The world has gone quite mad, but the reality of it little resembles the dystopian future so often portrayed in the most popular tomes and movies. The Road. The Stand. Hunger Games. World War-Z. There is a pandemic sweeping the globe, but so far there has been no rationing, no loss of national infrastructure, no bodies left to rot on the side of the road. There is only the acrid stench of self-generated fear and paranoia.

Nothing about the pandemic has warranted the popular reaction to it. Hoarding food and paper products. Eyeing our fellow citizens with distrust. Buying guns to defend against looting. While the government asks for social distancing, the nation responds with anxiety and sociopathic disregard for their fellow citizens.

Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what the great culling looks like. The slow, mean-spirited end of all things. I don’t know. Down we go into the abyss, one corpse at a time, until the rich have determined that there is no more profit to be made from it.

It would be my hope though that those who do profit from death (they say that we are waging war against the pandemic, and war is always profitable), for those who are able to seal themselves away, experience the sense of poetic irony when they find that what they feared most is living among them. Chances are that death won’t be wearing a red mask, but a smile. A warm touch, a lover’s embrace, the darkness which claims us all.

But we’re not there yet. We are locked down, quarantined, and self-isolated. Some of us anyway. Others of us are forced to go to work while our employers play Russian roulette with our lives for the sake of increasing their profits.

And so we wait to see what happens next. Will the sky darken? Will the rain turn to acid? Will Uncle Joe develop an unnatural taste for human flesh? We will have to wait and see. This is the face of the new normal. Mankind once again proving that it never fails to disappoint.

©2020 Kevin Fraleigh