Viral Tyranny – Redux

Freedom of assembly….We no longer have it, thanks to this new autocrat, the microscopic Mandarin, the nano-nemesis.

Broadway dark. Disneyland closing.No more glorious Trump rallies. No more raucous sporting arenas. We’re all at the mercy of this invisible foe, which has effortlessly slashed our wealth overnight, taken away our heedless joy,

As I have done during periods of personal adversity, I fantasize about being able to see a future where everything has turned out all right! In three months, will these instant privations be behind us? Will we laugh about them?

Or will they have become the norm, and we barely remember the way things were only last December, when we gathered, ate, drank, embraced without a care?

I’m having a St Patrick’s Day party Saturday. At least I think I am. Will my guests, one by one, call and say they’d just rather not be in even a small group of people just now? And I will say of course I understand, my hearth-fire and my heart-fire growing colder with each retraction….

Will this, if it transpires, be my last party ?

So many times in my life I’ve thought, how fortunate, how rare, to have been born in a time and place where violence wasn’t the daily norm. “From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence”…I never imagined that our generation would face the latter. But here we are.

“..From the apprehensive present, from a future packed/With unknown dangers, monstrous, terrible, and new:/Let us turn for comfort to this simple fact:/We have been in trouble before, and we came through.”

—Edna St Vincent Millay, Thanksgiving 1950.