The coronavirus shut down California nearly two months ago. For these seven or eight weeks, there was suffering, there was reflection, there was a sense that this door that we were forced to go through may wake us up.

Arundhati Roy, the brilliant novelist and political essayist, claims in her article last month, “The epidemic is a portal…this virus seeks proliferation, not profit and therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow…bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine. ….now in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health.” (Financial Times, April 3, 2020)

It is as if a giant swarm of locusts have descended on us from another time-space continuum and shut down our normal life, except these locusts are really tiny and we can not see them with our naked eyes. But we could see the power of what they could do to us, to kill us. The only way to fight their effects was: to shut the system down, in order to minimize contact with these invisible, deadly creatures.

A portal, a doorway, an opening to another imagination of yet another kind of world. We are going through it right now. We need to be very awake to what is being done in our names–––yours, mine, ours. We need to stop that which we are repulsed by. We must say no in as many different ways as we can. When we do, sometimes, it has effects. We must not forget that. Sometimes we need to say yes to what is happening, those beautiful, shimmering silver linings.

We all barely went outside for the past seven to eight weeks, only to shop or to take a walk. We all pulled out our old scarves, made masks or found an old, lost red and white horizontally striped leftover paper mask from long ago. Some folks spoke about the relationship between the virus and excessive carbon. There was a feeling that this facing of collective death experience with the virus may wake us up to the other collective death problem also facing us, the other one more long-term. Maybe we will figure this out, some of us thought, even as we are forced to go through this tunnel of deep suffering of millions who had to stay in their jobs, facing the public and dying at much higher than normal rates, inflected by race, class and gender, and the millions who lost their jobs, and the millions who may yet lose their jobs over the next year or two, an unimaginable fallout even three months ago.

I went out today, after not driving for a week to get some food from the grocery store. The lines snaked around several blocks. I thought I would avoid the crowds, so I got there just as it opened. I waited about 45’ to get into the store. The streets were nearly full of cars again. Very few folks were wearing masks. Our usual normalcy was picking up again.

How many of us will be left after all this works through whatever it is?

First, we passed the number who died on 9/11, 3000 plus. Second, we passed the number of Americans dead in Vietnam, over 50,000. Today, the Johns Hopkins University figures say it is over 83,428 dead.

In WWI, 116,516 dead: 63114 due to influenza and 53,402 due to combat. We are two-thirds of the way towards that WWI count. Of course, we are a much bigger population now, but still. (Green, Matthew, How Many Soldiers Died in Each War? KQED. May 25, 2017.)

I feel the crowing fear lessening in some, emboldening them to visit friends, to sneak out to work surreptitiously without letting anyone in the household know what they are doing and where they are going.  Is it fearlessness? Or is it cowardice?

We have gone through some kind of door, that is for sure, but what is the door and where are we going? What are we also taking with us? What do we need to leave behind?

I only hope that we remember some of what we saw during this time, the kindness, the imagination of other possibilities, of keeping the presence of collective death in front of us, as we enact our daily life. I hope we remember the ways in which we are all connected, whether poor or rich, whether unemployed or workaholic, whether homeless or a householder, how the virus did not see who we were; it was just interested in taking our life, some of our lives; just like climate.

The virus does not care who you are. It is impersonal, yet alive, beneath the notice of our gaze, invisible and indivisible. The virus is sticky, it can stay sometimes for 24 hours on doorknobs and surfaces. Wherever our sneeze or our cough can travel, it, too, can ride on the breeze-waves between each one of us. Sharing breath can be deadly. Forget hugs.

Climate also does not care who you are. It is also impersonal, though a fire can feel alive as a storm can, too. Shedding carbon as we move through our daily lives adds up­–––each car trip, each refrigerator, each stove, each larger and smaller system, one within another like Russian dolls, going on for infinity. In many ways some of the very assumptions of modern life are like the virus, upon contact, it spreads, lust spreads, desire spreads. Is there a threshold where we can collectively say enough?

This month Arundhati Roy says: Let us figure out how to disable this machine. She exclaims:

“Even after the lockdowns are lifted, unless we move fast, we will be

incarcerated forever. How do we disable this engine? That is our task.”

(From Arundhati Roy’s article, “Our task is to disable the engine” in Progressive Internationalhttps://progressive.international/wire/2020-05-02-arundhati-roy-our-task-is-to-disable-the-engine/en)

What is this “engine” in which we are embedded in? That is the real question. We must seek the answers now.