Imagine a world from the Las Vegas strip to the museums of downtown Chicago empty. The list of vacated tourist attractions is endless. Everything from the Vatican and the streets of Paris to Times Square are almost ghost towns.
Students from grade school to college are forced to do classwork via web conferencing from home on their laptops. Community colleges and universities have moved all on campus courses to online. In some cases, school districts are not only canceled for the remainder of the spring semester but the entire year.
All events the public used to enjoy seeing on a daily basis are at a standstill. No baseball, basketball, hockey, or tennis. Bowling alleys are closed. Hollywood studios have either canceled all red-carpet movie premieres from Disney’s "Mulan" to the James Bond film, "No Time to Die" to "Wonder Woman 1984" or moved to late summer or fall, or in some cases to 2021.
No concerts. Turn on the morning news shows and instead of audiences cheering during various news segments or standing outside the studios of NBC’s "Today" and ABC’s "Good Morning America", we see the overpaid multi-million dollar talking heads anchoring via video conferencing from home or, if they are at the studio, they are practicing social distancing six feet away from each other. Any pervert hoping to catch themselves some hot nylon leg action on Fox News’ "Outnumbered" seeing the long-legged beauties in their over-the-knee skirts and seven-inch-heels on that huge couch will be sadly disappointed. They too must also practice social distancing voicing their opinions on five split screens.
Turn on the local news and you will see meteorologists doing the weather from the privacy of their homes now.
People going to restaurants for an overpriced meal are a thing of the past. Drive thrus and curbside pickups are the only options now to get your supposed “good food quickly.” Mass shootings no longer lead the nightly news. With everyone being required to stay home gun-toting psychopaths have no one to take their anger out on before dying by suicide.
Those who still have a job to go to work remotely from home now, in a majority of cases, indefinitely.
Gun shops are swamped with perspective gun owners lining up outside pawn shops in hopes of buying a firearm should the need arise to protect oneself. From Walmart to Target, grocers are seen wearing face masks, even the dogs. Malls are closed indefinitely. The travel industry is at a standstill.
AND MOREOVER…THERE IS NO TOILET PAPER IN STOCK AT ANY STORES!!!!
Barely an hour after city officials declared a state of emergency for Dallas County March 13, grocers headed to their local Walmart's and Target stores overloading their baskets with anything they could get their hands on.
“I got caught in that crap yesterday at Winco,” wrote friend Pablo Martinez on my Facebook page. “People must have 2-3 refrigerators because I don’t know where the hell they’re gonna store all that damn food they were buying. RIDICULOUS!”
The scenes brought to mind the clip from the 1983 nuclear war TV film, "The Day After", where grocers grabbed everything in sight, stupidly paying at the registers just as the missiles were about to launch. My dad and I laughed watching that scene 37 years ago. What the hell were the grocery stores going to do with that money after the bombs detonate?
The scenes also reminded me of how Dallas citizens senselessly panicked lining up at gas stations like as though we were in another gas shortage from the mid-1970s after Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas Louisiana coast in August 2017. I was among the lucky few who only had to wait 15 minutes in line to get gas that Friday morning.
Still some people out there managed to find humor in the pandemic. On rebrickable.com, a site dedicated to Lego enthusiasts, someone built a Lego version of the Coronavirus while the front cover of the Hollywood Reporter boasted a picture of the Death Star from "Star Wars" (1977) looking like COVID-19.
Today, those who attend Sunday mass, especially during this season of Lent with Easter on the horizon in early April, must temporarily resort to watching the services on television. If I died tomorrow, seeing since the last time I was at confession was Christmas Eve 1992, I would already know where I’d be headed for eternity; either Hell or Purgatory since confession in some churches is not an option right now.
Weddings and graduation ceremonies are postponed. Hospitals are packed. Metropolitan cities are declared “hotspots” for COVID-19. Family members are unable to visit the dying out of fear they could also get the virus. Convention centers across the country are turned into makeshift hospitals.
Such is our country and our world today. Welcome to the New Normal.
©3/18/20
Students from grade school to college are forced to do classwork via web conferencing from home on their laptops. Community colleges and universities have moved all on campus courses to online. In some cases, school districts are not only canceled for the remainder of the spring semester but the entire year.
No concerts. Turn on the morning news shows and instead of audiences cheering during various news segments or standing outside the studios of NBC’s "Today" and ABC’s "Good Morning America", we see the overpaid multi-million dollar talking heads anchoring via video conferencing from home or, if they are at the studio, they are practicing social distancing six feet away from each other. Any pervert hoping to catch themselves some hot nylon leg action on Fox News’ "Outnumbered" seeing the long-legged beauties in their over-the-knee skirts and seven-inch-heels on that huge couch will be sadly disappointed. They too must also practice social distancing voicing their opinions on five split screens.
People going to restaurants for an overpriced meal are a thing of the past. Drive thrus and curbside pickups are the only options now to get your supposed “good food quickly.” Mass shootings no longer lead the nightly news. With everyone being required to stay home gun-toting psychopaths have no one to take their anger out on before dying by suicide.
Those who still have a job to go to work remotely from home now, in a majority of cases, indefinitely.
Gun shops are swamped with perspective gun owners lining up outside pawn shops in hopes of buying a firearm should the need arise to protect oneself. From Walmart to Target, grocers are seen wearing face masks, even the dogs. Malls are closed indefinitely. The travel industry is at a standstill.
AND MOREOVER…THERE IS NO TOILET PAPER IN STOCK AT ANY STORES!!!!
I can’t make this stuff up. This is not something out of all those end-of-the-world virus movies ("The Andromeda Strain" - 1971, "And the Band Played On" – 1993, Stephen King’s "The Stand" – 1994, "Outbreak" - 1995, "Contagion" – 2011). This is playing out in real time, and it began, for the city of Dallas on March 13, Friday the 13th of all days. All the result of what seems to now be an unstoppable flu-like disease that reportedly began in China called the Coronavirus, officially known also as COVID-19.As the second unappointed “Mayor of Realville” I knew upon first hearing about this virus in mid-January this year that, like all the other countries, the United States was going to get hit. The question was how bad.
“I got caught in that crap yesterday at Winco,” wrote friend Pablo Martinez on my Facebook page. “People must have 2-3 refrigerators because I don’t know where the hell they’re gonna store all that damn food they were buying. RIDICULOUS!”
The scenes also reminded me of how Dallas citizens senselessly panicked lining up at gas stations like as though we were in another gas shortage from the mid-1970s after Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas Louisiana coast in August 2017. I was among the lucky few who only had to wait 15 minutes in line to get gas that Friday morning.
Still some people out there managed to find humor in the pandemic. On rebrickable.com, a site dedicated to Lego enthusiasts, someone built a Lego version of the Coronavirus while the front cover of the Hollywood Reporter boasted a picture of the Death Star from "Star Wars" (1977) looking like COVID-19.
Weddings and graduation ceremonies are postponed. Hospitals are packed. Metropolitan cities are declared “hotspots” for COVID-19. Family members are unable to visit the dying out of fear they could also get the virus. Convention centers across the country are turned into makeshift hospitals.
Such is our country and our world today. Welcome to the New Normal.
©3/18/20
