Maybe its an epoch moment

Subject: Maybe an epoch moment.

Remember back when. The old boy with his photo album proudly talking about his grand children, the football fan describing his feelings when the ball went in the net, the holiday in Greece, the reuniting of family from overseas. Those old enough amongst you can remember growing up without the motor car, without television and certainly without computers or the smart phone.

They can tell you were they were when Nikita Khrushchev tried to supply arms to Cuba and the world held its breath as the Americans sailed their fleet into the path of the Russian ships to prevent them from arriving in Cuba. The shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas and the landing on the moon were all events in a world which functioned as a collection of events experienced by individuals. We felt joined to the drama by our humanity, "there but for the grace of god go I" but somehow we were remote enough to know that these events played out in another world to ours and we were observers, not participants.
Today the virus has made us all participants in a way we thought we never would. We are part of the drama, we are it's ingredient, it's fuel we can not escape it and only hope to live through it. Children in the future like my granddaughter will wonder at the pandemic being fought out, as a watermark, an event in their early life which drew a line in the sand, much like the fear of a nuclear Holocaust drew a line over ours and which to this day nations fear to tread.
Never has the world been asked to close down and ruin its economy for the sake of saving lives. Never has the world had such a collective fear for its future.
Will January/February 2020 be known as an epoch, a time to subdivide what went before and what happened since. Will we strive to remember when we travelled with abandon anywhere in the world, will we remember crowds of spectators fondly or will we marvel that individuals jostled onto trains and sat side by side in theatres. Will the fear of the virus tame us into submission, satisfied to take instructions as who and how many can attend a party. Will the weekly death-toll be on our minds when we meet people and engage in conversation, will we measure everything in metres and not in good intentions
The crows in India circling the burial sites or the sight of water tumbling down a cliff in Peru will be limited to the few who can get a pass from the authorities, no more the hedonistic thrill of a rock concert or the push and shove as you pass through the gates into a stadium, no more the freedom to explore without first checking what the infection rate is like and if they have enough ventilators.
And so my darling granddaughter will your experience be dramatically different to your Moms or mine even earlier. Each generation is different, each generation has its cross to bear and each generation thinks its was the best to live through but maybe this virus with its hidden gestation period and its ease of transfer makes a world very different place to the one before.
I hope not and who knows what you will invent to do the things you want to do, a trip to Mars or a dimensional holiday in the comfort of your front room and who knows if what you want to do will be anything like mine.