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Weird, that this global-trade-war market-crash thing feels a lot like five years ago. The cause is entirely different, yet I am feeling exactly the same disorientation and stomach-clenching fear I felt with the spread of COVID-19. And, given the abruptness, magnitude, and destructive power of the change, the same vertigo. There is a recognizable shock and grief over all that has already been lost, all the undeserved pain that has been inflicted. A selfish panic follows, and dread of what this will mean worldwide. Also a pouting resentment at the disruption of my pleasures.
This time, the pandemic is political, and the contagion is psychological. Yet once again, when I talk to a friend, we start by asking, in voices lowered with concern, “How’re you doing?” Because once again, systems are collapsing or in danger of doing so. And systemic collapse follows a pattern.
Conspiracy theories flourish. People stock up, watching their spending, focusing on essentials and letting the luxuries slide away. Favorite sellers and restaurants are forced to close. Extremes become plausible: Sell all stock? (Too late.) Live in a camper? (If we have to.) Instead of raids on toilet paper, expect raids on coffee and Champagne. Instead of worrying about long COVID and a shaky physical recovery, we are worrying about losses that will take years to recover—and that is assuming the market stabilizes first.
Yet in the midst of all that angst, here I sit, still content in our cozy home, still eating cereal and watching movies. Again, I feel survivor’s guilt: others are being deported or losing their jobs even as I hit Play. Every day brings a dozen reminders that the cultural institutions many of us treasure—parks, museums, universities, research, a free press—are all in jeopardy. With friends, I am cheered by the same sarcastic cracks, wry stories, commiseration, and silly emergency plans (we can cluster tiny houses around some remote lake and start a commune!). With strangers, there is the same creepy sense of having to watch what I say—although this round, I have stopped being careful.
In the space of five years (time is a kind of space) I let myself forget, encouraged myself to forget, the precarity that is always present below the surface. Like Nessie at the loch, it rises periodically to scare us silent. And then, after stunning us into silence, it provokes the same tired, niggling questions: “What if I lose my job? What if we have to move?” Last time, the worst was “What if one of us gets terribly sick and dies?” This time, unless we are arrested for speaking our minds, the worst question is “What if we lose all our retirement savings?” Again, an existential question, but I prefer it to the first. It is easier to shrug off, thanks to the solidarity of all the other people who are in the same boat, and the knowledge that we can get by with very little if there is love.
Another difference is my anger’s target. Instead of being mad at people who have no regard for public health and science, I am mad at people who have no regard for civil rights, culture, diversity (there, I said it), healthcare, education, the common good—and science. Instead of hoping for an end, a cure, a vaccine, I am trying to figure out how we could halt the spiral of damage, win back the world’s trust, rebuild a government that lacks the old waste and arrogance but does have compassion.
And there seems to be less hope for any of that than there was for vanquishing the virus.
A virus somehow let loose, an economic crisis deliberately set into motion—who would expect those two very different catastrophes to trigger the same response? Yet the old pandemic emotions are raging hot again, and they have the same icy dread at the center. Maybe I should have learned more detachment. We survived the pandemic, and here we are cozy again, taking unwanted precautions but overall lucky, sheltered from the worst of it….
Others did not survive the pandemic. Others are not sheltered. The dissonance does not bother me enough to renounce our (temporary, provisional, precarious) safety. But it does feel, once again, surreal. A waiting for disaster; a reminder that fate is random. I thought living through a pandemic was a peak of surreal, but apparently these crises are set to recur.
At least this one offers a better reminder: all that hard-earned, carefully saved money was just numerals and dots on a page. As long as we have food, walls, a roof, and a bed, we are still capable of finding both pleasure and meaning. We can still take strength from solidarity. Instead of Zoom cocktail hours, there will be a million ways to protest and resist.
In their efforts to divide us, tyrants create solidarity.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
