JUNE 13, 2020 – Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd, Jr. remind us again that we can’t handle more than two big stories at once. (The economy and the November election are sub-stories of the two main stories.) Actually, one big story: Covid-19 is hanging in there by the string of a face mask dangling from a protester’s ear.
Remember climate change? Oh, and here’s a pop quiz: “Brexit” was (a) an adult version of Duplos, (b) a bad dream, (c) happened, or (d) not happening. Once upon a time there was ISIS. Gone. Humanitarian crisis in Syria? Problem solved. Afghanistan? See “history, ancient.” And then there was the longest running outrage since the war in Iraq. Can you name it? . . . (Your three seconds are up) . . . IMPEACHMENT!
But there’s always the weather to knock cable news commentators off their game—well, for the three days before a hurricane’s landfall and the day-and-a-half following.
I’m guessing Puerto Rico isn’t quite fixed. Not sure about Flint, Michigan either. I’m fairly certain, however, that if you’re poor in America, you’re stuck. It’s a permanent condition, and permanent conditions aren’t newsworthy until someone decides to burn the place down because the someone realizes that the best that can be hoped for short of revolution is a roll of paper towels and the jingle—“For mopping up your own predicament!” To hell with “mopping”; the someone puts a match to the roll and burns his frustration into the news. But eventually the fire burns itself out and off our newsfeeds.
For kicks I often project myself into the distant past, as well as into the future. What would a villager in Medieval England think about us? What about a Sultan of the old Ottoman Empire—what would he have to say about modernity?
Similarly, how would an average Joe or Josephine—oops! Sorry about my white, Eurocentric bias; how would your average #24!% living QUANDRA from now think about the shenanigans of our primitive present? Would it be more horrified by the plastics we dumped into the sea or by our prodigious consumption of animal protein raised in unfathomable bulk (so to speak) inside enormous factory-farms? I doubt that by then the future will have even heard of Columbus the Dumbus.
Or will our AI-enhanced descendants take us down some darker lane, shaming us for listening to or performing the music of a bunch of very dead, very white guys and for keeping Shakespeare on the shelves long after such literature was deemed irrelevant by the future. And how could we print such books on paper long after we should have known that by cutting down too many trees, we caused the seven seas to cover seven-eighths of the world’s surface? (To the future I say, “Adapt or die! . . . and here’s a roll of paper towels.”)
Pandemic? Racism? (But for this week, mostly the latter.) Wait till the future sees us in full monty. We’ll then be rather . . . exposed.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
