“It Could Always Be Worse,” COVID Edition
The feeling of relief I’m seeing expressed as COVID comes to an illusory end reminds me a lot of a folktale I read as a kid: “It Could Always Be Worse.”
In the story, a man is complaining about how small his house is, so his rabbi tells him to bring in some goats and some other animals until his house is beyond cramped. Once it’s completely unbearable, the rabbi tells him to get rid of them each until he’s back to square one. Now he feels like he has so much room. The moral of the story: be grateful for what you’ve got. Heartwarming.
That’s the mood I’m sensing now. COVID created a heightened sense of discomfort, and now that the pressure’s off, our old lives suddenly seem so comfortable and pleasant.
It’s the wrong analogy, though. A better parallel would be if the guy wasn’t complaining about how small his house was and instead went to his rabbi to kvetch about his plumbing. Namely, he doesn’t have any, so everyone in his house is shitting in a bucket in the corner of the living room, and they all have dysentery. The rabbi tells him to bring in all the animals and now everyone has not just dysentery, but salmonella and E. coli poisoning, too. At the end of the story, the guy scrubs out all the animal shit and is relieved to have more space, until it dawns on him: I still have a dysentery problem.
The other analogy, of course, would be the boiling frog. By degrees, we have been conditioned to accept a lot of awfulness as normal. I’ll provide one example (expertly covered recently by John Oliver): plastic trash. Daily life is creating a tsunami of waste that will never break down. A river of it flows from our houses to landfills, where it will sit for millennia. It’s become such a staple of daily life, we hardly recognize it anymore. Appliances and electronics are cheap, and we think nothing of buying a new TV or a vacuum cleaner — just toss the old one in the trash.
This should alarm us. It should feel like an open sore we pick the scab off of every day, but it doesn’t. It’s normal.
Likewise, there’s that global warming thing. Like COVID, some of us deny it, and some of us acknowledge it, but no one actually does anything about it. We believe it’s normal to drive as many miles as we want, use as much electricity as we want, buy the biggest house we can afford, and fly around the world as many times as we can.
We let ourselves talk ourselves into all this being okay.
Where I live, people love to hike, and it’s fascinating to watch people talk about the landscape as if everything is fine. I know how degraded that landscape is. The forests here have been hammered by drought for a decade. It’s a sneaky drought. There has been plenty of rain, and snowpack has been “normal” for the past five years. In between the snow and the rain, though, there have been unusually dry summers. Warmer springs have melted the normal snowpack a lot faster than the springs of old. The glaciers feeding the rivers are in retreat. As a result of all this, the moisture content of the ground is not normal, and there are entire stretches of forest that have turned brown, because the trees are dying. It’s not that hard to spot, and yet…
To read people’s discussions of the places they go, nature is bountiful and beautiful. Oh, what an amazing place. While I’m locked in a horror show, everyone is misreading the signs and picking out the parts that let them build a vision wherein they live in the same untrammeled paradise white settlers first found just a hundred and fifty years ago.
I even find myself engaging in this exercise in wishful thinking. I hope for cool temperatures and rain. I cheer myself up by arguing that the snow level is staying decently low. See — it could always be worse.
It could, but that misses the point that things are already dangerously bad. As with COVID, we can close our eyes and pretend, but that doesn’t matter if the physical reality is less than the minimum needed for a positive outcome. Where I live, we are in the midst of a historically warm and dry spring. It should be all we talk about: this is weird, this is unsettling. Instead, everyone is saying how nice it is.
If last year repeats, however, the entire West Coast will be draped in smoke as California (and the rest of the west) burns under drought and heat. The Colorado River basin has practically run dry. Not solely by weather either, but by systematic diversion of water.
As with COVID, it’s not a natural disaster. It’s a human one.
I understand the impulse to look on the bright side, but we need to stop talking ourselves into believing everything is okay and start setting the bar in the right place and taking action to get back to a minimum standard of living on this planet. COVID was and still is the least in a constellation of larger worries.
