I couldn’t help laughing with a grim sort of humor when I read this paragraph in an article from The Atlantic today.
In 2019, the Global Health Security Index used 85 indicators to assess how ready every country was for a pandemic. The U.S. had the highest score of all 195 nations, a verdict that seems laughable just one year later. Indeed, six months into this pandemic, the index’s scores had almost no correlation with countries’ actual death rates. If anything, it seems to have indexed hubris more than preparedness.
from “Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us” by Ed Yong
To be an American today, you need to have a good sense of humor. We’re living in a farce. If you can’t laugh at it, it will drive you mad.
It also helps to have a strong capacity for forgetting. That same magazine article began with an explanation of how the flu pandemic of 1918 was quickly forgotten by the people of that era. It ended with speculation about how quickly we would forget about this pandemic.
If my recent experience is anything to go by, it will be fast. Last night, as the newscasters were rehashing the big news stories of the year, I was stunned by how many terrible things had happened in 2020. I’d already pushed my memories of those events as far from my surface thoughts as possible. They were upsetting and there were too many of them to handle at once. My memory having been jogged, I realized that they were still there in my head, exactly where I’d piled them up, but I’d left no tracks leading away from them, no clues to follow, no reasons to ever go back there and rummage through them. I will forget them as soon as I’m allowed to, and that’s just as well. The farce is far from over.