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Originally Posted by CU Tiger
Im not sure if this belongs here or the mental health thread so Ill start here and gladly move it if the group prefers.
One aspect of this has really consumed my brain for the last week.
Let me add this disclaimer before I got further. This is not an angle to minimize this pandemic. I think this is a major, serious, global issue that is going to get worse before it gets better. This isnt intended to minimize, excuse or ignore any of that.
With that aside, I am left wondering whether our global connected nature, as a whole, has helped or hurt in this crisis.
I ant but think if we go back to even the late 80s, how relatively little inter-connection and information availability was. (As a personal note I have been really mentally meditating and thinking on society and roles as a whole lately - thinking to settlement days where everyone had a task. The butcher, the farmer, the blacksmith, the barber etc and coming to grips with where my current societal contribution fits. So that's a relevant back drop to this thought) but I cant help but think about just 2 generations back.
In a much more isolated world. There has been 1 death in my county. In the days of newspaper and back I think this would definitely be a big deal in Italy and in New York currently. But would it be a big deal in my local community? Would it be totally business as usual and if this too does in fact pass with time, would it be thought back on as that horrible disease that killed the one lady two towns over. I spent this weekend visiting with my Grandfather who is 93(ish) and he was talking about the great depression for whatever reason. And how "that was horrible up in New York. but it never hit the farm Thank God"
In a more regionalized point in our history, certainly this wouldn't have spread as wide, and even if it did I wonder how it would be memorialized in our minds.
Again Im not intending to make light of the situation. But my ind is drawn to quantities. I've read that 40,000 people die every year in car crashes. 13 in every 100,000 people die every single year in auto accidents. We all know someone who has died in a car wreck I suspect. And it doesnt lessen the tragedy, but it also doesnt consume our consciousness. In fact we hardly ever stop to think about it beyond a wreath on the side of the road.
But this in our current social and traditional media environment, dominates our thoughts. And again rightly so. I just wonder if in a simpler time it would have even registered. In a rural ag community such as mine, its just about planting time. And I can imagine that being all grandpa thought about. With an occasional cursory thought to "those poor folks in Nw York battling that virus"..and maybe I selfishly long for that life.
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Yeah I'm in a similar boat. Information is good, social distancing, isolating is good and without the modern media this might not be happening. However on the flip side continual updates and information can just be overwhelming and the days I have not spent much time reading about it have been the least anxious.
I guess the best way to answer your question would be what historians have said about what happened during the Spanish Flu. Were small towns blindsided? Were some areas unaffected? I don't know the answers as I don't know much about this topic honestly.