^=- up -=^

what's past is nonsense

the world is a fucking wild place

"You know, someone on campus might have coronavirus," John said, absolutely unprovoked.

"The fuck is coronavirus?" my roommate, Sam, asked. "Isn't that like the cold?"

"No, it's way worse, but someone might have it."

Sam cocked his head to the side. "How much worse?"

I jumped in finally, "What do you mean someone might have it?"

It was early in the first week of February 2020. We were still at college, and five of us were able to make it to dinner that night. Can't blame Sam for not knowing about the coronavirus; at that point a lot of us didn't. And no, none of these names are their real ones.

"There's this kid, everybody's talking about him. He's from Wuhan province."

"Is he from Wuhan or Hubei province?" asked Anne, a global studies major, and the resident "weird Wikipedia kid," if you know what I mean.

"What does it matter?" John came back, "That's where the coronavirus is. He's from there. Like, this isn't safe."

"I mean, he probably hasn't been home since this started," I replied. "Who is it, anyway?"

"I don't know -- nobody does! And the school isn't saying his name!" John yelped out, incredulously.

"Why haven't they quarantined him? What if we all catch it?" asked David, the token conservative in our friendgroup, apparently thinking this was as good a time as any: "Political correctness on this campus is going wild."

"Shut the fuck up," John said, "Point is, if we're gonna have someone with a disease on campus, we should know who it is so we can do something about it."

Sam came out of a state of deep thought. "If this stuff is dangerous, I honestly agree. Kinda scary."

I was getting annoyed. "Yeah, we should run them out of the country on a rail," I spoke up in a monotone.

"Who?" John asked. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"The Chinese," David chipped in, clearly agreeing with what I was saying, because of course he would.

I continued my train of thought: "To hell with a rail, run 'em out on a burning stake."

John, breaking through my monotone, finally realized I was calling him a racist. "Okay, no, no, that's not what I'm saying, thank you very much."

"The fuck is coronavirus?" Sam asked again.

There was a silence for a moment.

"It's xenophobia," I answered.

That night I predicted, in a discord message, "If this thing goes worldwide it's gonna be the 9/11 of sinophobia."

I stand by what I said, but at the time, I didn't really take it all that seriously.

And while we live in a world where half of the us calls SARS-CoV-2 "the Chinese virus," it turned out to actually be a big deal.

Less than a month later, my friends and I were eating dinner and one who's an RA (and therefore in the administrative loop) said that they'd be deciding in the next 3 days whether or not we were cutting the semester short. Meanwhile, professors had been emailed asking them to begin preparing to move their content online, just in case.

Two days later we were told we were leaving next week.

A week after that, the campus had a night of great purgative violence. It was the night before we were to leave. All of our friends were having a going-away party for Sam, who was doing an engineering 3+2 program with another college (and we're juniors), so if we weren't coming back this year, he wouldn't be coming back at all. Once we were all good and fucked up, we went on a grand tour of the campus, or at least the places that had some historical significance to us. What we saw were scenes of destruction. There were maaany holes in the walls of dorms, most of the school's exit signs were on the ground. Windows and computers in common rooms were smashed. Vending machines were tipped over. The senior residential buildings were surrounded by swarming, screaming crowds, banners draped from the windows, "WE'RE NOT LEAVING!"

As this was happening, the men's lacrosse team got trashed and broke into the hockey arena and tore it apart. That RA friend told me a few weeks ago that it's estimated that $650,000 worth of damage was done. I don't even know how you do that.

Next thing I knew, I was home, doing online classes and going back to work at the drug store. Goods were in short supply; people were stealing toilet paper from the fucking bathroom. Delusional weirdos were coming in wearing masks.

Very shortly thereafter, we were _all_ wearing masks.

The world is a fucking wild place.