026: Are We Going to Get an 'After Times'?
Hi friends,
I wrote this early—for once!—because my mom is visiting me in LA this week. I always worry about scheduling a newsletter in advance (what if a tragedy happens that makes this seem insensitive between now and publication?) but there’s simply no other way to make it happen this week.
It feels strange to have a traveler in my home, to talk about plane rides and TSA as if it’s the Before Times again. She’s vaccinated, and I’m halfway through my inoculation, and there’s a pressing family issue here that can’t be put off, so here we are. It’s got me thinking a lot about what comes next—what will the After Times look like?
How do plague stories end?
That’s the question The New Yorker asked in my inbox on Wednesday morning.
As a society, we’ve more or less accepted everything from before about March 1, 2020 as the “Before Times.” We’re living the COVID Times now. So next we get the After Times, right?
But I think The New Yorker is asking the wrong question. They’re assuming that plague stories end. But in history, plague stories sort of… haven’t ended. The Black Death hit Europe and Africa in waves, over and over again for centuries. Just when people thought it was over, another round came back. The first infections began in 1347; the most recent round was in Madagascar in 2017-2018. It’s killed over 200 million people and been used as a biowarfare agent.
But COVID isn’t that, we claim! If for no other reason than we have a vaccine that is very effective, and we understand Germ Theory so much better now than we did in the fourteenth century. (Case in point: We have germ theory at all.) And yet, stories of the Plague persist. It haunts our textbooks, its shadow stalks the halls in our fiction—hell, it still literally infects us.
Y. Pestis, the bacteria that causes the Black Plague, is becoming antibiotic-resistant, as of 2019. We don’t have an effective vaccine for it. Instead, we have better immune systems, better preventative measures, and better treatments. And yet, it’s positioned to be the next plague, again, somehow.
So, maybe plague stories don’t ever end. Maybe we will just live with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and Y. Pestis bacteria forever. We’ll live the way people have done since the 1350s—long periods of isolation followed by long periods of festivity.
In a way, we already do:
In 1916 a Polio outbreak in the US killed an estimated 7,130 people.
In 1918-1920 H1N1 Influenza virus killed 17-100 million people worldwide. (Tracking was not great 100 years ago.)
In 1924-1925 Los Angeles experienced a Black Death outbreak that killed 50 people.
In 1952 another Polio outbreak peaked in the US and killed 3,145 people.
In 1957-1958 the world experience an H2N2 Influenza outbreak that killed 1.1 million people, 117,000 in the USA.
In 2009, a novel H1N1 Influenza virus killed an estimated 500,000 people worldwide, including about 12,500 in the USA.
Each of those outbreaks led to periods of quarantining, of shutting down public areas like pools and theatres, of suspending travel. We were lucky, in the US, to not have an epidemic-type outbreak for 51 years. Other than H1N1, every outbreak in the US since the 1950s—measles in the 1980s and whooping cough in the 2010s—were due to low vaccination rates, not a new surprise threat.
I think partly because of that long dormant period without an epidemic in the US, people forgot that this happens all the time. That doesn’t make it okay or fun or whatever, but we should recognize that it’s not uncommon. And just like measles and whooping cough still circulate, the SARS-CoV-2 virus and Y. Pestis bacteria will probably continue to as well.
Look again at that timeline—in between the periods of widespread illness, of epidemic, are some of our most famous times of national happiness and transformation. After 1920, when WWI was over and Influenza seemed gone, we got the Roaring 20s, a time of great prosperity and social change. Again after the 1957-1958 Influenza outbreak we got the 1960s, a time of huge social change thanks to The Civil Rights movement but also a time we culturally look back on pretty fondly for being “groovy” and fun.
Are we set for another one? People are dying—sometimes literally, unfortunately—to go out, to party. With Black Lives Matter fresh in our minds, are we set for a resurgence of the countercultural movements of the 1920s and the 1960s?
And more to where my thoughts are headed, is this sort of boom/bust of disease—this isolation/festivity continuum we used to live out—is it back?
Instead of the After Times, is this really just the Between Times? Is this summer going to be the beginning of the time between COVID-19 and the next round of the Plague, or whatever infection rises next?
I don’t want to frighten anyone or seem pessimistic. That’s not my goal. But I really believe that part of the role of history is understanding what things repeat in order to both mitigate them and mentally/emotionally/societally prepare for them. The world will deal with another pandemic, and statistically, it will happen during our lifetimes. Until we manage to make humans stop getting sick at all, that’s just a reality that we have to accept.
So, what do we do with the Between Time?
We do what generations of people before us have done: Celebrate being alive; Mourn the people we lost; Put science to work to better prepare us for the next; Find ways to make life better for everyone. We learn from it.
We don’t forget, we don’t pretend it didn’t happen, we don’t act like it won’t happen again. Because it has and it did and it will.
I hope that we don’t try to forget what we learned this year.
I hope that we continue to work for social justice like we did this year.
I hope that we show each other the patience and love we needed this year.
I hope that we respect science more.
I hope that we embrace truth, and frankly, history.
I hope that we remember everything, and I hope that we tell stories about it.
Now Reading: The Daevabad Trilogy
The Daevabad Trilogy on Goodreads.
I picked up The City of Brass incredibly randomly. I didn’t read the summary, I didn’t read a single review, I don’t think I’d even heard of it. It popped up because an algorithm recommended it—it was labeled fantasy, it was on sale, it was by an author whose last name was Chakraborty which I think is a beautiful name… And here we are:
I am obsessed.
I love it when this happens. It’s rare that I’m pleasantly surprised by a book—usually I know what I’m going to get going in. Occasionally I’m disappointed by a book. But it’s rare that a book captures my attention enough that I’ll stay up until 4 am to finish reading it, which is what I did on Tuesday night this week.
I’m currently reading the second in the series, The Kingdom of Copper, and reading it is literally all I want to do. I want to forsake all other tasks, even eating. It’s a story about a woman who didn’t believe in magic learning that there’s an entire magical world hidden from her, that she is the last in a line of a powerful family, and that her reappearance in their world signals a shifting political tide.
(Why yes, that summary could describe Harry Potter and honestly mostly fantasy stories. It’s called a trope.)
What also surprised me is how little I know about Middle Eastern mythology. I know about recent Middle Eastern history, I have read about the basic tenants of Islam, but djinns, the legends and stories that are passed down there? I didn’t know any of it. And this series is a lovely introduction. I talked a lot last June about how what we read impacts who we care about. I have Persian family members and I’ve always felt drawn to China so I know more about those two cultures, but The Daevabad Trilogy is showing me a huge gap in my knowledge. I’m excited to fill it. If you have any favorite books set in the Middle East, I’d love to read them! Hit reply and let me know.
Internet Things I Read and Loved This Month
And now for the irregularly kept list of things that I read on the Internet that I thought were excellent this month:
Will Anyone Ever Love Me? by ¡Hola Papi!
How Do I Fall In Love With Myself? by ¡Hola Papi!
My Sister’s Legs by Lyz Lenz
Welp, Finland’s #1 AGAIN for World Happiness, Those Clever Bastards by Ash Ambirge
The Gigantically Terrifying Life That Belongs Only To You by Cheryl Strayed
How to Care from SOURCED
No I’m Not Ready by Anne Helen Petersen
Meditations on the History of the Present by Christina Sharpe
Saint Brigid’s Day and Celebrating Spring by Brittany Muller
The Blue Hour: A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of Nature’s Rarest Color, from Brain Pickings
As always, thank you for reading. If you want to respond just hit reply. Your message will get to me (and only me). If you like this and think your friends might too, forward it on.
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All the best, friends!
Valorie