I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the coronavirus for a while now and I have yet to make the massive breakthrough you were surely all waiting for. What I do know is this: This pandemic is a different kind of cruel. I’m not going to go into how many people it has killed, or the towns and families it has destroyed–those are a different kind of tragedy. What I think is hardest about this whole thing is that COVID-19, at its core, eliminates our way to cope with tragedy.
When we suffer a terrorist attack or our community is ravaged by a hurricane, our first impulse is to offer a hand, to come together as a community to feel safe and rebuild. That’s our human instinct. Now, the nature of the virus effectively eliminates our ability to come together, keeping us separate when we need our community most.
I write about sports and my analogies and comparisons often stem from the sports world. In this case, it’s one of the easiest ways to see the chaos that the coronavirus is wreaking on community. Sports have long been a unifying force in times of war, illness, and hardship. Look at any tragedy in the last century, and there’s all but guaranteed to be a galvanizing sports moment that follows shortly after. Not this time. We’ve lost all major sports leagues and even the Olympics—an event that had only ever been cancelled by world wars—has been pushed indefinitely into the future. Stadiums, the places we so often go to escape the hardships of our lives, have transformed into epicenters of disease. Many Americans say they won’t even think of stepping foot into a stadium until there is a proven vaccine for COVID-19.
Beyond sports, the loneliness we are living right now will likely have mental repercussions for years to come. But the alternative feels so, so much worse. Running to be with family is one of the main ways of transmitting the disease, and transmitting in a way that might directly harm those closest to you. It’s a poetic purgatory, a painful limbo that makes this whole situation all the harder.
This post doesn’t come with a bow or any sort of solution, but writing it down is the first step to processing a new and strange reality. Stay safe, stay healthy, and can’t wait to hug you all soon.