When they announced the Covid could come back in the middle of summer, some people keeled over. Not the fall, mind you. The summer. We could have dismissed it if it had only been the WHO, whom we are again ignoring as much as before their brief window of glory during the pandemic.
But then Luke O’Neill seemed to agree with them. Which was a worry. Apparently Covid along with presumably the WHO and Luke and the others is going to spike about every four months.
Some people were a little torn. There was a little voice in the back of some people’s minds that said, “You mean we need to go back to working full-time from home and generally staying in our homes and parking all other worries and wearing comfortable clothes and eating and bingeing all the time.”
Easy Watch TV Shows? Presumably there wouldn’t be any wars either?”
But while it was slightly tempting to return to what we now know as the last of the simple days, most of us have moved on and left Covid to the Chinese, who thought they were so smart.
Covid was a long game and we won. We’re back at #2 on the Bloomberg Covid Resilience Index, coincidentally right behind Sweden, which would make you wonder if the Covid Resilience Index is now largely an index of how good countries are at ignoring Covid. We’re pretty good at that. We are all-or-nothing people. We persuaded the Covid into submission and now we feel there is nothing more to say. The main legacy of this now seems to be skyrocketing house prices, caused in part by all the money everyone has been saving while the government has been pumping it out faster than anyone could spend.
But rest assured, there were many other things we could transfer our fear to. The only way to really surpass a global pandemic would be nuclear war, and strangely, people now have a legitimate fear of nuclear war, which would presumably result in working from home and generally staying at home.
Although it looks like our homes may be under water by then, the only thing that pushed war and chaos off the front pages on Friday was the fact that Dublin Bay and Cork Harbor are on the rise. And by the way, even if our homes stay above sea level, we may not have electricity to light them.
Basically, everything we used to take for granted, like turning on the lights and not having a nuclear war and a global pandemic every four months, is over.
And what do our managers distract themselves with? The government appeared to have nearly collapsed over whether to sell peat to its neighbors, and a lot of political energy is being expended trying to settle a dispute over a college job for the CMO.
Who would have thought that our politicians are actually better at dealing with one-off existential crises like pandemics than with the boring ability to do the little things? Maybe they actually have a good nuclear war.
