The Reckoning

“It’s amazing that any of us are sane,” I say to myself, whenever my thoughts (even momentarily) apprehend the sheer scale of the pandemic; what it was, and what we so quickly, forcibly moved on from. I said it the other day, when a song from HBO’s Station Eleven bubbled up on shuffle; Station Eleven was the show of the pandemic for me, as those who were around here at the time will recall.

Station Eleven wasn’t about the pandemic — well, not our pandemic — but through absolutely dreadful/magnificent luck, it surfaced in 2021 at the exact moment it needed to. Partly because it was about a pandemic, but moreover about a world moving on after cataclysmic change; perhaps more importantly, at least in retrospect, because it was about a main character simply not dealing with her trauma for, like, 20 years. Kirsten gets “weird texts” about her parents being dead as an 8-year-old girl and twenty years later, she’s still flushing that grief into her art, onstage in a bird costume, perhaps alchemizing her own story into something that will bring meaning; or perhaps just rubbing grotty fingers in a wound that never healed and never would. She sleeps with her knives, after all. She still doesn’t feel safe.

All of this happened on one television series that wasn’t about our pandemic; but it also happened after a year in which I became well and fully irked to realize that most Western entertainment was going to dutifully invent a world in which the blasted thing had never happened at all. I’m sure there were plenty of shows — procedurals, probably — that worked masking and social distancing into their storylines; I never saw them. The majority of the TV that I watched in 2020, 2021, 2022 and beyond gave us the multiverse: the strand of time in which none of it ever happened, and life continued apace. Cowardly. In so many ways, vile. Those of us who pay attention to the film and television industry became familiar with the extraordinary precautions that the responsible productions put in place to ensure that they could continue to work; this was a Good Thing. But the last step of that process was always the same: the performers’ masks came off, tucked in a pocket somewhere, and then they’d shoot. Film and television are always an illusion: et voila. A world without COVID.

Even Doctor Who — even Doctor Who!! a series whose premise has seen it visit any number of historical disruptions, pandemics, epidemics, outbreaks of all kinds!! — couldn’t be arsed to visually imagine a 2020 in which people wore N95s to go to the grocery store. It was left to the audio dramas; the Eighth Doctor adventure, “Stranded” (another bit of eerie artistic synchronicity, in which the Doctor is stranded and housebound in early 2020 London, which was written before the pandemic) ends with an acknowledgement that when the Doctor’s sequestration ended, he emerged into a world where people wore masks. But we never saw it. Bill mentioned the masking to Nardole in the YouTube short that Steven Moffat wrote, but we never saw it.

Here’s the thing about Doctor Who, though: it keeps going, and the Doctor keeps time-travelling, and someday — when enough distance has passed between us and the trauma of actually going through the thing — the Doctor will pop out of the bright blue box, see a person walk by in business-casual with a white face-mask on, and declare “2020! I remember it well!” or some such, and be off on another adventure. On The Pitt on HBO, we’re watching the worst day in Noah Wyle’s life, because enough time has passed since the pandemic that he is actually (for reasons that are, as of this writing, unexplained) working on the anniversary of the day that his mentor died during COVID.

This is how it happened after September 11th too, as I recall; first, the brassy entertainment machine (which, to be fair, was caught as flat-footed by the tragedy as everyone else not in the American government), enforced a sense of normalcy by just carrying on with the show, and the show didn’t have 9/11 in it; later, like years later, the art began to actually look at the trauma and unpack it. With 9/11, the first attempts at reckoning were much more allegorical — M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village; Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, both dancing around the edges of what it felt like to be then, without having to actually be then. Eventually, as American überpatriotism became more and more codified, you could do films where the planes actually struck the towers or only threatened to; and all of it bundled the story of how America Definitely Wasn’t Fucked in a bright flag and made itself the official word from then on.

The trouble with the pandemic getting a similar treatment — again, at least as of this writing — is that no one seems to be able to agree on what the story was. A plurality of those who went through it (at least, again, in the West) are pretty relentlessly firm on the premise that it was nothing more than a gargantuan waste of their time and tax money and an unfair curtailing of their rights. A desperate minority, meanwhile, is still going through it and trying to force the boulder of equity uphill in increasingly inhospitable times. Alongside all of that there is what is, perhaps, the majority of people, who are just generally of the opinion the pandemic was what it was, and that they got through it, and that everything is back to normal now. “Wasn’t that weird, when we all banged pots on our balconies and made sourdough? Memories!”

