benefits and harms of pandemic

 

 

BENEFITS  AND HARMS OF PANDEMIC

 

Pandemic delivers  benefits and disadvantages..    The disadvantages are psychologically expensive and  strange, taking form as semi-permanent grief; excessive indulgence in hatred;  calculated  violence; hasty and  uncritical decisions ; ennui ( luxury of boredom);  excuse to overdose on designer drugs; discovering  opportunities to shame, torment, and virtually  kill; and other items of negativity which defy counting.   In ordinary, pre-COVID-19 time, none of these things would  be deemed normal.  In the clouds  of pandemic,  they are ultra-normal.  Unadulterated insanity is remarkably "normal."

 

Pandemic  also gives  birth to positive awakening, the sense that one can name and defeat one's demons. The  positive benefits  belong to the category of wisdom.  They struggle to articulate themselves.  The interest paid by wisdom is worth less than a postage stamp.

 

The benefits and harms of pandemic appear to be aspects of post-capital capitalism. Pandemic condemns us to swim in treachery.  Some us of live.  Some of us die. Amoral Nature prevails.  Serious science constantly adjusts our recognition of actuality as well as our disputes about the reality in which we choose  to live.  Has our ability to choose vanished?

 

It may be the case that the suspect conclusions of Tony Cuong Ngo's Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy (2021) provide inconvenient clues about ideological formations and social existence  in the ambiance of pandemic. Ngo's  pessimistic book is a neat counter-weight for the optimism of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics of Asian America (2002).  These yellow voices help us to see the work of pandemic with a modicum of clarity. Who in our nation of five colors needs to listen most passionately?  By way of an answer, another question erupts: How well or how poorly have Ngo and Nguyen as late arrivals absorbed lessons provided by African Americans in their very long, complex  critique of the benefits and harms of democracy?

 

Pandemic is  the angel of life; it is the angel of death.  It enables us to make insanity and wisdom identical.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            3/22/2021 5:27:47 AM

 

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