The pandemic: like and unlike a bad dream

The pandemic: like and unlike a bad dream

BY BOB LIM

The word  “disaster”  to most of us in Cebu used to mean  untoward events of limited duration that resulted  in difficulties and inconvenience and little damage.  A fire in the  neighborhood,  a low-intensity earthquake,  some flooding,  a low-level typhoon.   A super-typhoon would come only between decades; a giant tremor would happen elsewhere, not in “Sto. Nino-protected”  Cebu.  It’s only in recent years that almost every weather disturbance would afflict Cebu in a big way.  “Disaster”  is  now high up in the list of  concerns  of government, national and local.

             For entertainment purposes, to get the adrenaline rushing and  draw queues at the  box office, disaster movies were produced.  Alfred Hitchcock’s  “The Birds”  (1963)  — about  nature gone berserk,  probably the precursor of  disaster movies – with “Poseidon Adventure”  (1972); “Towering Inferno” (1974) and Steven Spielberg’s masterly  “The Jaws” (1975) were early examples of disaster movies that offered diversion from boredom and journey into fantasy land.  But this was before the appearance of larger-than-life,  life-threatening  real-life disasters.  

             It would seem that after the two world wars (1^st World War, 1914-1918: 2^nd World War 1939-1948), the people of the world would already be  exempted from terrors and trials that full-scale apocalyptic events bring. The dire predictions in the Bible and from Nostradamus would be confined to movies and books, not the staple of opinion columns.

             Few ever thought of a virus sending people and nations in most of the world virtually on its knees. Of course, there’s nothing entertaining about real-life pandemic, as a disaster movie would have.

             Before 2020,  when  Covid 19 reared  its fearsome  head and metamorphosed from a localized health scare into a worldwide pandemic,  it had been  quiet on the world front. But with the ugly explosion of the disease, from China and spreading around the world, in pace and intensity that seemed to imitate the movies, a terrified world populace dropped  most  everything  that involved human contact  and movement.

               Memories of the pandemic are like those from a bad dream, only that the pain and suffering of victims was real, and paralysis of  human activity actually happened.  The fear was overwhelming.

              In early March 2020, I remember,  a working student  texted me that her parents  no longer allowed her to report to the studio because one infection was  reported in Mandaue City.  Since then,  I realized that Covid-19 would have serious impact, and indeed it had,  on every facet of people’s lives, from leaders  in government  and captains of business and industry, to lavorers and working students and even people confined in their homes.

            Unlike a bad dream though, images of Covid-19  remain —  in print or digitally, thanks to the hardy photographers — to remind us that the scourge  was  here and could  still be here.  And like a dream, though half-remembered, some lessons on surviving a horrible ordeal would stay with those images.

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