And Lo, It Began...

Covid-19.

It sounded so ominous, tailor-made for trope mad scientist formulas, designed for doomsday weapons or government conspiracies or biological terrorism, like Stephen King’s Project Blue in The Stand, or Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain, or the afflictions depicted in any number of zombie movies or sci-fi television shows. It was catchy, with just the right kind of inflection to run sensational headlines. People were afraid.

We Americans hadn’t experienced that kind of mass fear of mortality since the height of the Cold War, perhaps further back to the World Wars. Few people were still alive to recall the Spanish Flu of the early 20th century, which took around 50 million lives in the span of a year. 700,000 of those lost lives were Americans. Post-industrial America never had to deal with such a thing, not to that scale. Gen X’ers, Millennials, and Zoomers, possibly a fair portion of Boomers, were too young to adequately appreciate the existential nuances of geopolitical events like the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam or the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation.

On this day in the early spring of 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. People felt like trapped mice in a bottle. There was nowhere to run, no place to hide. It rendered quite the reality check on Americans. Speaking as one, like everyone else, I was shaken. I tried to adapt. It was a delicate quietness at hand. Yet it was a loud kind of quietness, a pause of unexpected viral dread forced upon us with such impossible speed. I was certain if the grid went offline and social media went dark, there would've been anarchy in the streets. I’m still certain of that.

While the first round of salutations went to front line essentials and first responders and food distribution workers, the second round went to the electronic whiz kids and engineers and utility workers who kept the circuits flowing and the utilities on, because it was pretty clear if the lights went out, so too would humanity’s aversion to cannibalism. Indeed, mutant bikers may have been at the ready if Trader Joe’s weekly trucks stopped delivery.

Actually, Trader Joe’s seemed to be ground zero for the Californian Coronapocalypse.

Internet grapevines claimed the novel coronavirus originated in China. Their government flipped it back to us and suggested the American military brought it into Wuhan. Fingers were pointed in all directions. Blame was laid at the feet of anyone in striking range including Communist Tom, Socialist Dick, and Capitalist Harry. Politicking took a brief backseat in the beginning, due to the grim reality that most everyone was preoccupied with staying out of range from raging viral fire outside. We postponed the tossing of causality grenades…our gaslighting president of the time notwithstanding.

Wuhan was the largest city in Central China. One story said in late December of 2019, someone at a street wet market selling exotic meats allegedly purchased and consumed a kind of bat or pangolin, and boom, off went the virus into the human population, not unlike pandemic staples like Outbreak or Contagion or 12 Monkeys. It’s a common origin for viruses like ebola or bird flu. When that happens, it’s called zoonotic spillover.

Chinese officials, in standard paramilitary cover-up fashion, kept things under wraps for as long as they could. They tried to contain the spread with drastic, unprecedented lockdowns. The world knew little about what measures were taken to control the spread of the disease. The Chinese were reported to have corralled much of their rural infected to military hospital centers and bases.

The New York Times issued an analysis of the most extensive travel restrictions in modern history, taken from telecom sources tracking cell phone movements, and how those interventions apparently weren’t enough to contain the pandemic, mostly because of two things. The size of the outbreak was much larger than projected and there was an unfortunate coincidence in that it happened during the Chinese Lunar Year when millions of Chinese citizens in the coastal cities traveled back to their home towns. With each infection passing the contagion along to a few others, even the most valiant national response probably wouldn’t have contained the spread.

Meanwhile, Americans were paying scant attention to the spread of the disease, as was our custom when it came to empathizing with populations outside our borders. China was little different from other world powers in harboring mysterious happenings within its interior. Its ongoing saber-rattling with Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong classified it to average Americans as Southeast Asian Power Not to Be Trusted, or The Place Where I Everything I Own Was Constructed (probably by child labor). Our perceptions of China were tied up in generations of racism and cultural inaccessibility. We weren’t taking the virus seriously yet, because we believed we’d seen things like it before, with SARS, MERS, H1N1, swine flu, bird flu, or mad cow disease. If it wasn’t in our backyard, it was a regional thing, and as long as it wasn’t happening in our region, it was no big deal.

And then it was in our backyard. Apparently, our levels of concern seemed dependent on our sociopolitical mindsets. Most rational folks who took basic high school biology courses knew microbial type organisms didn't adhere to nationalism and that calling the bugger a Chinese virus was idiotic, since the supposed creature which infected Patient Zero could’ve easily been shipped to a distant land and started there, and the virus nesting within would’ve had no clue whether its host was Chinese or French or Australian, only that it wanted to feed in a warm body. Viruses aren’t racist. They’re an equal opportunity kind of scourge.

The virus gave the appearance of a crown under a microscope. ‘Corona’ means crown in Latin. The World Health Organization deemed it COVID-19; CO for Corona, VI for Virus, D for Disease, and 19 for 2019, when it first appeared in China. In no way did it actually implicate the Chinese people. But we all know how Americans like to generalize as they vilify. The unsettling increase of people disparaging and attacking Asians for retaliation to the spread of a virus was sickening.

