Over the past several years, I’ve fallen increasingly victim to the opium of YouTube to help me fall asleep at night.
It’s not as healthy as reading, sure, but it’s not as mindless as Facebook scrolling. Besides, there’s decent content on YouTube if you know where to look.
For me, it’s mostly documentaries, tutorials on hobbies that interest me or just about anything sports-themed. An ongoing series on the history of the Minnesota Vikings is pretty good, and I don’t even really like football.
Last night, a video that was pushed to me based on my interests stopped me in my tracks. It was the latest episode of a series that chronicles World War II week by week “in real time.” So each episode is a 10- to 12-minute summary of what happened in a certain week of the war. For example, the most recent episode covered the happenings of the first week of September in 1944.
What made this surreal was why it was pushed to me. Before forgetting about it, I had watched the first few episodes when the series began – in 2018. The series has another 10 months of weekly episodes before it wraps up with news of July 1945.
The series started 18 months before the COVID-19 pandemic came to the U.S., and there’s still almost another year of war news to cover. Think about that.
I’m not even remotely the same person I was in 2018. Some of that is the regular growth (hopefully) that comes with time, but a lot of those changes – not just for me, but for most folks – were spurred largely by our pandemic experience. A friend the other day, for instance, referred to “anything before 2020” as “prehistoric.”
I started gardening during, and because of, the pandemic, and it’s now one of my favorite hobbies. I behave a little differently in crowds now. I feel closer to, and more comfortable with, the members of my “COVID bubble.” I look at life, people and their value through the lens of someone who has lived through a protracted historical crisis. I’d wager we all do to some extent.
Depending on who you ask, the pandemic lasted a year-and-a-half to two years. Most of us also know a few folks who believe it didn’t happen at all, but that’s a different issue.
Now imagine living between 1939 and 1945, especially in Europe with the lifestyle, danger, fear and anxiety that came with being in an active war zone every day. Now with COVID as a frame of reference, imagine, even in the best of circumstances, curfews and food rationing that lasted four times longer than the inconveniences we endured during the pandemic. That’s pretty jarring, especially when most of us learned about World War II in a few weeklong units in junior high and high school.
Many of us knew relatives, in my case two sets of grandparents, who lived through both the war and The Great Depression that came before it. We saw how it affected their behavior and how it informed the values taught to subsequent generations. As a kid in the ‘90s, it was still punishable not to clean your plate. “Just try it, and you can toss it if you don’t like it” – that wasn’t an option for a lot of us.
You didn’t ask Grandma why she bought generic bread. You already knew because, at some point, either your grandparents or your parents told you all about it. No matter how much comfort they could afford, there were many among that generation – my grandparents included – who instead prioritized making sure they were prepared if a big “It” happened again.
So I wonder what the residuals of the pandemic will be for those of us still around in 10, 20, 50 years. What markers will COVID leave on the generations who lived it that might seem mysterious to those that come after us? I bet you, at the very least, mask wearing remains more common during flu season for the next half-century.
And what if the pandemic isn’t the major crisis of our lifetime but simply a crisis. What if the next one lasts six years like World War II or 10 years like The Great Depression? What have we learned? How, if at all, are we better for what we’ve already been through?
Zack Plair is managing editor of The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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