Op Ed 3
Here is a thought that just popped into my head: What would an alien say or do if yesterday was the first time they had ever seen planet Earth.
It would be like meeting your future boss in public except they only see you when you are at your absolute worst. Fresh out of bed, still in sweatpants, coffee stains on your shirt, and brain fog clouding your judgement. The alien would be trying to comprehend how our society works but we Earth's inhabitants don’t even recognize our own planet. If I were to meet an alien tomorrow, I would not even know how to explain what is going on to them right now. Best I could say (in a nutshell) is that we are fighting a war, one that is without weapons, and the opponent can only be seen with a complex microscope.
I still have so much life to live and experience since I am only nineteen so I’ve yet to see what the world is like when everything is normal-let alone abnormal. But here is what I do know from what the news, social media, and school has been telling me. We are living through something that nobody ever saw coming. Despite how technologically advanced our society is, there is still a code that we have yet to crack. Despite all of the collaboration happening with scientists around the world, we as a society could not be more divided. I have moved on from the juvenile idea that a utopian society can exist because disagreement is what helps move society forwards. But here, I do not recognize myself or the world around me because we are so different.
Earth is at its best when it is able to learn and grow from the people that are inhabiting her. But that is what isn’t happening right now. All interactions have become superficial and artificial and it is killing everyone from the inside despite the destruction that is simultaneously occurring on the outside.
Here I am starting another chapter of my life like that alien. Unaware of my surroundings, and confused about what is going on internally. I go about my daily life just as I have since August. Spitting into a tube every other day, rewarding myself afterwards with my favorite iced brown liquid. Staring at a medium screen all day in order to reward myself by staring at a small screen for the rest of the day despite being distracted the whole way through. Knowing more about how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, and less about my roommates favorite TV show or my new friends favorite restaurant. Even though restaurants and TV shows are nothing but superficial, it is nevertheless an escape from what is going on right now.
A time where all you feel is loneliness yet the strange part is that everyone is feeling it too. To be a stranger to your own world.
This is the time of year when my family celebrates Passover, and this time last year was when we said “next year in person”. Now granted, if everything were normal, I would not be able to come home because I would have classes that I couldn’t miss, but this year is what is different. And I am not the only one affected by this. So many families throughout the holidays no matter the nation or practicing religion, they could not come home for their holidays and see their family and friends, and eat their home cooked meals.
As Jerry Davila and Tim Liao voiced in their CovCourse lecture, there is no one in the world that hasn’t been impacted in some way shape or form by what is going on right now. With this information in mind, I have found myself doing two separate things: either a) Dismissing my own problems by saying others have it worse, or b) The complete opposite.
It is just insurmountable to think that we have been living like this for over a year. But I swear, if someone wants to go out of their way to call me resilient one more time, I might just have to leave the room (or at least the zoom call). Like how Catherine Prendergast said in her piece “We Get Sick and Die”, it is in her class where her students realize that we all are uniquely abled in our own ways due to our own circumstances. She talks about how once her students realize the true magnitude of how many people who are just like them brave their own visible and invisible illnesses, they realize how much of themselves they have been hiding from their whole lives up until that point.
From what we have seen across the United States and World from the pandemic is this: Nothing is a secret anymore, we can’t internalize these feelings and prejudices anymore. Now we are seeing HOW racist our policies are both here and abroad. We are seeing HOW hospital systems were barely hanging on in normal times let alone in a public health crisis. And now, we are really seeing what people truly prioritize in their lives based on what causes they fight for, how they react to this common adversary, and how they are adapting to the uncertainty that is going on around them.