Resist the Unraveling of Hope
Things are bad, but they can get better. Just keep your mask on.
Not long ago, it felt as though we were finally willing to break from our old, broken ways. This tone of optimism was immortalized in a video posted online in late April by 26-year-old Tomos Roberts (aka Probably Tom Foolery), who wrote a bedtime story imagining our post-pandemic future. In his four-minute poem, which has tens of millions of views on Facebook and YouTube, Roberts describes the world prior to the outbreak of Covid-19 — our isolating addiction to screens, our destruction of the Earth, and our political resistance to change. But then, as Roberts’ story goes, the virus arrived, and our culture started to shift. After hiding in our homes, we reemerged to find that not only had we changed, but our ideas of society had progressed for the better.
The video simplistically and saccharinely captured both the sense of community we quickly adopted as the virus spread as well as a frisson of possibility underlying the bleak headlines. Because, in the beginning, we really did change. We stayed home, for one thing, and we stayed apart. We reconnected with old friends. We ditched the makeup. We baked.
And, of course, we started wearing masks.
