I’m not one to cave into pandemonium, but if amazon sells out of toilet paper, I’m alarmed. I jolted out of bed this morning with one mission, and one mission only: buy toilet paper. And no, I didn’t subscribe to the panic, it’s more that I had none left, and apparently neither did amazon. What could have been a productive Friday turned into a fight or flight Friday, one in which I waited in a 45-minute lineup at Whole Foods amidst empty shelves, and hipsters upset non-organic produce was their only alternative in apocalyptic times.
Corona spread across the globe, and Cancel Culture caught the viral bug real fast. Concerts, flights, small businesses and even Mercer Hype Kids are closing down shop. Basically, the world officially called in sick, and will be WFH via Zoom and Slack until the end of March. No one sounded the pandemic alarm while innocent Asians were getting sick, but once the stock market took a hit -- read, White Men of Power -- the world soaked itself in Purell and panic. The drought of canned goods and toilet paper are cookie crumb clues of bunkers being built in the stead of quarantines, but the empty subway cars point to a much bigger sign: 2020 has no chill. And not in a meme way, but in a wake the fuck up way.
Realists point out the facts: Australia forest fires, war in Iran, Corona Virus, Global Warming and Donald Trump at risk of re-election. Optimists have another message: we are missing the point. Over the last few years, the message has been growing louder and clearer, yet we as a collective have grown more selfish, narcissistic and vain. The pedestal for the self was the initial quarantine. And now we’re in lock-down in community centers with our neighbors. Not cute, and not instagrammable.
We are all energy. We attract what we put out. And in the last 5 years, we’ve been spewing garbage. Literally. It’s in our oceans, and our ozone. Perhaps the Corona Virus is a blessing. It’s the Universe’s way of signaling that we as a species are growing out of control. We needed a slap in the face. One that would put us in a corner long enough to think about what we’ve done.
We’re killing each other.
We’re harming our planet.
We’re destroying the homes of animals.
We’re living in squalor.
We’re terrible people.
We need this time out. We need to be benched. We need to regroup, and reconsider what it is we’re doing and how we are living. How it’s affecting us, as individuals but as a collective. Whether we want to or not, we’re all in this together.
Being this selfish can only take us so far: to toilet paper pandemonium.