Worrybirds,
Dooty doo. Let’s take a look at some unsettling similarities with the past.
For any new subscribers, my name’s Jed and I created the Get Afraid Journal. If you want to get in touch, hit reply.
🔁 It’s All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating
I love starting books, but I have trouble finishing them. I get distracted and want to read something new.
I’ve been reading, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Which is an absurdly long book title. Let’s call it Flu for short.
It’s almost as verbose as the, Get Afraid Journal: Try It for the Story-Comfort Zone Challenges to Spark Creativity and Inspire Adventure.
With my tendency to quit reading early, I’m surprised I didn’t abandon Flu halfway through its title. I’m only a couple of chapters in, but it draws illuminating parallels between the 1918 and the 2020 pandemics.
For example, when the second wave of Spanish Influenza hit the United States in the Fall of 1918, officials created a public awareness campaign against coughing, spitting, and sneezing.
Now, we’re urged to cough into our elbows, wear a cloth covering and social distance.
The 1918 influenza decimated clusters of people, particularly young military servicemen. It turned their skin blue and overwhelmed their lungs. Philadelphia was hit extremely hard. 11,000 people died in a single month.
On October 3, the city closed all schools, churches, theaters, pool halls, and other places of amusement in a frantic attempt to slow the spread of the disease.
I don’t think they were able to slip into remote work. Working from home in 1918 just meant you weren’t fighting WWI.
In other areas of the country, medical scientists recalled, “citizens wore white gauze masks in public in a vain attempt to protect themselves. Funerals were limited to fifteen minutes. Coffins were in short supply.”
Sounds familiar.
Society focused on the utmost essentials as well. Like, playing baseball. Games were captured on film, showing players and umpires wearing masks.
In 2020, masked patrons flock to hardware stores for essential home renovations. Or they order carryout pizza like we did last week and watch as the worker warily places the box on the hood of the car and understandably runs away.
In 1918, Tucson, AZ required masks with “at least four thicknesses of butter cloth or at least seven thicknesses of ordinary gauze, covering both the nose and the mouth.”
In 2020 I have to ask myself, “Could I spare four layers of butter cloth? I have so much butter to wrap.”
Good luck doing an online search to find out what butter cloth actually was. You’ll be bombarded by $108 Buttercloth® shirts that appeared on Shark Tank. Yay! Branding! And guess who’s making face masks for only $25? Buttercloth®!
But, the Buttercloth® mask only has three layers. Not four. Like the folks in 1918 recommended.
According to the book Flu, the experts during the 1918 pandemic didn’t really know why people were turning blue and gasping for air. The medical community didn’t even have electron microscopes to see viruses; the devices weren’t invented until 1931.
I did some research and pulled together a list of other things that didn’t exist in 1918.
Adhesive bandages
Cotton Swabs
Vitamin D
Deodorant
Cheeseburgers
Netflix (Believe it or not!)
Can you imagine a world without Netflix?
Much, much earlier in the mid-1300’s the world was terrorized by the Black Death.
Author Giovanni Boccaccio witnessed the horrors of the bubonic plague in Florence first-hand. In the introduction to his book, The Decameron, Boccaccio outlined polar opposite responses to the pandemic.
These quotes are long, but if anyone from the 14th Century wants to come after me for copyright infringement so be it.
Having withdrawn, living separate from everybody else, they settled down and locked themselves in, where no sick person or any other living person could come, they ate small amounts of food and drank the most delicate wines and avoided all luxury, refraining from speech with outsiders, refusing news of the dead or the sick or anything else, and diverting themselves with music or whatever else was pleasant.
So, basically, some people stayed at home and went, “La la la!” Meanwhile…
Others, who disagreed with this, affirmed that drinking beer, enjoying oneself, and going around singing and ruckus-raising and satisfying all one's appetites whenever possible and laughing at the whole bloody thing was the best medicine; and these people put into practice what they heartily advised to others: day and night, going from tavern to tavern, drinking without moderation or measure, and many times going from house to house drinking up a storm and only listening to and talking about pleasing things. These parties were easy to find because everyone behaved as if they were going to die soon, so they cared nothing about themselves nor their belongings; as a result, most houses became common property, and any stranger passing by could enter and use the house as if he were its master. But for all their bestial living, these people always ran away from the sick.
It’s like the crowd raged into the darkness, “Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1348!” And then they bumped into a sick person and ran away.
Who was right? I don’t know. But we’re experiencing the same dichotomy roughly 672 years later.
Flu is an interesting read, but I’m probably not going to finish it. Nothing against the book. I’m really enjoying it, but finishing a book takes forever, and there’s a lot of other books I want to start.
— Jed
Try it for the Story
Ideas to spark creativity and inspire adventure.
⚡Virtual Escape Rooms. Remember escape rooms that weren’t real life?
Room Escape Game “SIGN” We played this last night. It was fun, but we had to cheat several times because some of the puzzles were near impossible. (Make sure to enable Flash.)
Have kids? These might be better. Public libraries have been using Google Forms to create digital escape rooms. I tried the Indiana Jones and Witcher games. They’re more like choose your own adventures with riddles and puzzles.
I went on a pitch black movie spree. First, there was The Art of Self-Defense with Jesse Eisenberg followed by Sorry to Bother You with Lakeith Stanfield.
They were both absolutely insane. I love dry humor, so I appreciated Self-Defense more. It was really dark/absurd/disturbing, but there were so many great one-liners.
See you fearly soon. 🙄
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