It happened so slowly — the masks and the social distancing and the economic wreckage were each gradually imposed upon us by slow degrees — that it’s easy to forget how oppressive the weight of our lockdown state has become. But the other day, as I stood masked in line at the grocery store, I looked at the beleaguered crowd of people trudging through their cramped existence and thought: what have we become? It got me thinking about how disconnected from reality our rhetoric has been these past few months.
We’ve lost all perspective. The black death, which ravaged Europe with repeated outbreaks of the bacterium yersinia pestis, killed between 30 and 50 percent of the populations it infected — 25 million people in Europe — during the 14th century. That is a pandemic. It hung grimly over the lives and careers of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer.
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