Journal of the Plague Year 14

The streets and sidewalks where I walk are becoming littered with falling leaves. Many of the trees are still green-leafed but within a few weeks they will become bare and with a sigh I will anticipate the incoming winter. There will be snow and life will freeze with the plunging temperature. I will enter my winter hibernation.
          The pandemic isn’t quite over. Camus’s old man acknowledges that “What is plague? It’s life and that’s all!” Conceptualized this way plague never goes away; I would gladly dispose of my supply of masks, but alas, that event does not seem possible in this moment. I have heard that the Moderna vaccine booster will become available in November and I will get the shot, and hope for good health. But I am aware every day that the world has indeed for me changed. I cannot at this moment think about entering a movie theater, once my happy place; I am yet loath to get on an airplane; I do not leave my house without a mask, carried when outdoors and worn whenever I enter any establishment. I have grown accustomed to seeing children at school bus stops wearing their masks. How strange it must be for them and yet how normal. 
            Defoe’s narrator, H.F., in A Journal of the Plague Year, complains that as the plague began to wane the people began to celebrate irresponsibly. He writes, “”The audacious creatures were so possess’d with the first Joy, and so surprize’d with the Satisfaction of seeing a vast decrease I the weekly Bills, that they were impenetrable by any new Terrors, and would not be persuaded, but that the Bitterness of Death was pass’d; and it was to no more purpose to talk to them, that to an East-wind; but they open’d Shops, went about Streets, did Business, and conversed with any Body that came in their Way to converse with, whether with Business, or without, neither inquiring of the Health, or so much as being Apprehensive of any Danger from them, tho’ they knew them not to be sound.” Of course, this recklessness led to an increase in incidence of plague and further unnecessary deaths. 
          Defoe’s description of London in 1665 reflects to me the situation in the United States today. Too many people walk about oblivious of the presence of plague and too many of them angrily resist cautions imposed in business establishments, harass those who wear masks and berate and physically attack those who insist that they too mask up. Too many (mostly Republican Trump supporters) refuse the efficacious vaccine and continue to occupy the ICU beds in overcrowded hospitals. H.F complains that “it must be acknowledg’d that the general Practice of the People was just as it was before, and very little Difference was to be seen.” I suppose it must be denial: this won’t happen to me, they might think. Or maintain some obstinate insistence that nothing should trouble the comfort they once enjoyed even though the world in which that comfort was enjoyed is gone! And then I read the news today, oh boy!