It looks like Biden’s administration will not reach the number of vaccinations they set up to having administered by the 4 of july. More interestingly, the attitude towards vaccine is strongly correlated with politics: up to 29% of the Republicans does not want to get vaccinated, compared with 5% of the Democrats. At least one could think in co-variables of human stupidity.
In England there is an increasing number of infections due to the so called delta variant of COVID19, which seems to have lead the vast numbers of infections, and deaths, in India. Meanwhile in France mandatory mask-wearing and lockdown rules are being lifted. I suppose that the french are thinking that UK’s predicate is some sort of non-shared-by-france-english-karma, for having colonized India. Or perhaps they think that Brexit isolation will, finally, bring something positive to France.
The city center of Utrecht nowadays, as aptly put by a New Yorker comentarist describing Times Square, seems a scene of a Twilight Zone episode. The one in which, after a distopic tragedy, people goes back to normal life without remembering anything. And your preferred actor is filmed in the foreground, twisted face shouting “why nobody remembers?”
I myself have been in few extreme situations with groups, like running away from and/or confronting armed gangs, being lost in the jungle and/or mountain or being jailed with 60 others in a 6 by 6 cell for a weekend. Without any claim to higher knowledge or reason, I do tend to believe that extreme situations brings out our true self. Like COVID19 has done. One thing we have learned so far is that we are definitively not rational.
Perhaps social describes us best.
In the past weeks, more or less seeing -or wishing- a light at the end of the long tunnel, I have dared to ask some of my friends about their faring of the recent past. Very few have floated through the waters of 2020 unscathed, meanwhile most of us were, or are, like those proverbial slowly heated frogs. What affected us most is that we were not together in this, not at all. Like a huge laboratory with millions of heated frogs, each in individual small glass container, without any other contact than visual, seeing rows after rows of heated bodies about to die. Knowing that the temperature is rising, knowing that we are likely to die, and we will do it alone.
I still do not understand the republicans, but I see the frenchs finally joining friends and lovers in embraces without masks and with good wine, so I imagine it all like a perverse monty python remake of that sketch, the french castle besieged by the hapless british knights, gnashing their teeth at the cosy french together inside and not opening the doors.
They say that ignorance is bliss. And indeed, the superior knowledge of our age on virus transmission has told us that the way to fight this pandemic is isolation, the one behavior that we can’t bear. So I remember the ignorant reactions to pandemics of yore. Right now I see that Italian young people together and telling tales to each other.
Doing what we do, even in the face of extinction.