rising, and of course, plagues.
But it also means an unveiling of things not seen. An apocalypse can be the discovery of the truth.
Which, admittedly, can feel like the end of the world.
***
I say this knowing that people are scared, that the last thing many of them need is yet another hot take, yet another goddamn opinion about what it all means, yet another joke about zombie movies. I know there are going to be a lot of people in pain. There are going to be people who lose the loves of their lives, their parents, their grandparents, and their children.
I want to take a moment to confess: I know how lucky I am. My work doesn’t require me leaving the house. We have plenty of money and space and food here. Our biggest problems right now are getting the glitches out of the kids’ online learning classes and figuring out what to stream on Netflix.
I hope that luck holds. I wish no one had to feel any pain. And I am fully aware that words mean little when the shit well and truly hits the fan. When that happens, we hold onto each other and we find comfort where we can.
What we’re facing right now is the kind of dread that comes at three in the morning, when you can’t sleep and you realize that your life is not quite what you expected. I imagine a lot of people, stuck at home with more time on their hands than they’ve had in years, are having that quiet moment.
I think a lot of people are wondering how we got here. And I hope they’re also wondering what we do about it.
Because this is not the last apocalypse we are going to see in my lifetime, or my kids’ lifetime. Much of human history is a long flat line of the drudge work of everyday survival. That’s not where we are now. There will be more diseases jumping the species barrier for which we have no immunity. There will be rising seas, and burning forests and we will have to face all of these problems as they overlap and compound one another.
This will require our best solutions and our best selves. This is where we determine the future. This is a time for us to figure out what really matters to us, and what we really want.
Because if this is the end of the world, then we’re going to have to build a new one.