Before
the Virus
Before the coronavirus, we lived a charmed life of
social interaction and the freedom to leave our houses. We took it for granted.
It was the norm, the world as it had always been. No one thought anything of
touching their loved ones. We came and went as we wanted. “Quarantine” was a
word seldom used outside of hypothetical scenarios and isolated incidents
nobody thought would ever happen to them. The world was built on people
interacting, people crowded together. Gathering and interacting was always the
norm.
Nobody foresaw weeks into months where we would be
sequestered in the confinement of our own homes trying to avoid any risk of
catching a life-threatening infection. It probably never occurred to most
people that hospitals would come dangerously close to running out of necessary
equipment meant to protect its workers and save lives. We thought we were safe.
We thought those we loved could keep coming home to us just as they always did,
that nothing like this could ever happen. No one thought life would just stop. When it did, we were so unprepared
for the effects of it that for all intents and purposes, the world around us
was in peril.
Socially, we were divided by the long-reaching effects
of the virus. We couldn’t just venture out without a thought to what dangers there were anymore. Our only means of leaving the
house came in the form of needing food and medical care in this dire time. When
we left, store shelves were running empty, people wore masks and avoided
nearing each other. It was like scenes out of the apocalypses we had seen
depicted in movies, only real and terrifying in how much it threatened to take
from us.
Before the virus, personal freedom and walking out
into the world without caution were things we never thought would be lost to
us. There was little to no risk of anyone becoming infected and dying from
everyday contact. Our apocalypse came sooner than any of us ever expected, in a
different form than the zombie movies we watched when movie theaters were still
open promised in their vision of a destroyed future. We learned that things
were more finite than we ever could’ve realized. We saw that in the worst of
times, some people cared more about themselves than the danger they posed to
others in leaving home. Pushed to our limits, we had to make sacrifices and
reevaluate the necessity of things we once took for granted. We had to learn
how be selfless in our actions, to put aside our need for the world as it was
in normalcy just to keep those we loved and the people they’d interact with
safe.
The coronavirus did more than separate us. It
challenged our perspectives on a safe world where we were free. It required us
to ask ourselves to let go in the name of doing what was right for society as a
whole. Nothing the world had yet faced affected our way of living as much as
the novel coronavirus. We lived as we wanted until it threatened the safety
many thought was simply a given. Worst of all, it divided people in more ways
than just the physical. Asian people saw the blame shift to them as ignorant
masses treated them as carriers of this indiscriminate virus. Suspicion became
the norm. Because we all lost our freedom and safety, the need for blame arose
in the worst of us. The new vision of the world we were forced to take on was
more divided than ever.
In the year 2020, we faced a crisis that held us
apart. We closed and locked our doors, covered our faces, avoided everyone we
could be distant from. We learned to let go because we had no other choice. The
very notion of what it meant to be free became more precious than it ever was. Our
world changed fundamentally, changing with it our view of what was necessary
just to ensure everyone else’s survival. Coronavirus is a chapter in the
world’s history that will be remembered for years to come. It was the pandemic
that reshaped society and enforced a new normal we weren’t yet ready for. So
much of how the world moves forward will be informed by the impact the virus
has had. In this desperate time of seclusion, we must learn how to proceed in
ways that protect everyone, our society now revolving around caution rather
than the normalcy of social interaction.
