I Can Tell the Pandemic Is Ending Because People Are Being Assholes Again

Good news/bad news

Susan Orlean
GEN
Published in
4 min readJun 14, 2021

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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Today, three — yes, THREE — different drivers flipped me off because I had interfered with their right to 1)drive very fast on the wrong side of the road or 2)park their car in the active lane at a car wash or 3)fail to yield at an exit-only lane. I was thrilled. Finally, the pandemic is ending! Finally, the goodwill brought about by tragedy and disaster has worn off!

I’m not kidding. The warmest, most genuinely communal feelings I’ve ever been part of have all come amid disaster. Example #1: The Northridge Earthquake in Los Angeles, which I experienced because I happened to be in LA on a story assignment. The kindness, the outreach, the sense of community in the aftermath of the earthquake was extraordinary. In my case, someone I barely knew tracked me down at my hotel and invited me to stay at her house because she thought that staying alone in a hotel room on a high floor would be a drag (there were massive aftershocks for days). On the streets, people slowed down as they passed and smiled at each other. Strangers traded stories about whether or not their houses had been damaged and offered consolation. It was Los Angeles at its very best, humanity at its very best, everyone viewing themselves as part of a continuous fabric, all vulnerable to the same scary thing.

Then, 9/11. I was living in New York at the time, and it was awful. I was supposed to get married that Saturday, so until the attacks, I had been in a mood of great excitement, distracted and delighted by the upcoming event. My soon-to-be husband lived in Boston, so I was alone when the day unfolded. We — that is, the people of New York City — clung to one another. My next-door neighbors, who I didn’t know particularly well, came over and watched the news with me, and invited me to sleep at their apartment so I wouldn’t be alone. For the next few weeks, everyone was bruised, stunned; we walked around in shock, teary-eyed, nodding to each other as a gesture of compassion and humanity. There was a lot of calling to check up on people, especially people who lived downtown, but the calling rippled out beyond that, welfare check-ins with anyone and everyone. For months it felt like no one could imagine honking a horn angrily, or being snappish in a public…

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Susan Orlean
GEN
Writer for

Staff writer, The New Yorker. Author of The Library Book, The Orchid Thief, and more…Head of my very own Literati.com book club (join me!)