The Day the World Stopped

March 12, 2020. That’s the date that sticks in my memory. The CDC had just announced that COVID-19 had crossed the threshold into being a pandemic, and courts started canceling trials. Within days, sporting events, concerts, all the rest, would stop. Stores began to implement social distancing policies. Workplaces and schools shuttered, leaving people scrambling to learn how to do everything remotely.

I tried to process some of my own feelings of helpless bewilderment two years later, when I wrote an An Aria for Cami. Speaking through my characters, I described feeling like I was watching a speeding train jump off the rails and bury itself, car by car, into a thick, deadening bank of snow.

Society, too, was traumatized. It still is. Here in the United States, our politics reflects this unspoken trauma. We are angrier and more fearful. More insular. Less trusting. Cynical, even nihilistic. We try to retreat from the world, while still attempting to dominate it. Our hearts are harder, our minds less open. Like a person who has wrapped himself in himself, we make a package that grows smaller and smaller.

Five years, and that wicked day still burns in my memory. I pray for those who did not survive, but still more, I pray for those who emerged so much less than they had been. And for our poor, fragile, broken world.