How Did We Get Here?

March 23, 2020

I’m spending the day in the chilly basement at my parent’s house in Connecticut. The lighting from extra table lamps collected from around the house is dim, but cozy and what was once used as a dinner table during my childhood is doubling as a desk. This is my makeshift office, “the bunker” as my dad has come to call it, my escape from coronavirus-drenched New York City. I was here last week, I’ll be down here again this week and probably the week after that, too: working, hiding, worrying, looking for answers to the question we’re all asking: how did we get here? How did we get to a place where a mysterious, previously unknown virus is killing people in mass numbers; where we can’t dig graves fast enough for fit all the bodies; where we don’t know when it will be safe to be close to family members again; where doctors are sewing their own masks because there aren’t enough to go around? It’s feeling more like 1820 than 2020 these days. 

Worldwide, nearly everyone is doing the same thing as me: staying put, avoiding other people, and wondering how an invisible enemy hiding in plain sight could send financial markets into free-fall, drive thousands from their homes and offices, cancel celebrations large and small, turn lives upside down, and stop the world.