The Threat From Covid-19 Is Now Officially Over
OK.
It was fun for a while.
The lockdowns. Zooming with our friends. Wearing pajamas all day long.
That was fun.
But now it is time for it to be over.
The ‘it’ being the virus thing.
And, from what you can see around the country, we have all, more or less, concluded that Covid-19’s 15 minutes of fame are now over. Time for a new show.
As it happens, we don’t draw our opinions about the course of the virus from the White House press briefings, entertaining though they are. And we don’t draw our perceptions from Dr. Fauci, entertaining as he is-he was even on SNL! We don’t draw our perceptions from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, NPR or even Fox News.
We draw our perceptions and our beliefs about how the virus should proceed, from the deep education we have gotten from ‘the media’. All of it.
As a culture, we now spend an astonishing 8 hours a day, every day, watching TV, or some variant there -of. (This data from Nielsen, who should know). When I say TV, I mean the whole swath of video-driven news and entertainment, from NBC News to Netflix to Hulu to IG and beyond.
Watching ‘stuff’ on our screens is now our number one activity.
We spend (and have spent) more time watching stuff — news, entertainment, reality, Friends re-runs, The Crown, Ozark.. you name it- than we spend reading, eating, working out, working and even sleeping. Watching stuff is now our number one activity. Bar none.
No society has ever spent the majority of their lives watching other people do things. Your grandparents may have gone to the movies, but they went once a week. Today, we are all pretty much living in a movie theater, and we never leave.
So what happens to a society that spends pretty much all of its time watching movies?
Well, that experience, repeated daily for the past 40 years teaches us something. It teaches us that, no matter how bad things are, they will always get better, and in fact, they will be resolved within an hour, or 90 minutes at the most.
It also teaches us to be passive.
Watching, after all, is designed to be a passive activity.
If you are watching a Laker’s game, and you think that you personally can influence the outcome of the game, you are considered psychotic. Same goes with a Bond movie. Your just is just to sit and watch, in the serene knowledge that, no matter how bad things get, Bond will be fine.
Well, now we’re in a killer Bond movie.
And evil entity (Bat, China, you name it), has unleashed a terrible weapon on humanity in the form of a virus. So far, so good.
But none of us are particularly frightened, because we all innately know that in the end, everything will be fine.
It always is. This has been our life experience (as we have lived in in front of a screen for the past 40 odd years).
So when Batman fails to appear, when Chloroquine doesn't seem to be the miracle drug we thought it was, when Dustin Hoffman fails to return with the secret monkey serum, we get bored. “What a crap movie this Covid-19 has turned out to be.”
Boring.
Time to turn it off and get back to real life.
The idea that real life is never coming back, well, that just isn’t in the script.
That’s not how this works. That’s now how any of this works
Except maybe this time, it is.
This taken from Don’t Watch This! How The Media Are Destroying Your Life — Skyhorse June 2020