It was just as likely that Jimmy Joe Bob in Greasy Corner, Arkansas (real town name!) fancied himself a bite of the sickly freshwater eel he scooped up in the creek, and bang, Arkansas might’ve been the viral epicenter and other world leaders might’ve deemed the blight the American Virus. Everyone was on the menu regardless of skin color or national pride or belief system.

We humans are fragile organisms. We’re more subject to physical limitations than we often realize, especially those of us fortunate enough to have been born within a region of planet Earth, like the United States, where modern amenities enable us to believe we’re more invulnerable than we actually are. As a general rule of thumb for the gastronomic interests of humanity, it’s not the best idea to sample raw meats or exotic consumables that haven’t been safely vetted, properly sterilized, or cooked well.

Every time one of us orders the blowfish at our favorite sushi joint, we’re assuming certain, taken-for-granted conclusions. It’s a risk being human, subject to our desires and curiosities. So if indeed that first guy in China wolfed down the wrong morsel, he can’t really be faulted. He was just trying to eat, same as me, if I peered into my half-eaten Double-Double from In n’ Out, saw more pink than usual, and thought, screw it, it’s fine.

For the record, it’s near five years later, and we still don’t really know the origin of the virus. Conversely, there’s a thousand-thousand plus conspiracy theories on that sore subject.

The other prospective Covid-19 origin story considered at the time was more unsettling, though hardly unexpected. There was always a chance the virus crept into the world via a lab accident. Wuhan also happened to be a place where a known Chinese institute of virology existed, housing a bio-safety level 4 laboratory, which was the kind of high security bug tank where scientists dink around with exotic viral agents that have no treatment or vaccines. This is precisely the scenario Steve King explores in his magnum opus The Stand, though his story showcases a doomsday kind of bug with only a marginal survival rate, and it subsequently wipes out nearly all of the world population.

It was premature and likely far-off base to deem the spread as a purposeful Chinese bio-terrorism attack, because the mortality rate was relatively low, presuming the nationalist paranoia panned out and China truly intended to thin out planet Earth’s herd. If it was an engineered virus, it was not a terribly effective one in terms of numbers. The Chinese are anything but inefficient. Additionally, the United States had no small amount of BS-4 labs ourselves, nor were we any more or less humanly fallible than the Chinese. There are too many humans who still think bio-terrorism is a viable option in competition for resources. As horrible as the virus seemed to be, it wasn't the worst of what could be leaked into the world, from virtually any major militarized nation-state, including ours.

By the by, for what it’s worth, when we’re the kind of beings who weaponize biological agents and nuclear fusion, we have to consider the possibility we may end up staying the type zero civilization that we currently are in the cosmos, one that not only hasn’t figured out how to harness the sustainable energy resources of its planet, but is still concerning itself with utilizing said resources to kill large amounts of our fellow creatures. New diseases are an unfortunate circumstance of living out of balance with our ecosystem, and yes, they can be results of foolishly tinkering around with biochemical stuff.

The virus resulted in everyone confronting our respective shelf lives. Technically that was already a day-by-day consideration we by and large chose to ignore under normal circumstances, unless something pressing reminded us of it. That’s why we freaked out, because we really hadn’t had to consider that fear in our era to a widespread degree. Then suddenly we did, and it sure was a great reason to visit the liquor cabinet or the bottle of xanax in the cupboard.

Whether one was a soft-shelled Beta or a hard-boiled Alpha, we all felt the heebie-jeebies, quaffing down a collective soup of anxiety and disinformation overload. It was also a fair time to reassess our connections to one another and examine what it really meant to be human and our understandings about life and death.

Pointing out the obvious, if we’d chosen a more spiritual and agrarian evolutionary path, one tuned to sustaining our natural environment rather than the meta-technological adolescence we continue to navigate, critters like pangolins or bats probably wouldn’t need to be considered for sustenance. Human beings are shooting themselves in the foot when they waste time and resources on laboratories constructed for exploring bio-terrorist methodology.

People took more notice of the elderly and front line medical workers and food distribution chains, and they started to consider what was more existentially important than careers or money or television or the internet.

The universe hints at things sometimes. Actually, she levies guidance fairly often, I wager, but a species has to be sentient enough and emotionally evolved enough to hear her.  Serendipity and synchronicity exist, but those wavelengths are hard to find and harder to surf for civilizations still mired in the roots of their primal origins.

Still, a legit pandemic finally hitting the American scene after years of apocalyptic flicks and fiction finally gave us real-time context to pause and ponder causes of the potential nightmare.

I’ll go ahead and drop the first of what will surely be too many pop clichés within this volume catered to the kids who came of age in the seventies and eighties. One of Gen X’s favorite childhood toys was created way back in 1946 as a token medium for supposed clairvoyants, but its popularity really took off in 1971 when the corporate toy world got their hands on it and marketed it to kids. There are twenty answers on that die floating around inside that gel.

Did the onset of the Covid pandemic and the sociopolitical fallout of 2020 spell an end for us dogs of Generation X?

Magic 8-Ball says…reply hazy, try again later.

*Compiled from March 11, 2020