Seattle under stay-at-home orders, Washington, March Another terror goes undiscussed in such analyses, perhaps because it undermines our shared romance as self-possessing realists capable of understanding our desires and modifying our behaviours. What I have in mind here is that that some of us seem to pre-emptively miss COVID, to fear the moment when it will recede into our collective rear view. We fear a time after COVID not because its passage will require the various reckonings and returns enumerated above.
On social media and in person, we increasingly appear, many of us, to perceive the recession β not exactly of the virus itself but certainly of the relational and cultural formations it engendered β as a psychic loss. It bears stating explicitly that this anxiety is both different from and, in a sense, foundational to the other stresses of re-entry listed above. Yet for many of us β and, here, I mean a certain kind of reflexively secular, over educated liberal β the coming emancipation feels less than happy.
Ever since the massive rollout of the vaccine programme in many parts of the developed world, another, incompletely repressed part of us has begun surfacing with greater vehemence. This part seems angry, resentful and, most to the point, betrayed at the premise of return. As with many cultural barometers today, this one is most legible online, in fora where user comments are hosted.
The user sections in online newspapers favoured by moderates, liberals and Leftists alike, as well as in less moderated venues such as Reddit, have begun to feature a particular kind of voice lashing back at any editorial content suggesting that the end of COVID is near. How can we really be sure, they ask? Of those sounding optimistic notes, users demand to know their epidemiological credentials.
Is it really responsible, they ask, for anyone but a medical expert to call for return? The opinion pages and comment sections of The New York Times provide as representative a sample of this affect as any outlet.
