Читать книгу Let them all tell you what happened - Mercedes Pescador - Страница 7

We show our surprise, we talk about how incredible this unexpected situation is, with the overused reminiscence of black swans. We don’t quite understand the fact that we are still in confinement, more or less strict, not less than 4.000 million people, half of humanity.

Frequent recollections from Bocaccio’s Decameron, and Camus’ The Plague, even if we hadn’t read them. There are, sometimes, personal feelings of freedom deprivation, but the confinement is not a prison but a passage from normal life to a path somehow oneiric.

There are a few episodes of unease induced by the “stay home”, in a society which is, to a great extent, filled with comfort. But also, the extreme situation of what we call “to live hand to mouth”, as we can’t clearly see what the future might be.

The media, obsessed with the virus; and whole families, by the millions, are draining their stocks, both mental and physical, of films and series. Using telematic resources, they try to continue working, maintaining their precious routine…

Memories re-emerge, from past and hard times: the oil crash of 1973-1974; the stock-market crisis of 1987, which was stopped dead by the central banks; the fantasy of the dot.com companies in the third millennium; the wealth loss on the real estate speculative crisis of 2008. What is happening now is different, it kills confidence and foretells harder times.

Nothing can compare to the coronavirus crisis, the viral grave for hundreds of thousands of people, entailed by the darkest premonitions. No, we will not live better tomorrow just because we showed solidarity. We will suffer greater hardships, for the lack of global governing and coherent reasoning.

But we shouldn’t sink into depression either. Jorge Manrique explained it better than anyone: “Not any time gone by was better”.