kindess in the age of panic

I have an embarrassing fascination with Black Friday, mostly the fights. Not because I ever want to see someone get hurt, quite the opposite. But because there is some part of me that has an undying suspicion of my fellow humans. I know that our polite society is just a series of agreements, a system of pulleys and levers. And if any one of them goes, it turns out that under it all we are just scared spiritually inclined monkeys looking for shelter, fighting for resources and wondering what that sound was.

If this sounds bleak, thats not my intent. To me, its the one universal law. Our priorities are not that far from each other, though they take radically different forms and routes. I do not have kids, but I have heard so many friends talk about the effect it has on you. Once you have a child, you are forever aware that thats how we all start out at. Your douce bag ex boyfriend, the inpatient person behind you in traffic, the man in jail. At one time, they were batting a thousand. Perfect innocence touched down on dirt with no idea of the shuffling of cards that would one day be their context.

When you know that some of what people do is because of what has been done to them, it makes you have more empathy for what people do by choice. Because, we somehow know, that at times, we don’t do that many things by choice. We are all mashing buttons, soloing over a song we don’t know that well. Running on instincts half the time, trying to override them the other.

This week has been a fucking spectacle and a curiosity.

Everyone is afraid, that is understandable. Their reactions are the part that are hard to fathom. WTF is up with all the toilet paper hoarding? It makes no sense. At least the hand sanitizer stuff does, but even that is crazy.

I have long suspected that people with baseline anxiety use times like this as a lightning rod. They then can make some large action (like buying toilet paper) to soothe their anxiety. But from the outside observer, the action is out of proportion. And they would be right.

But the fear we all feel is not that this is happening, its that nothing can stop this from happening again at another time. I think most of us know that we won’t die of corona virus. But the real deeper fear is that if this was the new black plague, we live in such a fragile society that the whole thing can implode. The entire world of ropes of pulleys and levers comes crashing down and we are faced with ourselves and our prime objectives.

In the face of that fear, most people decide to devolve first. They fight, they hoard resources etc..

and its all understandable

but if you want to do better, if you want to be proud of yourself when you remember this time, be brave and be kind.

One of the best feelings in life is when people tell you a story about yourself, especially when its a good one. I love it when someone tells me something nice I did that I completely forgot about. Not because I’m an egomaniac, but because I am at times afraid that the scale of altruism and ambition is tipping the wrong way at times.

My goal in this panic, is simple: don’t be the reason that someone loses hope.

If I manage that, the rest is gravy.

Keep your chin up everyone.