WHEN READING about history, memorable events in the usually distant past like wars or the fall of governments, one generally knows how the ending turned out, whether glorious or tragic, who the villains and heroes were (for the latter, usually the ones writing about them) and perhaps what we can learn from them. The details and linking of sometimes disparate events make history worth reading.
But what if you’re living through times such as what the world is going through now?
Aren’t these historic events, already being compared to other pandemics like the Black Death of the Middle Ages around 1347 (200 million dead) and the 1918 Spanish Flu (another 100 million casualties).
Oral history chronicles events from interviews of survivors, those who lived through the times under study, usually looking back on their experiences and fears, and eventually how they coped. It’s only the survivors that are given the chance to narrate how it all was. Or the journals of those who fell.
Somebody should be making a journal and taking notes. Here are some notes still fresh in the mind.
For three months of the quarantine, you mostly stayed home, except to do groceries. Those who still had jobs set up a nook at home for work and attended virtual meetings. Performers and newscasters did their work and posted their performances online. The multiple screen splits became a regular feature for viewing anything, including concerts of groups and bands.
You had a morbid fascination with the news, especially daily reports of testing, contagion rates, recoveries, and death tolls provided routinely at a specified time. Foreign news was the same and there were country-by-country indices on how everybody stacked up on the virus indices. It was a new kind of competition, replacing GDP indices. The news included too the latest prohibitions on social movements, except for those being serenaded on their birthdays.
The economy dipped in spite of the billions spent on social amelioration and monetary stimuli. It’s a challenge for companies to make money when everything was closed for one quarter and there were no customers.
A ‘new normal” was how the social distancing mantra was cascaded. This included the avoidance of physical human contact, except at home when the spirit moved you. Digital transactions from a distance became the norm for payments and business transactions.
Even social rituals like weddings and anniversaries needed to be canceled unless conducted in the digital realm. Saddest of these were deaths in the family, especially in hospitals where the deceased was quickly bundled out straight to cremation with a short wake attended by a few family members.
How many books did you read in the lockdown? What about all the unused clothes that just gathered mildew? Who were the heroes of the era? Why were there so many musical videos of men and women in face masks? These little touches of life in the time of the virus make the story breathe.
The note-taking of historic events is a continuous process, what corporate communicators, who don’t know what to do next, call a “work in progress.” How do we even know that these are truly events that will be of interest to future generations? Will your great-grandchildren just shrug their shoulders when informed of these “hard times” — what was the fuss all about? There were more deaths from road accidents in one year than the casualties of that pandemic.
The difficulty of living through historic times is understanding when this movie would end and how much longer it intends to run. Endings are, after all, artificially constructed by historians and novelists. Where the story starts and where it ends is a decision historians make, as well as which characters to follow.
Unlike a historian with perfect hindsight, aided by a lot of research, the character in this yet unfinished story is filled with dread at the uncertainty of survival and how the new economy would affect him. For the individual in historic times, the empty streets and then the slightly increasing traffic of vehicles and pedestrians in face masks, was just scenery he began to accept. Uncertainty of the future is an input for his coping mechanism, like denial.
How it all ends for an individual is an important chapter only in his life… not necessarily to be recorded in the history of these times.
Tony Samson is Chairman and EO, TOUCH xda
