For a moment, take yourself out of reality. Pretend that what is happening is on a television screen or the pages of a novel. It seems far-fetched, almost impossible to imagine as reality. It might even seem like a tired concept. After all, how many movies are based around a mysterious pandemic sweeping the nation? We’ve even read something involving a mysterious disease, Carmen Maria Machado’s “Inventory.” There is no shortage of plagues or diseases in the human imagination, but it seems like such things aren’t often framed in the present.
There has also been no shortage of plagues in humanity’s past. Two that stand out are the Black Death and the AIDs crisis. Memorable as they are, they are often placed far in the past. But the bubonic plague isn’t something of the Middle Ages- at least not entirely. There are still cases of it today. A less understandable sort of push against the idea of a modern outbreak is what has happened in relation to HIV and AIDs. Maybe it’s just the fault of my education, but for most of my career as a student there has been a perception of the AIDs crisis as far away, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Almost everyone has a family member that lived through the AIDs crisis. Many older LGBTQ people had social circles affected by the AIDs crisis. Despite this, there is almost an anachronism to the way we treat it, pushing it as far away as we can.
It makes me wonder about the nature of our relationship to disease that we push ourselves as far away from pandemics as we can. A lot of media we have depicting pandemics is apocalyptic in nature, a glimpse into some alternate future where we are subject to a disease we can’t imagine being reality. Is it fear, no matter whether it is rational or not, driving us to de-realize situations such as this? That could be a reason, I suppose. After all, one of the horsemen of the apocalypse is Pestilence. But in biblical terms, plagues are not always such a bad thing; a plague freed the Jews from the hands of the Pharaoh in Egypt. While there is really no single answer to why our relationship with disease is so strange, it is something interesting to sit with and think about.
A lot of your post reminds me of JGB’s post where he comments “While the fantastic in literature often strives to make the unimaginable real, this passage suggests that we are also prone to take something horrifically real, like a pestilence or plague, and perceive it as something fantastic,” and how destructive such a relationship to the fantastic can be, especially for millennials which are the largest group refusing the “social distancing” precaution.
You raise an interesting point about how, occasionally, plagues can result in good things happening; I actually read that cleaner air, cleaner water, reduced traffic, and an increased price in labor usually occur during economic depressions–such as the one we are currently going through due to the coronavirus. It will be interesting to see what other (if any) benefits come out of this whole ordeal.