The Meaning of the Great Pandemic Forgetting

This week marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, an anniversary notable for how little commemoration happened. The pandemic killed over a million Americans and disrupted daily life deeper and longer than any event in this country since World War II.

The lack of comment may simply reflect a trauma response. Few people want to relive those dark days, and so are choosing not to. Those seeds were sewn during the pandemic itself, when new movies and TV shows took place in a world where the pandemic just did not exist. Most people just wanted to get back to “normal” and get past the awful thing as fast as we could.

While that may be the main reason that the arguably most consequential event of my lifetime has been flushed down the memory hole, I also think it has to do with intense feelings of shame and embarrassment. The pandemic response could have united people together in a common cause, but it didn’t. In the first days there did seem to be a strong sense that we were all in this together, but we had the misfortune to experience this event with Trump as president. Soon he was making Democratic governors beg in order to get relief and promoting injecting bleach. This man thrives on conflict and whipping up his base against his enemies, so COVID was bound to do more to divide than unite us.

Vaccines are a case in point. The government helped produce a vaccine in record time, but paradoxically, the pandemic did most to undermine vaccination than any other in our history. Now we have the spectacle of a deadly measles outbreak with the head of Health and Human Services proposing woo-woo remedies and downplaying vaccination. States and localities in conservative areas are banning the wearing of masks outright. The people who might be the most likely to remember the pandemic are also the ones most ashamed of the response, and so would rather not be reminded of our society’s complete failure to unite to stop the disease and prevent future outbreaks.

I also think there is a lot of shame and embarrassment out there on behalf of what I can only call “non-essential workers.” The corporate flunkies and desk jockeys actually materially benefitted from the pandemic. They got to work from home for years, and treat being called back on-site like a war crime. Their quality of life improved while they saved money on child care and transportation. When children could not go to school, they had jobs that allowed them to parent and not abandon them. However, desk jockeys know deep down that the “essential workers” endured a very different pandemic. They may not even consciously think about, but deep down, it haunts them.

Service workers endured massive layoffs and uncertainty. Those who kept their jobs had to face the dangers of infection. One of the forgotten statistics of the time was that line cooks were the people whose chances of death spiked highest. People literally gave their lives so that the remote work class wouldn’t have to prepare their own meals. Other workers faced higher stress due to the demands of the pandemic.

As a teacher I lived this first hand. In the spring of 2020 I completely altered my teaching practice to be able to teach over Zoom. Come fall I had to come back to school on half my days, teaching remotely on some, teaching a “hybrid” model with my students split remote and onsite with me. That meant, in the space of less than a year, completely retooling my curriculum and practice a second time. Later in the school year I was back on campus every day, which was hair-raising because my children’s school wasn’t open yet. Thankfully that impossible situation only lasted a week.

In the process of changing my practice multiple times I still tried to keep the learning going as best as I could. I would work twelve hour days to this end, and had to neglect my own children’s education in the bargain. My students and superiors were appreciative of my efforts, but all of this work did not net me a pay raise, or more social respect. I cannot count the number of conversations I had in that time with other people shitting on teachers. (Of course, I was assured that I was “one of the good ones.”) In a parallel with vaccines, our work to keep things going and hold the pandemic at bay actually undermined us. I try not to be bitter, but I feel like I went out and fought a war for the benefit of the society I live in, and have only been paid back in neglect and disdain. The teachers who did the bare minimum were the smart ones, I guess.

It didn’t help that schools often handled their policies poorly. For one, nothing was coordinated, meaning that the opening status of my school, my spouse’s school, and my children’s school were all completely different, an impossible situation. Some districts managed to find ways to keep things as open as possible safely. Others cruelly threw safety to the wind. I know someone whose co-teacher got COVID, and their school would not let them quarantine. You can guess that happened: this person also got COVID while having a chronic condition that made the disease far deadlier. At my children’s school I assumed that once teachers were vaccinated that things would re-open, but faculty resisted coming back until May. It’s truly embarrassing that such a thing happened, or that the town I live in would close the schools during outbreaks but not the bars. The lesson seemed to be that children didn’t really matter.

COVID was a failure on so many levels, and a shameful one at that. It’s obvious why so few people would want to drag it out into the light of memory again. In our current moment, the COVID failure obviously mirrors our current cultural and political failure. We could not keep a man who tried a coup to hold onto power from getting back into the White House. The prevailing spirit in the land is one of acquisitive nihilism where the goal of life is spending money on empty pleasures. The idea of doing things for the collective good is held up for mockery.

I think the nihilism of late consumer capitalism had seeped in before the pandemic and conditioned its response, but the pandemic also boosted the nihilistic tendency. When Margaret Thatcher said “there is no such thing as society” in the 80s it was audacious, in the 2020s it’s merely a description of how most people now relate to each other. If a society faces a crisis and people refuse to come together for the common good, then that is a truly sick society.

This anniversary I just try to remember the times when I did see people work in concert to help each other during COVID. I hope it’s still possible to revive those values.