To begin my Surviving Apocalypse course, I read Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood and "Pale Horse" from David Quammen's Spillover. Experiencing a pandemic while reading these works makes some of these realities more frightening, but at the same time I'm able to connect with the characters and the haunting predictions that are made.
The nose cones that the characters wear in The Year of the Flood remind me of face masks I wear every time I leave the house. I used to be somewhat embarrassed of being a germaphobe before the pandemic started, but I would always use sanitizer before eating in public or after touching a self-checkout kiosk at Kroger, for example. Now these are standard, and I feel more comfortable using these products to protect my health. With that said, I think corporations are required to increase their health standards in order to stay open, which completely elevates standards of cleanliness in all areas. I noticed that the God's Gardeners conditions weren't the cleanest, with mold in their rooms and limited shower facilities. Yet by the end of the novel when the plague had spread, Toby was concerned with how dirty Ren had looked and thought she was carrying the virus. Sanitary conditions also come into play with the Hendra virus in Quammen's "Pale Horse". In an interview with a vet that caught the virus, she admitted that "in the laboratory all those precautions are easy to take" (47). She carefully explains the procedure of cutting into the horse to discover what its ailment was, and took a deep cleanse shower when she got home. Taking the proper precautions are ever so crucial now to avoid contracting, and more importantly spreading, coronavirus to the most vulnerable citizens in our society. But from the empathy in the vet's interview, I could tell that this case was a matter of dealing with a stressful situation and caring for the humans involved. I don't think people who gathered for holidays this season intended to spread coronavirus either, but the consequences were vast, and the spike certainly came like scientists predicted. Listening to science is ever more crucial, and had this vet taken the proper precautions while operating on the horse, it could have been prevented. When news spread that the WHO declared that we were officially in a global pandemic, days later school was closed and restaurants and stores were quick to follow. My mental health was severely affected in the weeks shortly after the pandemic was declared. I constantly scrolled through Twitter for updates on the pandemic to see if numbers would get better, and the news became a toxic source in my life. In The Year of the Flood, Atwood addresses information transmission, noting that "the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing" (293). The week before the pandemic was declared, I was vacationing in Florida during my university's spring break. I didn't worry about the coronavirus until it impacted my corner of the earth, despite people dying from the virus already at that time in other parts of the world. But once the media got control of the narrative playing out in the United States, that's when I knew it was serious. Media plays an interesting role in the Hendra virus when they unintentionally created a widespread fear of bats and flying foxes in Australia with some calling to extinguish the species from the country. Quammen also points out that these outbreaks are connected, that "they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing" (39). Although Crake's pandemic is a deliberate act of genocide, the Hendra virus came as a result of species interacting with each other in close proximity. Quammen excellently describes the agency of microbes and viruses, especially when referencing their behavior. It's difficult to cope with the restrictions and lockdowns based on the small microbes that are killing and infecting millions of humans around the world right now, but listening to science is going to be the only direction that saves us, and I have a feeling we will continue to lose lives until we decide to listen to this influence.
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AuthorCreative writer + professional & technical writer. TWD enthusiast. Archives
April 2021
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