In the early days of the Covid pandemic, reporters and historians turned to history for lessons of what we might expect, and the pitfalls we might avoid. They quickly identified the 1919-‘19 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people worldwide as a possible analogue—and in fact it would turn out to be alarmingly predictive. One of the most interesting—and inexplicable—things they discovered: after it abated, no one mentioned the epidemic. Unlike the contemporaneous World War, people didn’t make movies about the flu epidemic or erect memorials to the dead or commemorate it with holidays or remembrances.
It’s been five years since Covid shut down the United States. That’s just long enough to see that, like our ancestors in the last century, we’re burying its traumas as fast as we can. I saw a few articles note the date last week, but the movies, memorials, and official commemorations are nowhere. Instead, the most visible monument to Covid may be the new Health and Human Services head, RFK Jr, who is leading the U.S. government to abandon the very vaccines that kept Covid’s death toll from ballooning to the levels of the earlier one.
This is very strange. Why would societies work so hard to ignore something so consequential? Why would they fight about the science and facts of the events, which were so well-documented? Why would a large portion of the population join an anti-vax cult of death during and after a pandemic?
Any time people are unwilling or unable to revisit bad experiences, it’s not because they’ve forgotten them and moved on. It’s because they’re too traumatic to examine. The disfiguring wounds may have scabbed over, but they still ache. Looking at the trauma feels overwhelming, so we bury it.
Society isn’t well. We are isolated and angry, and, in country after country, at each other’s throats. I haven’t seen any polling on this question, but my guess is that people across the political spectrum feel a pervasive sense of helplessness, a loss of control. In the U.S., conservatives have been very vocal about their sense of lost power and grievance, and the entire Trump/Elon effort to dismantle government can be read as a desperate effort to take control of the wheel. Americans spend less time investigating the emotional space of the left, but based on personal experience, I would describe it as a form of nihilism, a feeling that the world is spinning apart and we can’t do anything about it. Everyone feels that someone has the power, it’s just not them.
Society wasn’t healthy before March 2020, either. These trends blossoming now were already taking root, but Covid supercharged them. It’s not helpful to construct a unified field theory for how this dis-ease arose (and anyway not possible); its causes were many and pervasive. Covid’s role in all this, however, was to inject an extra-potent dose of random horror into our lives.
We didn’t understand Covid and couldn’t predict what it would do. Loved ones were dying and we couldn’t stop it. We didn’t know how to protect ourselves except to cut ourselves off from one another—the most emotionally damaging thing a person can do. In most of life’s situations, someone knows what to do: a firefighter or a general, a president or a doctor. During Covid, bodies were literally piling up and we couldn’t stop it. Society had come to a standstill and we all huddled in our houses. Even though it was happening, it was unthinkable.
In an environment when no one seems to know what to do, we try to seize control in whatever capacity we can—by taking ivermectin, wearing masks, closing schools, getting vaccinated, or believing the vaccine, not the virus, is the real danger. The debate about how the virus started was a perfect metaphor for our helplessness. It was pointless on the merits, but trying establish this one fact gave people a sense of control. We all struggled through it, isolated, and then it ended—or more accurately, became a chronic rather than acute crisis. It was a horrible violation to our sense of stability and safety, and left no lessons in its wake.
We are left five years later terribly divided and unable to deal with this trauma. That lack of introspection and the inability to rest with our powerlessness has left us fighting proxy wars in politics, on social media, among families and friends. I suspect many people would argue that the current political turmoil dates entirely to years before Covid. There’s no doubt that we have been following a clear trajectory since (select one: the 1980s or 1960s or 1930s or 1780s), but did the first Trump administration predict the second? Are we on a linear trajectory?
I would counter with this. The radical actions happening in Washington don’t make sense without Covid. They’re too weird, too extreme, too unprecedented to exist without an intervening factor. Societies don’t throw away a stable status quo. People upend their way of life during moments of extreme turmoil, when radical change seems rational. Future historians will look at the U.S. economy, the normalcy of the Biden administration, the relative stability of international order and wonder, why did they throw it all away? In one way or another, that’s the question we’ve all been asking these last fifty-odd days. It just doesn’t make sense. The thing is, we have not felt stability, and I think it’s because Covid freaked us out in ways we weren’t emotionally prepared to handle, and which we’re still trying to process—often in extremely damaging ways.
My wish is that we would use this time each year to stop and remember how hard March 2020 was. We were so scared, and so many people died, and we had grief for so many things. Fear, confusion, and grief are part of being human. It’s okay to experience them. More than that, until we experience them and come to a sense of peace, we’re going to keep misdirecting our trauma in an attempt to find the control Covid revealed we never had. The results will be full of the confusion we’re wrestling with, and they won’t lead to clarity or healing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like 2025 is the year my wish comes true.
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