“Well, Merricat, we handled it in a very American way. We started off with a blithe dismissal of the threat followed by a sudden panic, which triggered hoarding and conspiracy theories that many tried to challenge with argument and virtue signaling. Once we got our footing, though, we marketed and profiteered our way to the end until even the CDC got bored with it.”
“Was it really a big deal?”
“It turns out, honey, that 584,000 deaths are a big deal to some kinds of people but not to others. That was a weird lesson we learned when wearing a lightweight cloth was worth storming state capitols to prevent.”
“But we overreacted, right?”
“To all crises, there’s really only the choice to underreact or overreact because nobody knows what perfectly reacting looks like until it’s all over. So in America, we split the difference by overreacting in some ways and grossly underreacting in others.”
“Was the Old Internet involved?”
“Boy, was it! That’s where sneering malcontents competing for meanness points used to live. They liked to overreact to overreactions because they magically knew exactly what we should have done all along from flunking out of biology in community college. They were the kind of people who’d give us shit for swatting a wasp with a 2×4 when that’s all we had.”
“Is criticism bad?”
“Good faith criticism sure isn’t, but even if we’d discovered that masks were useless — which we didn’t — what was the harm of trying them? Oh, that’s right: our deeply entrenched freedom to be profoundly stupid. We were a country back then who confused the LIBERTY to hit ourselves in the face with a brick with the NECESSITY of it.”
“Is the pandemic why we’re living in this abandoned mental asylum?”
“Oh, of course not. The real disaster came a few years later with Pronoun War I and II, followed by the Great Gas Surplus when panicked simpletons blew up all the Shell stations because fuel got suspiciously cheap. Then we had no way to ship food across the country and many had to literally air fry their guns to eat them instead. It was a crazy time.”
“I wish I’d lived to see all that.”
“Well, it certainly showed us who we were. Now finish your sriracha armadillo ear soup and cover your facial vacuole with the cloth mask like I showed you. I think a radioactive tornado of non-biodegradable drinking straws is coming.”
