We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us *

  Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Becalmed, we are. 

No wind in our sails. Scanning the horizon for help. Glare on a broad flat expanse that is so empty we can see the unflinching curve of the earth.

So we row, and we hope. We are still alive, while many are not, so we are the lucky ones.

It’s a strange feeling to have to stay away from people. We are lucky if we have that option.

Isolation is probably not evolutionarily adaptive. So we poke our heads out when it seems the danger must have passed, even though it has not.

I don’t know how long we, individually or collectively, can keep it up, or what will happen as we let down our guard, as we already are. We don’t want to believe this is real, so many of us refuse to. We are not a nation of natural mask wearers. 

The pressure to get back to normal is enormous. Both psychologically and economically. But this is a more formidable pathogen than we have faced in living memory. Maybe we’ll get a vaccine. Maybe it will save us. If not, we are going to lose a lot more friends and family before this is over, if indeed it ever is.

How will we handle that? That is the question on my mind lately. Will we pull together or apart?

The conventional wisdom is that a common enemy unites us, but that’s not what is happening this time. We are at war not only with the virus, but with ourselves. 

If we continue that way, we will certainly lose.

______

* Walt Kelly, in a Pogo strip