I have been having a number of conversations with friends in recent days about how particularly odd is this pandemic. It’s not that we haven’t gone through difficult times before — we certainly have.
It’s that no other tragedy in our lifetimes has utterly changed the nature of society. The very way that people connect has changed, in fundamental ways. Ways of personal connection that we thought were immutable have ceased full stop.
One topic that comes up often is how we will describe this time to those who are not yet born. It might be impossible to truly comprehend to anyone who has not actually lived through it.
I imagine it might be something like the dilemma facing soldiers who came back from the front in WWI and WWII. There was no way to truly convey what they had gone through, so in many cases they simply did not try.
The difference is, of course, that in this case the “front” is everywhere. So the question is not so much what we will tell our children, but how we will tell them.