Coronavirus = Checkmate?

What is happening can be seen either as a catastrophe or a miracle... or both. Things are moving so fast it is difficult to keep up.

Not even a month ago I was worried, fearful, couldn't think straight. Was it the end of the world or the end of a world?

Last year I left a big metropolitan area to come in a less densely populated area for many reasons. The first one was the noise level that has increased dramatically over the last three decades I lived there before, from 1985 to 2004. I came back in 2014 and was appalled by that aspect. Whatever could have improved overtime in terms of quality of life was being impaired by this aspect. The number of cars had tripled since 1985 and the advent of the internet made people more mindly secluded than before. I was lucky by the end of my stay because I was responsible of a community center which was one of the best places to neutralize the worst aspects of this social isolation.

Yet I couldn't help noticing a certain level of stress among a good portion of the people coming to their activities, a level of sadness and anguish that was visible to the naked eye.

For decades now I have been questioning our lifestyle, our way of living. I have a six-decades perspective of it, from the sixties to now. I lived through what's called the Golden Thirties, the three decades following WWII. I am a boomer but a late one, that is born between about 1955 and 1964, the so-called Generation X, a term that almost became a trademark after Douglas Coupland used it as the title of his 1991 novel of the same title. This novel might be considered cynical or absurd as our epoch. Discussions are going on concerning the dates of that 'generation' which is not a generation in anthropological or sociological terms as such because in those disciplines and others a generation lasts around 30 years. It's a birth cohort. Naming each decade a generation since WWII is rather funny (or phoney): baby-boomers, generation x, y, z, etc.

What's funnier is that when I was living in Vancouver in the 80s I could have met Douglas Coupland and I might have met him without knowing it/him because we were in the same circles. I had friends who studied at Emily Carr School of Arts on Granville Island. Vancouver then was a great city to live in, still affordable, full of great people from everywhere, especially from the rest of Canada because here was a good climate with winter sometimes reaching 20°C. I know it because I spent at least one afternoon in January in short sleeve reading aloud to a friend on a cliff overlooking the ocean. More often than not though it was rainy. Anyway Vancouver was then the multicultural city par excellence.

I left the big city lately for many reasons besides the noise level. One of them further on my list of reasons to leave was a fear I had that in case of catastrophe living in a big city would be hellish. I had that in the back of my mind for decades. It never stopped me in living my life and enjoying myself, just the fact of being apprehensive, with a back burner consideration to it. Terrorism came to mind but also the kind of situation happening now, a pandemic with the shut down, the possible scarcity of things, the possible looting and riots or simply bad beheviours like those we've seen lately for some sanitary items that makes you wonder about human nature. Mind you, not that nothing of the kind would happen in a smaller town but rather that if I would decide to escape I could do so on a dime. Try to leave a city when thousands upon thousand of people try to do so.

Is this selfishness? I don't think so. For decades I have been apperhensive with our way of living and that it had to stop somewhere because we would face a degradation of it all at one point because it is unsustainble. I've tried in many ways to convince people of this to no avail. So at the end I shut the fuck up and left.

I enjoyed living in the big cities for many reasons: access to an incredible variety of people and activities. I am grateful for that. In my youth I was ambitious but never really wanted to go on overdrive to obtain a social and material status that would be the envy of others. The curves between that and just living my life quickly reached a breaking point of... pointlesness. So I 'sacrificed' a high-end living for just living. I was not convinced of the first, for it meant almost certainly being conform. One can not be part of a group if one does not behave in a certain way pertaining to that group. So I could be called a misfit which suits me well after all. Not that I feel as being a misfit but that is probably the way I am perceived :)

I have been a pretty good chameleon in my life being surrounded at times by rich people, artists, etc. but it was a game to determine how far I could go in fitting in a circle. In that sense I am very blissful about it. Very often though I got either bored or rejected or both. I am totally fine with that. It makes me laugh. I had another agenda, one of curiosity, acquisition of knowledge, or risk-taking, etc. I met people in all fields doing all sorts of things. I am very grateful. I've had a great time. I met incredible people.

We are in 2020 and I learned over time to live modestly and enjoying myself. I live a decent life well under 1000 dollars a month.

I am more living than existing in fact. I even consider that the last five years I spent in the big city I was more existing than living because the cost of 'living' is such that you end up existing rather than living, always worrying about paying the rent and this and that. I was only living to PAY. It made no sense. What is THAT? At the end nothing I would do would make me enthusiastic because I did not understand the meaning of what it is we as a society we are doing. Pointlesness. Absurdity. That is the way I felt. I think there are many other people who are having this line of questioning but it is very difficult to find them because this line of questioning is not 'cool'.

Epidemy

On September 11, 2001 I was living in Montreal. Like everyone else I was following what was happening and what people were saying or writing about it. Two comments by two Newyorkers that day standed out and are still resonating in my head 20 years later, one by a woman living in the lower East Side: "The humbling of US has begun" and another from a guy in Brooklyn: "What happened when a bunch of narcissists get bombed?" Each was a great statement and I was amazed they came from Newyorkers because what we were hearing on the mainstream media that days was nothing of the sort. It made me hope for humanity.

My modification then of the front page of the NYT of Septembre 12, 2001

Some people believe we are at the threshold of something. I have my doubts about that after being on this planet for eight decades now, being born in the late 50s. What happened as I wrote at the beginning is nothing short of a miracle if we were looking at a way to stop the machine. Many people were desparate and it took a 16 years old girl to galvanize energy around an idea. Beyond the turmoil it created last year, it seemed that we were somehow going back to what we were doing and not being able to change a thing. And then this unexpected tsunami happened. The pandemy had made everything stopped at once. This is something beyond anything we could have come up with. There will be casulaties but not a single shot has been fired to achieve it. So far.

How long would that last? Who knows? Hopefully it will help in making drastic changes for the better, but I still have my doubts.