It is the stated policy of this blog not to address serious topics. However, I don’t think that I can ignore what is currently going on in the world.
A week ago, I was thinking that we were heading into what was either (A) the biggest public health crisis of my lifetime, or (B) the biggest over-reaction of my lifetime. Now, though, I’m thinking that there might be a third option, (C), which would be both (A) and (B) simultaneously.
Much has been happening, from a huge scale (populations of whole states being forbidden from leaving their homes) to my personal scale (the only way in which I could get food from a restaurant was to place a takeout order, drive to the restaurant, and have the order carried to my car by a man wearing plastic gloves). But there is one experience that stands out in my mind.
On Tuesday I was in a grocery store. Whole sections of the store—bottled water, paper goods, meat, frozen foods, and more—were nearly or entirely emptied out. As I was waiting in the checkout line, the man in front of me remarked to the woman running the register that the store must be unable to get any toilet paper. But she responded that the store gets a new shipment of toilet paper every night, and every morning when the store opens at 6:00 there is a line of people outside who immediately buy up everything.
We are only missing some people in hazmat suites, and a guy with a military uniform and an assault rifle yelling, “It’s all gone to hell!”
Once they show up, we’ll know that we really are living in a movie about the end of the world.