The pandemic was nobody’s fault. The impacts of the pandemic, perhaps, another story. But what’s notable about this moment — as 2024 has bled into 2025 and (I imagine) for the rest of this weird, angry, fascist-leaning decade — is how many of the people who saw us through the biggest disaster of any of our lives — perhaps imperfectly, perhaps incompletely, perhaps! — are now being made to wear an entire civilization’s feelings about that whole thing. Those scapegoat leaders are being swept away in favour of idiots, charlatans, and outright monsters whose underlying message seems to be some variation of “with me, you never have to feel that way or even think about it again.” TV didn’t show us the masks, and now real life doesn’t need to either. It was a blip. An error. It didn’t really happen, not really.

Leaving aside my feelings about the compassion-vacant, aimlessly amoral plurality of people for whom the very premise of kindness has become some kind of negative political stance, I’m finding it more interesting lately to think about our seemingly endless ability to adapt to gruesome circumstances. The way the feeling of horror deadens over time, no matter how horrific the material is. (The way the other side weaponizes this, has weaponized it, is weaponizing it right now, to produce sweeping evil that will take generations to un-make.) Witnessing one month of the massacres in Gaza is infuriating, maddening, soul-destroying; but endure fifteen months of witnessing it, and it feels different somehow. It still feels like all of those things it did before, but in a different framework or proportion, because clearly, the “I can’t bear this” of it all proved not to be true, no matter how unbearable we found it and still find it. We did bear it. We bore it. It was borne, and we’re still here, and it’s still happening, and it feels like none of our feelings about it mattered to anyone but ourselves.

This phenomenon — where we adjust to horror — cannot be anything but innate. No one would choose this. No one would choose to get used to being daily threatened with invasion by the largest military power on Earth, but somehow, I have; it still scares the white shit straight out of me, but I’m not huddled in a corner stocking up on ammunition, so clearly, I’m getting used to it. I still log on to my computer and earn money and go out with friends and all. We’re fully at Threat Level Midnight in all directions these days, but I still filed my HST return last Thursday. We adjust and keep going because we can’t do anything else. It’s maddening, which is likely why so many of us have gone mad.

I was reading this piece by Kate Manne the other day. About resilience, about how we all built up our bench-strength in that laudable (?) quality in the face of adversity in 2020 and 2021, and how maybe doing so got displaced into something else, something bad, something where we learned not to feel the sand in our shoe. We became the grit; we stopped recognizing the chafe. Great, we’re oysters making pearls; but think, for a moment, about how much having a piece of sand in your moist, gentle oyster-flesh must hurt. In my sangha we’re talking about calcination, the first step of alchemy; and I’m a writer, so of course I believe in, and aspire to, alchemy. But what does it mean to really turn toward the thing that has harmed us, to let it burn and let it burn us, so that we can move on to the next step of transformation? It would hurt, wouldn’t it? I think it would have to hurt a lot. I think it would have to hurt like the time, fourteen years old and incredibly careless, I grabbed a retort ring in Chemistry class, mere seconds after I’d turned off the bunsen burner that was heating it. That heat hurt so much that it struck me temporarily blind. Nerve-dead. A lightning world, beyond sensation. And then the sensation came roaring back; and that was worse.

The pandemic hurt. It hurt a lot. But it also hurt us, traumatized all of us, even (and probably, mostly) those of us who insist that it did not, could not, or should not. The pandemic evaporated, if only temporarily, a myth about the world and our lives within it that we’ve been using to self-soothe for far too long. In a saner version of the multiverse — neither the one we live in, nor the TV one they made up — I think we could have taken stock of some things that we were shown in those two turbulent years of semi-isolation; we could have had a reckoning with some of our longer maladies, which was long overdue. A lot of us did it internally, whether we wanted to or not (I sure did); but socially, culturally, broadly in the world, the machine got reset to factory-normal as quickly as it could (with more than a handful of false starts… remember 2021?) and everything just carried on. As a civilization, we never acknowledged or grieved that moment, and we certainly didn’t learn from it; and I have come to suspect that we are now seeing what that failure has done to us, and will continue to do to us, until a larger failure either brings us to our senses or wipes us out completely.

In the interim, maybe we can start to understand some of this, some of ourselves, through increasingly weird art; maybe someone can start to write that story. It would be a story of a person who keeps making the same mistakes and is running out of chances; Roy Hobbes (the novel’s version, not the film’s) fearing what he might do at his next crack at the bat. A machine, low on fuel, starting to make some very unusual noises as it gasps and guzzles and tries to keep functioning. A great and orange Saturn, devouring increasingly smaller sons, till there aren’t any left.