There will come a day – maybe even a day in the next few months – when Americans wake up, leave their homes, throw off their masks and resume their lives. On that day, the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020-21 will end.
Ridiculous, right? A desirable perfection with devotion, but very unlikely.
Here’s the problem with anticipating the end of the pandemic: no one is sure exactly what that end will look like or when it will come – or even if we’ll know when we see it.
Will it be when most of the country is vaccinated? When do all schools come together safely? When are COVID hospital beds empty? When are American stadiums full for a summer baseball game? When does Disneyland reopen? Does wearing a mask look weird again?
“I don’t know if I see a specific ending,” says Erica Rhodes. a Los Angeles comedian who found unique ways to perform through the pandemic. “I don’t foresee a moment when I say, ‘Oh, everything is exactly as it was.'”
The type of finish that coronavirus has for tired Americans does not have a distinct ending. This is a hard pill to swallow for a nation long trained – in some cases quite literally – to expect well-defined and often optimistic conclusions for sinuous sagas.
“Finding light in the dark is a very American thing to do,” President Joe Biden said this month. “Actually,” he said, “it may be the most American thing we do.”
The problem is that the real world often does not conform. Of course, the movies are free to be like “Independence Day,” where a ragged American band led by Will Smith defeats the invading enemy. Real life? More than the conclusion of “The Sopranos”, when everything turns black, forever unresolved as a Journey sings that “the film never ends, continues and continues and continues and continues”.
CLARITY OF THE FINALS
American finishing mark – borrowed from the classical Greek story, made industrially in four generations of Hollywood and Madison Avenue – it goes something like this: A story ends with a specific resolution, usually after an action, heroes of good type or development of great characters and usually at a specific, discernible moment.
Are we heading for this with the pandemic? Almost certainly not. And the gradual nature of things destroys things, because it is not finished until it is finished, and even then it may not be over.
“Without that clarity, we’re not used to that,” says Phil Johnston. an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director who worked on “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Zootopia.”
“I guess everyone made their own version of this ‘movie,'” he says, offering his own, “I could see a series of dissolutions over a long period of time.” A guy is leaving the house. He takes off his mask. He’s staying at a restaurant. And then it’s the passage of time, this long montage and this guy stands and realizes, “Oh, that’s life. Life has returned to normal. ‘”
All the important things that people endure today do not have distinct ends. Climate change. “The War on Terror.” Persistent racism and sexism and homophobia. These stories flow and pass, but since they are not considered specific “events”, they are often seen differently.
Something like a pandemic, although, despite its prolonged nature, falls directly into the bucket of the public and the media “an event” that comes with certain expectations. These include a discreet ending.
“We have this human tendency to structure our life events into plot points. It helps us create a more interpretable and predictable world, ”says Kaitlin Fitzgerald. a doctoral student at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, who studies the role that emotion plays in the way stories are consumed.
“But, as we know in the real world, recovery is not a linear process and does not have a clearly defined end,” she says. “These popular media narratives, I describe them as within a few minutes. This affects our expectations about how things should end. And when these expectations do not match reality, it is difficult. ”
Elaine Paravati Harrigan, Fitzgerald’s research partner and assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College has dug into the same attitudes as he teaches his “psychology in a pandemic” course for the past year.
“Without a type of plan, we only live life. And this can be confusing and overwhelming, ”she says. “If I can believe that there is a kind of arc, a kind of sketch that can help me understand my journey, it helps me find meaning in my day.”
Sailing to the end
Children have been a particular focus of this type of attention in the last year, as the adults in their lives help them navigate to a positive end to the pandemic without giving false hope.
“Discovering this final piece will be a real challenge for adults in my opinion. And it will be a challenge not to build the minds of children around it, “says Chuck Herring. director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the South Fayette School District near Pittsburgh.
“People keep talking about when it’s over, when it’s ‘back to normal.’ I tell them it’s not back to normal. At least, not as many people think, “says Herring.
However, the notion of the end exists for a reason: people need markers in their lives to show that they have experienced things, that they are moving from one phase to another, that there is some sense in what they are enduring.
That’s why Jennifer Talarico, which studies how people remember personally experienced events, suggests that even if there is no real time when the pandemic ends, finding a way to mark it is still important.
“I’m thinking of VE Day or VJ Day. This is clearly not the end of the war; it lasted longer than that. But we have these days when a big communal celebration took place “, says Talarico, professor of psychology at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.
“We build relationships based on common ground, even if your story and my story are unique and may not have been shared at that time. Sharing the story becomes the way we know each other, ”she says. So, “Where did you go for Remembrance Day or Pandemic Paloosis or something?” “The story of that younger generation years later may be a common moment.”
Ultimately, such as, managing expectations about a pandemic conclusion is a procrastination exercise, of coping with everyday life without losing sight of the great things that could be improved. Remembering the lost. Anchoring you in details without losing the bigger plot. Creating meaning. Many, one might say, like a movie.
We will then leave you with two quotes, uttered half a century apart by two very different writers.
The first comes from the little narrator in “When the Pandemic Ends,” a children’s book from 2020 by Iesha Mason: “I will be so happy once we get out of this crisis,” she says.
Second comes from science fiction writer Frank Herbert: “There is no real end,” he said. “It’s just where you stop the story.”
Which, for the purpose of our story about the endings, is right here. Even as the story of the pandemic continues.
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Ted Anthony, director of digital innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted