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Denialism
Get Ready For Even More Unthinkable Things
We felt invulnerable, but we were wrong
All my life, I’d hear about things the generations before me had lived through — world wars, the Great Depression, ravaging childhood diseases — and I’d think how lucky all of us living in contemporary Western culture are.
I had no significant worries about infectious disease. Or war, which was something that didn’t affect many people unless they lived in areas much more dangerous than the United States. Only the Americans who quite literally signed up for it had to fight — the rest of us have been mostly unaffected. Or water, food or energy shortages.
Covid was an eye-opener for many of us.
Turns out infectious diseases can still kill us — who knew? And if we had any lingering beliefs that we were going to skate through without living in what the old curse calls “interesting times,” the very real possibility of World War III has thrown cold water on them.
Existential dread was already a thing, and now it’s ramped up considerably. Those of us with wide-open eyes were already concerned about climate change. Now we’ve added pandemics and war to our list.
