the interesting thing to me is the way various collective cultures are reacting to the unknown. panic basically. when i think of my father, who was a 4-year POW in WWII being told he wouldn't walk any more, it was as though someone had mentioned that today was Thursday... not so much numb or detached as integrated, able to navigate calm or stormy waters with aplomb... of course his wife, my mom, had a complete meltdown, but then she did that when the toast got burned...
so---the point? that in the moment most boundaries and governments in Asia, Europe and North America are believed to be fixed and stable--some are even run by stable geniuses!--or not... Africa and the Mid-East are not so stable, and while there is every reason to believe that this virus is traveling across northern Africa with the same speed as it may traverse Australia, say, there's less hyper-reaction to it--partly, no doubt, to fractured or non-existent infrastructures, or super-efficient suppressive regimes (::cough::SaudiArabia::cough)--but also partly because daily life has been a shitstorm for nigh on to thirty years (centuries?) in those parts... so this virus has to wait its turn to be the focus of fear and unbalanced response. the very fact that things like toilet paper and sanitizers are flying off the shelves while people paw through the display of bulk tomatoes, candies and kids school supplies points to the sheer irrationality of these reactions. but without knowledge what else beside the irrational do we have? faith? that's irrational but with polished shoes (or sandals), the occult? same, only with smelly stuff and maybe some boobs, science? for most of us that's an irrational faith too, since we know fuck-all about epidemiology outside of what a few games and movies tell us...
and to wail or rail against the stupidity of people is just a waste of air, not to say a touch arrogant since a great deal of our daily life depends upon technology we are in no position to maintain, repair or create for ourselves... reading the history of Europe I am struck by how fluid national identities really are, and how often they fragment, rejoin, appear and disappear--and how little we are prepared for such apparently 'seismic' shifts--like the fracturing of America which I am sure will happen, as its boundaries are no more naturally created than were those of the USSR... a long time ago, i discovered, in my role as a counselor, that the poor and the very very rich recognize that their lives and fates are not under their own control... the poor because a store or plant closure can put them on the street without notice, any day of the year, the very rich because, well, things like this can obliterate the stock market and wash away a significant part of their paper empires... it is only the middle class who believe that there is always a solution to every problem, that if 'we' haven't solved the problem we are failures, or 'they' are fucking with us... it never or rarely occurs to people that 'we' might not in fact be in control of this world, of life itself, or even of our own toenails... and that the recognition of this truth does not bring depression or claustrophobia (okay it might, but if it does, that's just the remnants of the middle-class ghost clinging to your soul)... instead, it brings peace... and with that peace one is finally free... free from paralysis and thus able to take action when action can be taken, and to wait and watch with neither despair nor anxiety until that moment comes.
