I Grew Up on Disaster Stories: We are Doing a Lot Better than I Expected
Forget the shots of empty airports; let’s see more apocalypse films with teddy bear hunts
I attribute a lot of my early interest in public health to library books. Novels like A Matter of Days by Amber Kizer and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven dotted my bookshelf and my imagination in grade school. Both are set after a viral outbreak recedes from society and the survivors are left to rebuild what is left of it (spoiler alert: it’s not much). I took a strange amount of motivation from the desire to keep these stories in the fictional world. After going to a summer conference at the CDC, I became obsessed with Steven Soderburg’s film Contagion. When I showed the movie to my mom and told her I wanted the epidemiologist Erin Mears’ job, she blanched at my idea of a good time. In my adolescent idealism, I told her what I always thought: I’m going to help make sure something like this never happens.
Enter my (abridged) spring semester and it appears that I was born a tad too late to be like Erin Mears and attempt such a heavy feat. Ever since February, I have been snacking on Contagion clips and painfully admitting how close they are to our COVID-19 reality. Soderburg’s story of a respiratory virus originating from a bat is China and overwhelming government institutions sounds too much like a news briefing. On a micro level, I feel eerily similar to Matt Damon’s character wandering through a dimly-lit and scantily-clad grocery store, where people have decided to battle it out for toilet paper of all objects. Some people can argue that our current situation is worse than the film, which failed to predict that an outbreak would salt the wound of racial tensions in our America, both through discrimination against Asian-Americans and the unbalanced toll of the virus on African-American communities. Even with the bleak headlines, I have to acknowledge that none of the movies or books depicting global pandemics would be able to predict the goodwill flowing through America in the past month. While it sounds cheesy on paper, I have a lot more hope for us a month into quarantine than I did entering it, when all I had for reference was what was between the covers of books.
Most of my fictional characters emerge from their quarantines pasty-faced and sallow-cheeked, but I don’t think novelists could have predicted the actual quarantine lifestyles we follow. Looking out my window right now, the streets are lined with dog walkers and sunbathers, all responsibly-spaced, soaking up the warm weather. It’s all fully permissible even under Shelter-in-Place guidelines. I wonder with a chuckle why sunbathers didn’t make the cut in any movies. Last week, in my upteenth rewatch of Contagion I noticed that the sky looks unrealistically dark the entire film. Maybe it’s time to let filmmakers know that viruses don’t impact the weather, or possibly we are incredibly lucky that the virus hit the US in the springtime when the sun is returning. Either way, if the recent rise in popularity of running or my younger cousins’ fervent hunts for window teddy bears are any evidence, people are still finding ways to come outside for fresh air. Frankly, we are all better for it.
Social Distancing brings an inevitable degree of isolation as well, but it also gives us a unique opportunity to reflect on which relationships we actually want to put time into. Maybe you find yourself feeling less frazzled now that you aren’t keeping in touch with the office worrywart. Conversely, maybe you were called to reconnect with someone from your past who challenged you to be a better person. For me, I’m finally able to meet the neighbors I never really knew through front-porch conversations. Sure, it’s an older demographic than I am usually used to hanging out with, but their perspectives on the past are a refreshing break from conversations with my younger peers where the conversations always seem to point to the future. Distance no longer appears to be an excuse for Americans to fall out of touch, either. Phone calls are making a surprising comeback into modern life, and every day it feels as if the calls are coming from less and less familiar people. I mean “less familiar” in the best way possible; it’s an opportunity to see who remembers you thought about you as the world slows down, and the answer is usually surprising. No one could have predicted in a disaster-scenario the urge people would feel to create a patchwork community of so many disparate people from their lives or that it would feel at least remotely comforting. I certainly did not.
Barring social interaction, authors predict American response to disaster to be greedy and mob-like. I pictured vignettes of smashed bank windows and smoldering flames around city squares. With so much more time on our hands and so many unemployed, it is shocking to think that violent crime is actually on the decline. It appears that when America’s entrepreneurial culture was halted in the workplace, it moved towards unpaid endeavors. Now that mass-industry is failing to reach the need for medical supplies, Facebook is splotched with impromptu groups of women and men trying cottage-industry again, sewing healthcare workers N-95 mask covers for free. College students now with less class demands are developing websites to help at-risk populations with food delivery. While in Station Eleven live broadcasts peter out as anchors quit to be with their families, for better or for worse the broadcasts continue from home. Even TEDx Conferences, refusing to cancel, are experimenting with online, pre-recorded formats. We all must acknowledge that virtual events are nowhere close to the real thing, but there is something distinctly American about us all wanting to keep busy. Whether we are working at no wages for the benefit of others or simply trying to maintain a sense of routine by digitizing what we always thought HAD to be in person (live stand-up!), the fact that we continue to find goals and projects makes me confident that there is a future to be excited for.
Disaster stories are great at depicting the onset of a disaster, but the way many Americans have chosen to respond is something no author or algorithm could predict. Hopefully, the next pandemic story will be able to feature the vignettes of happiness that show so starkly in hard times. Forget dramatic shots of empty airports and give us car parades of schoolteachers honking at their students, Passover Seders hosted over Zoom, or families laughing at their failed attempt to create a viral TikTok. We all know that COVID-19 is a global disaster; let’s do the challenging thing for once and focus on the positivity that is harder to find.
