I started to work on a fairy tale of sorts last week, it isn’t yet ready for publication, but hopefully soon, or perhaps never. I am not sure why I started writing it exactly, maybe because my head is full of The Tales of Beedle the Bard which recently made it into my Audible library. Fairy tales are stories we tell ourselves, tell our children to inspire them, to shock them, to motivate them, and yes at times, even to scare them. I can only speculate, but I am guessing that J.K. Rowling found inspiration for her book of tales in the Children’s and Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm? We often associate fairy tales with happy endings, but the Grimm brothers were not convinced.
While I have thoroughly enjoyed the Tales of Beedle the Bard, I must admit that I was never really into fairy tales as a child. I never found much use for those stories or the morals that they were espousing. Now that I think of it, growing up in a Danish home, I was far more familiar with the fables written by Hans Christen Anderson, than the Brothers Grimm (the Little Mermaid, the Ugly Duckling). Despite my exposure to fairy tales, perhaps my lack of enthusiasm with them stemmed from knowing that the truth is always stranger than fiction. And that has never been more true than at this juncture we collectively find ourselves today.
What is jaw-dropping to me is the collective consent the world has exercised in relation to the threat posed by a virus. Albeit, I am hesitant to describe this consent as informed consent as I don’t think people actually knew what they were signing up for in all of this. I am not just talking about the next four to six weeks of continued isolation and public shaming that we are all in for either (New York City has just released an app to rat out one another to the authorities for not social distancing). We have consented to be led en masse towards a massive knife-edge and while the time to pull back is quickly shrinking, we if act sooner rather than later, we may yet selvidge our children’s future. I am with Rex Murphy on this one, who frankly has been one of the lone voices of reason within the media in all of this…
I do not know if it is possible, in the middle of a genuine national crisis, to gather the intellectual and financial resources to deal with a future, but imminent, one. The scale of the economic crisis we will be facing must somehow find the serious attention and planning and urgency we are bringing to COVID-19. Even as, in the darkest of ironies, we are still attempting to combat the coronavirus.
It is an inescapable fact, an axiom of implacable logic, that we must deal with the first crisis first. But the economic crisis to come is already boiling beneath us. Lives are already being upended. The stability of normal times is in disruption. And millions go through their days disturbed in spirit and likely their mental health as well.
It must somehow be prepared for, to whatever degree it can be, now.
While we have a responsibility as citizens to care for one another in civil society, this care surely is not only to be confined to one’s immediate physical health needs. As I pen this post a total of forty-eight people (all loved and cherished) have died in Alberta from the virus. While this is not a trivial number, I can’t help contrast that to the fact that over 20,000 people die each and every day to communicable diseases; over 3,000 people die every day in traffic accidents, and this doesn’t account for all the deaths that occur daily due to starvation, war and heart disease, just to name a few. Each and every day, for the last number of years, those deaths have racked up annually into the millions, without significant intervention.
Yet mysteriously, we collectively have decided en masse to choose COVID 19 as “the” great threat to humanity to respond to, and by the response, I mean literally shut down the entire global economy, Sweden excluded. What led to that decision, fear? As I mentioned above, the collective consent to lock ourselves away in our homes, was not informed, as we have not been given the full picture of what that decision will likely result in. What I do know is that the economic tsunami that is coming is unlike anything the world has experienced since 1929. While we collectively hold our breath and long for days of social interaction in the sunshine, which will come (sooner rather than later I hope), we haven’t imagined or prepared for the economic strife which is steamrolling towards us as we lie helpless tied to the tracks.
From the tone of this post, you may have deduced that I am not sold on the global response towards this virus. If you picked that up, you would be correct. Frankly, I am fully with the Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell who is directing his country towards a more measured approach to all of this mayhem and is not willing to sacrifice the Swedish economic livelihood to beat the virus. I am with Tegnell and others who recognize that humanity is dependent on more than our physical health. We are social creatures, dependent on gathering and sharing experiences and resources. Some would argue that it is only this which makes us “human”, the essential element which separates us from the rest of the mammals on this planet.
Alberta did not choose to go the way of Sweden in all of this, but we did seemingly come prepared. We have tested more aggressively than almost anywhere else per capita and our social distancing has limited the spread of the virus. Unlike Sweden, our approach apparently is not geared to developing herd immunity, and so many experts speculate that we will encounter waves of an outbreak again in the fall and next spring. As troubling as that sounds for some in terms of health outcomes, it would be devastating for our economy which funds our daily lives, not to mention our healthcare system. Let us hope for the speedy delivery of a vaccine.
Not all fairy tales are happily ever after. The cliche posits that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes, and yet, we collectively seem to have deluded ourselves into a place where death is no longer one of those certainties. Don’t get me wrong, I wish death on no one, but I am not naive enough to pretend that it doesn’t come for us all at some point, a cloak of invisibility or not!
As in most fairy tales, the characters of the story find themselves in dangerous times, strange times, ridiculous times. The end of the story ultimately depends on the author’s imagination, and yet, it is not hard within this story to surmise that the story will not end happily ever after. While there is still time to reign in the herd and bend their trajectory, the cliff is not that far off in the distance.