There will come a day, maybe even a day in the coming months, when Americans will wake up, leave their homes, throw off their masks, and come back to life. On that day, the great coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21 will end.
Ridiculous, right? A devoutly desirable, but highly unlikely consummation.
Here is the problem of anticipating the end of the pandemic: no one knows exactly what that end will be like or when it will come, or even whether we will know when we see it.
Is it when most of the country is vaccinated? When will all schools meet safely again? When are hospital COVID beds empty? When are American stadiums full for a summer baseball game? When will Disneyland reopen? When does wearing a mask look weird again?
“I don’t know I see a specific ending,” says Erica Rhodes, a Los Angeles comedian who has found unique ways to act through the pandemic. “I don’t foresee any time when I say, ‘Oh, everything is exactly as it was.'”
The kind of finish the coronavirus has reserved for tired Americans doesn’t have a clear ending. This is a hard-to-swallow pill for a long-trained nation, in some cases literally, to expect well-defined and often optimistic conclusions from tortuous sagas.
“Finding light in the dark is a very American thing to do,” President Joe Biden said this month. “In fact,” he said, “it may be the most American we do.”
The problem is that today’s world often doesn’t comply. Of course, the movies are free to be like “Independence Day,” where a messy American band led by Will Smith defeats the invading enemy. Real life? Rather like the conclusion of “The Sopranos,” when everything turns black, forever unresolved as a Journey sings that “the film never ends, it goes on and on and on.”
THE CLARITY OF THE FINALS
The American mark of the end: borrowed from the classical Greek narrative, industrial fact for four generations by Hollywood and Madison Avenue – says something like this: a story concludes with a specific resolution, usually after some action, good man heroism or large-scale character development, and usually at a specific and discernible moment.
Are we heading for this with the pandemic? Almost certainly not. And the gradual nature of things is wearing down the works, because it is not finished until it is finished, and even then it might not have ended.
“Without that clarity, we’re not used to that,” says Phil Johnston, screenwriter and Oscar-nominated director who worked on “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Zootopia.”
“I guess everyone has made their own version of this ‘movie,'” he says, offering his: “I was able to see a series of dissolutions over a long period of time. A boy comes out of his house. the mask.He’s sitting in a restaurant.And then it’s the passage of time, this long montage and this guy sits down and realizes, “Oh, that’s life. Life is back to normal.”
All kinds of transcendental things that modern humans suffer from have no different purposes. Climate change. The “war on terror.” Persistent racism and sexism and homophobia. These stories flow back, but because they are not considered specific “events,” they are often viewed differently.
Something like the pandemic, although, despite its protracted nature, it falls directly into the public and media container of an “event,” and that carries certain expectations. Between them is a discreet ending.
“We have this human tendency to structure our vital events into plot points. It helps us create a more interpretable and predictable world, “says Kaitlin Fitzgerald. a PhD student at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, who studies the role emotion plays in the consumption of stories.
“But, as we know in the real world, recovery is not a linear process and does not have a clearly defined end,” he says. “These popular media narratives portray them as if they were passing through minutes. This affects our expectations about how things should end. And when those expectations don’t match reality, it’s difficult. “
Elaine Paravati Harrigan, Fitzgerald’s research partner and visiting assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College, has delved into the same attitudes as she teaches her “pandemic psychology” course this past year.
“Without some kind of plan, we just live life. And that can be confusing and overwhelming, “he says.” If I can think of some kind of arc, some kind of plan that can help me understand my journey, it helps me find meaning in my day to day life. ” .
SAILING TO THE END
Children have been a special focus of this type of care for the past year, as the adults in their lives help them navigate towards a positive end to the pandemic without offering false hopes.
“In my opinion, discovering this final piece will really be a challenge for adults. And it will be a challenge not to build the mindsets of the children around them, “says Chuck Herring. the director of diversity, equity and inclusion for the South Fayette School District near Pittsburgh.
“People keep talking about when it’s over, when ‘back to normal.’ I tell them it won’t go back to normal. At least, not like a lot of people who are thinking,” Herring says.
However, the notion of end exists for a reason: people need markers in their lives to show that they have experienced things, that they move from one phase to another, that somehow there is a meaning in the which they support.
That’s why Jennifer Talarico, who studies how people remember events lived personally, suggests that while there may not be a real moment when the pandemic ends, it is important to find a way to mark it.
“I think of VE Day or VJ Day. Clearly this is not the end of the war; it took longer than that. But we have these days where there was a big community celebration, ”says Talarico, a professor of psychology at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.
“We build relationships based on reality, even though your story and my story are unique and may not have been shared at the time. Sharing the story becomes the way we know each other,” he says. Then, “Where did you go for Remembrance Day or Pandemicpalooza or whatever?”, Telling this story to the younger generations years later may be a community moment. “
In the end, so to speak, managing the expectations of a pandemic conclusion is an exercise in postponement, of facing the day to day without losing sight of the great things that could improve. Remembering the lost. Anchoring in the details, without losing the biggest plot. Create meaning. It could be said a lot, like a movie.
Let us leave you, then, with two quotes, uttered half a century apart by two very different writers.
The first comes from the little narrator of “When the Pandemic Ends” a children’s 2020 book by Iesha Mason: “I’ll be so happy once we get out of this crisis,” she says.
The second it comes from science fiction writer Frank Herbert: “There’s no real ending,” he said. “It’s just the place where you stop history.”
Which, for the purposes of our story about endings, is right here. Although the story of the pandemic is moving forward.
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Ted Anthony, director of digital innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted