There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
That’s the metaphor people are using, right? And with good reason. It’s an excellent metaphor.
I want to emphasize, before I go any further, that I have no actual experience of making my way through a dark tunnel and then seeing light at the end of it. Well, almost none—some roller coasters have something like that, at the beginning, but only for a few seconds. Most of the tunnels of my experience have been well-lit. I’ve never, just to be clear, had to escape from somewhere in a tunnel, or by tunneling. The metaphor is a vivid one, but not from my own experience.
Anyway, as I understand it, you’re in this tunnel, right? And it’s dark, or at least any light you have is being thrown by your own flashlight or lantern or torch, depending I guess on your own context for this image, maybe not even a little pool of light, just feeling your way through pitch blackness. And presumably, the tunnel curves to the side, left or right, goes down and then climbs back up, whatever—the metaphor, I think, does not allow us to be in a tunnel that we know like the backs of our proverbials. The tunnel goes from the present to the future, where we have not yet been. And then, at some point, you go around a turn or perhaps finish a climb, and then… you can see the light at the end of the proverbial.
You’re still in the tunnel! Maybe you have a long stretch of tunnel to pass through yet. The only thing that has changed is that you can see the light at the end of it. Which means that there’s no more turns in the tunnel—it’s a straight shot from here to that light source. It may be a long way away, but it’s no longer complicated. Probably.
Which, it seems to me, is exactly where we are in this pandemic. We’re still in it! We don’t know how much longer we will still be in it, but right now: ten thousand people in the country died from this disease in the past week. Forty thousand are in hospitals across the country right now. We have no idea how many contagious people are walking around. There are a lot of people who are protected against this disease, but also a lot of people who aren’t—in fact, there’s not really pessimistic to suggest that another twenty thousand people will contract it and die before we get out of the darkness and into the light.
On the other hand, we can see the end. We no longer have to guess where the turns are. We know all the steps that we need to take between here and there. We don’t know exactly when we will be stepping out into the light, or for that matter what it will look like once our eyes adjust, but we know it’s there and we know how to get there.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I feel like i have to update this part:
it’s not really pessimistic to suggest that another twenty thousand people will contract it and die before we get out of the darkness and into the light.
In the month since I posted that, twenty-five thousand people in the US have died from this disease, and while the daily toll is lower than it was, we aren’t getting much below five thousand deaths a week. Which is a lot of graves, a lot of bereaved people, a lot of empty spaces when we emerge from the tunnel we are still in and will still be in for another few months.
Thanks,
-V.
In the four months since I posted that it’s not really pessimistic to suggest that another twenty thousand people [in the US] will contract it and die the actual death toll has been eighty thousand. At least.
A thousand people died from this disease yesterday. While we did have a stretch where comparatively few people in our country died (I think we had a two-week stretch with around 3,000 deaths) the butcher’s bill continues to mount. And globally, we’re seeing ten thousand people a day dying. It’s unimaginable.
Thank you,
-V.
In the four months since I posted the above comment, the death toll in the US has been over one hundred and sixty thousand. We have averaged 1,300 deaths a day over the autumn. There are currently fifty thousand patients in hospitals in the US.
In the nine months since I declared that there was light at the end of the tunnel, the pandemic has killed a quarter of a million people in this country.
I certainly no longer feel that we can see the end in the US, and the rest of the world is, if anything, even further down the tunnel than we are here.
Thank you,
-V.