I worry
Victor Gibbs – Archeologist and Photographer
(April – 2020) Early morning, April 15, 2020, can’t sleep. Planetary alignment of moon and three planets rest in the southeastern sky. The corona virus has spread to almost every country on Earth in under three months’ time. Most of the world has been hiding and waiting for it to leave. I feel like I am living in real time through an amalgam of some old sci-fi movies. The Quiet Earth, The Andromeda Strain, Invasion of the Body Snatchers come to mind. A complete makeover for the plane
Yet life is moving on. Growing up during the Cold War in Los Alamos, I always thought nuclear war would be our undoing. It still might. Climate change has been working to knock a few of us off through extreme storms, fires and droughts. Now this virus.
Things have changed pretty radically for some. Millions have lost their jobs or are working in jobs where their exposure quotient is particularly high. Millions will likely go bankrupt in our country because of an inability to pay for treatment to the disease. The government is failing, caught up in its own greed and inaction, blaming everyone but themselves. Most states have been leading some effort to stop the spread, with differing results. Medical supplies shipped to the states from the federal government stockpiles have been handed out not based on need, but on who bends the knee to the president.
The company I work for remains open for now, as an essential service. A month ago I moved my desktop to my house. Some of my workmates still go to the office, but a lot of us worked remotely before the shutdown. The projects I am working on have been put on hold. My wife is a teacher and she works from home now too. My son is a student at NMSU, and he attends classes online. Life has slowed down a lot. We have time to throw the Frisbee for the dog, and see hummingbirds in the back yard.
We go shopping every week at the grocery stores. We shop for our parents so they won’t have to expose themselves. Over the past month, more people are wearing cloth masks. My wife made some masks for the family last week too, so we’re following the latest fashion trend. Seeing people in public has made me paranoid. No one knows who could have the sickness, so there is a level of distrust of fellow humans. To me there is still not enough room in the aisles of the store for my comfort. This creepy feeling is something that may not abate for a while, even after the virus leaves us.
I worry about what the future holds. I see this change as temporary, but I think it will take us a long time to recover from it. We’re not out of the woods yet. After a month of lockdown, people are getting a bit cagey. Beneath the thin veneer of civilization, lies chaos. Hoarding of goods and guns may lead to more crime and looting if food sources become scarce. People will be or already becoming desperate.
In better moments, I choose to look at this as something we are all facing together, a shared global experience. We have common cause. We can take stock of who we are and what we can do to help one another make it through this time. On an environmental scale, we can see what our lifestyles have done to the planet. The skies over major cities are clear for the first time in 30 years. We can see distant mountains. The water in rivers runs clear again. Animals are flourishing. People are gardening. How can we make changes in our own lives to keep those planetary benefits during our cocooning? Do we need all those material goods? Where do we go from here?
The choice is ours to make.