The Devil At Your Door

These days it is hard to get through a normal day when tensions are high and people are behaving irrationally. Most of the time all I would like to do is take a pill or inhale something to calm my teetering anxiety. It's almost like the whole damn world has gone crazy and there are factions of haves and have nots ready to go to war with one another over a ximple case of toilet paper. And the constant cycle of news reports, politicians spreading disinformation, religious whack-a-do's pandering cure-all potions, it's hard to keep a cool head. I want to be okay. I don't want to be fearful. The climate of panic is making it hard for me to focus otherwise.

I remember Y2K being a thing. There was so much uncertainty about what would happen when the new millenium came that most folks were prepared for the worst. It wasn't like how they are behaving now of course, because we weren't talking about a plague-like scenario. It was a computer thing. Most of us were worried that the lights would go off forever (or for a long time), our computer systems would revert back to an error, and we would be pushed back into an age before technology and have to do stuff the old fashioned way. I mean yeah, as a species, we are/were pretty spoiled.

Still the events of the past haven't taught us anything about how to prepare for the events of the last few months. COVID19 sprung up in the news months ago and was considered merely a "Chinese Issue" and left out in the cold until it started spreading like wildfire. Nations shrugged it off as just another type of flu and let the numbers increase, while the masses were preparing for the worst. We live in a day where "doomsday preparation" is a thing that you can watch on a number of YouTube channels. The problem with these shows is that they entertain a large number of intellectually challenged individuals, or even worse, those who think they are superior because they have money, and these folks start stockpiling their homes/bunkers with stuff. They hoard groceries and toiletries all for the sake of saying "I/We have all of this so I/We will not be affected".

But they are overlooking the one problem...stockpiling doesn't prevent you from catching a virus.

Depriving others of essential goods: like groceries and toiletries and cleaning supplies, hurts the others that can't afford to protect themselves from the same virus. The funny thing is, the suggestion of "love thy neighbor' really flies out the window, because all that most people are thinking about is saving themselves. It's not enough to have everything, especially at the expense of others. It's a dangerous thought process to have when suffering is non-discriminating to circumstance. As a society, we should have learned this from the black plague. Everyone who got infected and died did so regardless of how much food (or toilet paper) they did/didn't have. For comedic effect....I know that toilet paper was invented in 1857 and the black plague hit in 1347.