Pandemic memoir: C and R – old friends, parents, academics – turn to each other in anguish and hope

May 15, 2020

Dear R,

You and your words are a pillar of my sanity (I knew you would be) as the country slips into collective delusions. When I see the struggle as one between coronavirus and consumerism, I find myself rooting for the virus. Let it change us! May it block the return of the endless consumption economy, in which I, too, am complicit. For your father-in-law is right that the gods are mad – crazy-angry—and the gods are right to be mad. Micah likens the reopening to watching everyone go out and have unsafe sex. Consumer libido spilling out again. In the early days, they didn’t understand the Spanish flu; they thought AIDS was a cancer, he reminds me. We still don’t know what this thing is – and the most dangerous thing is thinking we do. No theory of the virus accounts for this mysterious Kawasaki-like development in children, a syndrome I would not have known to fear if it were not for your Mrinalini.

Everything we thought we knew so far about this entity has turned out to be false. But we are supposed to believe that we now know it is safe enough to open up?

I feel it too, of…

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