Flatten the Curve: The Hard Questions that Lie Ahead

Hmmm, will the real
heavy lifting come after COVID-19 flat lines?

A week ago I wrote a
post about the Coronavirus in which I advocated for everyone to keep things in
perspective and laugh at the toilet paper mania. I promised that the sun would
come up tomorrow as it always does.

I was only partially
right. The sun did rise as usual, but it rose on a very different world than
what we knew before. Flatten the curve
is now the catchphrase and hashtag that defines our existence. Drastic steps
have been taken to stave off the feared upward curve in cases.

Those of us in the
workforce army now find ourselves assigned into one of three battalions:

The
Frontline Battalion:
The dedicated people who work in essential services – doctors, nurses, hospital
staff, EMS, firefighters and farmers among others. They are the unsung heroes
whose dedication ensures the bottom will not fall out while the rest of us are
in seclusion. We owe them our undying gratitude.

The
Remote Battalion: The
large contingent of people, myself among them, whose employers answered the
call and closed their physical offices. We are working from home on our laptops
becoming slaves to e-mail and hoping that our internet connection does not
fail.

The
Temporarily Decommissioned Battalion:
The unfortunate ones employed in the businesses that have been compelled to shut
down for the duration of the flatten the
curve period. Next to those who actually contracted the virus, you are the
ones hardest hit as there is no money coming in to pay the bills that do keep
coming. My heart goes out to you.

When we come out on the
other side of this unprecedented period of constraint, it will be time to ask
the hard questions. Did the response by government and those in positions of
power happen soon enough or too late? Was the response appropriate or over the
top?

Will the end justify the means? We hope the lockdown we are experiencing now will be measured in weeks. But the economic repercussions will be measured in years.

And then there is the darker question: Was any part of the turmoil caused, influenced or encouraged by those with vested interests in creating disorder and chaos?

The more immediate
question on our minds is: How long will it be before things get back to normal?
But perhaps the question we should be asking is: What will the new normal look like?

We’ve been down this
road before. After 9/11, we had to rethink our perceptions of security. After
the great electricity blackout in the northeastern U.S. and central Canada, we
had to reconsider our faith in the infrastructure we thought was infallible.

Now we have to realign
our sense of the very fabric of society. If a respiratory virus, or more
specifically the reaction to it, can cripple our societal structures, what does
that say about the foundations we have built our society on?

When we get around to
answering these hard questions, flatten
the curve may – no, make that will
– take on a new life as a metaphor on multiple levels.

~ Now
Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting
Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet

~ Michael Robert Dyet is also
the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel which
was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s
website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .

~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka That Make Me Go
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