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The Sea Of Ignorance
#WritcoStoryChallenge
#CoronaVirus
Social isolation had forced an eerie silence upon them, while fear haunted every aspect of their existence. The biggest question or at least the one that seemed to be at the forefront in everybody's mind was:
When was this going to end?
It was also in everybody's mind that the precautions and the fear and the isolation that had crept into their individual lives, mostly by government decree, had come to stay. Finally, after little more than a century of steady progress, the American Dream was coming to an end, the party was over...
Public-Education, already a failed institution in America, had been futher compromised by the spread of the virus; Suddenly, children were home most of the day and parents were obliged to leap into the breach and quickly restructure their lives to accomodate their children back into the home. In most families the pressure was on the parents to swiftly adapt to the new conditions which were soon rendered even more grave by the faltering employment figures being quoted and requoted by every news-organization in the country. All the reduced figures, most of them due to shop closures, cuts in hours, food-handling issues and a general downturn across the entire economic spectrum were, of course, blamed on the virus and that was a self-evident and rarely disputed fact: The virus always seemed to be at the root of the problem. So, lets talk a little about the virus...
The virus, I believe, actually attacked the mind, not the body, it was/is "behavioral" or "psychological" in nature, not granular. But, despite what I had come to believe, "the powers-that-be" treated it as if it were a virulent disease, it was acted upon and sold in the media as if it were a plague. The Cops, City Hall and the bottle-washer at Joe's Diner were all transformed by the vaguely contrived but nevertheless prevailing conditions; abruptly, the atmosphere around them chilled and they began to go about their days in a state of "detatched focus" and always with those gloves on, the black latex kind, the same kind Jeffery Daumer wore and Ted Bundy and, well, you know the rest.
And then, finally, there were the multitude of questions concerning the current, high-tech nature of police weaponry and the evolution of their basic button-down-collared-khaki-shirt-tucked-into-a-pair-of-khaki-pants-type-uniform, like Andy Griffith and Barney Fife used to wear, into the steel-toed-jump-boots-kevlar-and-impact-resistant-plastics-all-rendered-in-different-patterns-of-O.D.-green-and-flat-black that we see today, all over the world. And we can't forget the crazy, bug-eyed helmets with the slightly fascist side-profile and comfortably prominent chin-strap that every cop, from Duluth to Miami Beach, wears today. I don't need to say any more, it only requires that you take a casual...
#CoronaVirus
Social isolation had forced an eerie silence upon them, while fear haunted every aspect of their existence. The biggest question or at least the one that seemed to be at the forefront in everybody's mind was:
When was this going to end?
It was also in everybody's mind that the precautions and the fear and the isolation that had crept into their individual lives, mostly by government decree, had come to stay. Finally, after little more than a century of steady progress, the American Dream was coming to an end, the party was over...
Public-Education, already a failed institution in America, had been futher compromised by the spread of the virus; Suddenly, children were home most of the day and parents were obliged to leap into the breach and quickly restructure their lives to accomodate their children back into the home. In most families the pressure was on the parents to swiftly adapt to the new conditions which were soon rendered even more grave by the faltering employment figures being quoted and requoted by every news-organization in the country. All the reduced figures, most of them due to shop closures, cuts in hours, food-handling issues and a general downturn across the entire economic spectrum were, of course, blamed on the virus and that was a self-evident and rarely disputed fact: The virus always seemed to be at the root of the problem. So, lets talk a little about the virus...
The virus, I believe, actually attacked the mind, not the body, it was/is "behavioral" or "psychological" in nature, not granular. But, despite what I had come to believe, "the powers-that-be" treated it as if it were a virulent disease, it was acted upon and sold in the media as if it were a plague. The Cops, City Hall and the bottle-washer at Joe's Diner were all transformed by the vaguely contrived but nevertheless prevailing conditions; abruptly, the atmosphere around them chilled and they began to go about their days in a state of "detatched focus" and always with those gloves on, the black latex kind, the same kind Jeffery Daumer wore and Ted Bundy and, well, you know the rest.
And then, finally, there were the multitude of questions concerning the current, high-tech nature of police weaponry and the evolution of their basic button-down-collared-khaki-shirt-tucked-into-a-pair-of-khaki-pants-type-uniform, like Andy Griffith and Barney Fife used to wear, into the steel-toed-jump-boots-kevlar-and-impact-resistant-plastics-all-rendered-in-different-patterns-of-O.D.-green-and-flat-black that we see today, all over the world. And we can't forget the crazy, bug-eyed helmets with the slightly fascist side-profile and comfortably prominent chin-strap that every cop, from Duluth to Miami Beach, wears today. I don't need to say any more, it only requires that you take a casual...
