It could/might be called the 401-K Virus now, after the slam to the stock market yesterday. The 2000 point drop in the Dow could as easily be attributed to an oil price battle between Russia and Saudi Arabia, but that would be limited to “easily” and not “accurately.” The oil business may have tipped the scales but we are actually due for an adjustment and as one commentator on TV said last might, “It’s the perfect storm.”

We all spent a good part of the day yesterday talking with clients about cancellations of our live events, particularly the Austin show next month. Austin has already cancelled South by Southwest and the financial loss they will suffer, mostly uninsured for the majority of participants, cannot be recouped. Maybe everything has been overdue for an adjustment. Maybe it’s indicative of the pitfalls of privilege. Sooner or later someone has to pay for the over-indulgence. Nothing is free. What we heard in everyone’s voices yesterday wasn’t just suspicion or minor skepticism. It was just plain fear and we had all better get used to that. How we will be judged after this is all over, no matter how weird shit gets, is not whether or not we were afraid but how we responded to the fear. The jury is asking for more evidence on that charge.

It’s life, that’s all.

Someone said once… I read somewhere once, that privilege isn’t in the things we think about on a daily basis, but in everything that we never have to think about until there is some existential threat. We could be learning that lesson now.

Maybe.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I am without concern. You can’t spend days talking about fears without at least some bit of fear getting under one’s skin. Nobody is that unmoved. Who am I worried for? What concerns me? Is it my own mortality? Not really. It’s bigger than that. I’ve always lived with the notion, or with the fear perhaps, that my days are numbered. I mean, everyone’s days are numbered, but the idea of living to a ripe, old age is something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. You get used to it after a while, like maybe by late thirties if you start early. I feel most days that I’ve already beaten the odds That’s how it feels to me.

No, having been judged a misanthrope for a long while now, mostly a verdict I brought upon myself, I can honestly say that it’s not exactly true. My concern now is for other people, not because I fear for their lives but more because I know what it’s like to live in fear. I don’t want that for anyone. My judgments have always been brought upon people who cause it in others. Creeps and bullies. Those that wield power of whatever sort against others and threaten their peace. Not calling myself a saint because little could be further from the truth. I’m not without compassion though and it does pain me to see others suffer. Existential terror is no way to live. Nothing will bring that about more than some nebulous global threat like the spread of disease. It’s not something that can be hated and vilified and shot at.

It’s life, that’s all.

Truly.

As for me, I’m not really afraid of dying. I’m afraid of what happens in between being born and dying. I’m afraid of being sick. Fear itself is a sickness. I don’t want it for me and I don’t want it for others. Maybe it could all be alleviated but that would require something bigger. Perhaps an epidemic but that’s never brought about a lasting peace. Even the Spanish flu. while powerful enough to pause a World War, only had enough gravity to create a brief respite. It probably seemed pointless to shoot at each other with invisible forces, that never take sides, knocking people off left and right. Politics and nationalism must have seemed very, very small for a tiny window of time.

It’s time to get up and get out of the house and see what the day brings.

Later notes: The Western World, by and large, has been removed from fears of famine and disease for generations. It’s only been addressed in the contexts of world news from faraway places and in science fiction. That it’s remained a steady theme in literature and films says something about us as a people. I believe what it says is that we’ve held onto the knowledge that there are things in The Universe that are bigger than both our gods and our science. We play with the fear in the fictional realm but we’ve not had to address it up close and personal. COVID-19 is as close as we’ve come in a very long time. SARS and MERSA and other “flus” have seemed very, very far away and things that only happen to people that don’t look like us. There’s a largely unspoken idea that plague is an affliction of the “primitive.” Sorry to say is that primitive is how even more progressive thinkers view, at least in somewhat recessed parts of their consciousnesses, think of The East. We have believed these things happen because, “they are not like us.” Most of us have never been there so we’ve not seen that most of the world in fact lives very much like us and are actually better equipped to deal with things like viral outbreaks. If we are unprepared it’s because we are not so low-key racist and think we are above it all.

Surprise.

Again I will mention, this could very well turn out to be somewhat of a tempest in a teapot, and I hope it does, but the fact remains that we have been caught with our pants down. It’s not just our stooge of a president because this has revealed that in many ways we are all very much like him. We are ignorant and vain and when in history has that not been man’s undoing?