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| Blogs > justaguyinalaska > Big World, Short Day |
Love in the Age of COVID-19: A Prayer
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Love in the Age of COVID-19: A Prayer I have begun wonder if the gravest collateral damage of the Digital Age might be our ability to defer gratification. We marveled as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, et al instigated dream-fulfillment at *the speed of thought* in the late Nineties. We not only had flashier, more diverse, more sensual choices- we could achieve them with phenomenal ease and pace, freeing up abundant leisure-time to indulge them and crave even more. Now a voracious pandemic, fueled by self-serving political isolation and nativism, shakes and fractures our glass cathedral, threatening to collapse it on top of us. In a few scant weeks we have moved from concern to social-distancing to sheltering in place. While I do not see a scenario by which flatbed trucks roll slowly down our streets, the drivers shouting "Bring out your dead!", I do worry that a generation of social progress hangs in the balance. And yet crowds congregate and cross-contaminate for the silliest of reasons: lining up to buy more guns and paying drunken homage to an Irish missionary. We gather in the FriendFinder-x community to interact with libertine (if not outright vulgar) transparency. We flirt, we romance and we fuck. To be sure, we also lie, misdirect, argue, bully and grieve. In short, we participate in a social community with a vigorous and very human dynamic and- up until now- relatively little need for safeguards beyond common sense, caution and a thick skin. Our new paradigm of medical ethics calls for the very isolation our politicians promised...at a microscopic level. There is certainly no need for condoms or scrupulous hygiene when we are advised (soon to be directed?) to sequester ourselves behind walls and avoid contact with any other human being. On my drive home tonight, I listened to a medical director at one of our local hospitals try and soothe us by promising that they have installed additional ventilators in operating rooms. Now, when the Intensive Care Unit beds are filled with C-19 victims with lungs choking on fluids, the overflow of critically-ill patients can be accommodated...up to a limit that we hope the surging *curve* does not cross. It is enough to make one yearn for 20 Democratic candidates sucking the oxygen out of a television studio. So, let us respect the need to shelter in place and not unwittingly become a vector, or worse, one of the infected. Let us continue our sexual frolics, but- excepting those who are part-and-parcel of our daily lives- limit our pursuit of new *connections* to messaging, emailing, Snapping, texting, Skyping and- god forbid- voice-to-voice, until we are convinced that the crisis has passed and the world is ours to rebuild. Peace out. |
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Bump.
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3/17/2020 4:24 am |
Lovely. I agree 
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Lovely. I agree
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Concur. It has been a beauty and a terror. I thoroughly enjoy my on-line connections (often to the point of distraction) but have also had to thicken my skin as scammers, trolls and other time-wasters have insinuated themselves in my life. That said, at the end of the day, I am a Boomer and most of life- including the *Lord Byron* phase I had in college- was lived before Tech changed everything. I still savor the potent energy of face-to-face.
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