After a mass trauma comes the mass forgetting. No one really wants to talk about Covid any more, even though it tore through every dimension of our lives. But now it’s as if the disruption was so great, weird, terrible and abrupt, that we cannot incorporate it into our present and future narratives.
And so we have done a remarkable and largely collective job of acting like the pandemic is over, and – even more – of trying to forget that it even happened.
The pandemic barely came up as an election issue. It didn’t form part of either party’s main pitch or talking points, rarely rating a mention despite it dictating the most significant policy shifts (a doubling of jobseeker, a mass business subsidy in form of jobkeeper, closed international borders, widespread stay-at-home orders) in our lifetimes.
Covid-related deaths were announced each day by a grave-faced premier. One death was “too many.” Now Covid-related deaths are on the rise and no one blinks.
In popular culture, the pandemic also shows signs of leaving few, if any, trace elements.
For a collective experience that literally everyone on earth will relate to, it forms very little of our cultural content (an exception being Bo Burnham’s Inside and now Inside the Outtakes - two iconic comedy specials that never mention the pandemic but are very much of it).
Sitting in a writers’ room last year for a television show, it was decided pretty quickly to not mention the pandemic in the series we were making; it would be too much of a downer to have our characters wearing masks or checking in with QR codes. And so it’s not mentioned
And so we have done a remarkable and largely collective job of acting like the pandemic is over, and – even more – of trying to forget that it even happened.
The pandemic barely came up as an election issue. It didn’t form part of either party’s main pitch or talking points, rarely rating a mention despite it dictating the most significant policy shifts (a doubling of jobseeker, a mass business subsidy in form of jobkeeper, closed international borders, widespread stay-at-home orders) in our lifetimes.
Covid-related deaths were announced each day by a grave-faced premier. One death was “too many.” Now Covid-related deaths are on the rise and no one blinks.
In popular culture, the pandemic also shows signs of leaving few, if any, trace elements.
For a collective experience that literally everyone on earth will relate to, it forms very little of our cultural content (an exception being Bo Burnham’s Inside and now Inside the Outtakes - two iconic comedy specials that never mention the pandemic but are very much of it).
Sitting in a writers’ room last year for a television show, it was decided pretty quickly to not mention the pandemic in the series we were making; it would be too much of a downer to have our characters wearing masks or checking in with QR codes. And so it’s not mentioned
