On Living In The Coronavirus Age

Today, we were scheduled to be down at Myrtle Beach for the annual CCMF Kickoff Golf Tournament and Concert.  It is one of the rites of spring we look forward to.

The plan was to drive down Friday night, spend the weekend with a couple of  our closest friends at their condo,  enjoy the weekend, and then take part in the festivities today.

Well, on Friday morning...the CCMF events were postponed.

So, what to do?  After the sledgehammer-to-the-head that the last couple of days of the week were, the LAST thing we wanted to do was sit around the house watching doom and gloom on TV-or worse, watch people fight over toilet paper at Wal Mart (on second thought, that might have been fun for a bit <g>).

In a conversation that took about 2 seconds, our friends and us decided, "Screw it, we're going to the beach.  We can live our life anywhere, so why not there."

So true.

A friend of mine posted this over the weekend, it's over 70 years old and was written by British writer and lay theologian, CS Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia).  It is entitled "On Living In the Atomic Age."  As you can tell by the title it was a response to the public fear of "the bomb."  Everywhere you see "Coronavirus," I have replaced that word for "atomic" or "atomic bomb."  Amazing how all these years later, the words still ring true.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in a Coronavirus age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the Coronavirus was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by the Coronavirus, let that virus when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about viruses. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

Now, don't take this as we're ignoring advice or safe practices (btw-we've been washing our hands for our whole lives, so we've been woke to this for a while now), that's not the case.  We just choose to do these things while not living in fear, panic, and hysteria.

How are you going to live your life?