My excellent friend and former colleague Jonathan wrote this, and I thought it was pretty insightful, so I'm sharing it here.
How is COVID-19 like a chocolate bar? Well I'm glad you asked, dear friend.
Anyone who has visited the US from overseas (remember when that was a thing?) will tell you that American chocolate tastes terrible. Personally I don't think so and always assumed it was European elitism around the production methods and percent of cacao and so on.
But no.
It turns out that American chocolate doesn't exactly use real milk, in order to make the product shelf stable. So I can grab a Snickers bar out of a desk drawer that's been there for years and have basically no fear that it's gone bad. Melted, maybe. But never rancid or dangerous. That shelf stable milk is the funny taste non-Americans can't get past.
We have grown up eating the chocolate of convenience. Because we are an impatient lot and though we might say, think or feel differently, we value ease over quality.
This year we have been asked to be inconvenienced and patient. We gave it a go, more or less, but quietly decided it wasn't for us. We needed our hair done, or our vices fed. Sure, some people might get sick or even die but that only happens to "other people" like shark attacks or lightning strikes. So the salons and the bars and the restaurants opened back up while exhausted health care workers begged and pleaded with us not to, because our vanity and our self interest proved stronger than our literal instinct to survive.
America, we could have licked this in a few weeks. We could have stayed home and worn masks on our minimal, essential outside activities. But you needed a lobsterita. We could have been eating really good chocolate, outdoors, together, without masks. It just required patience. Now we'll probably be stuck at home eating that old, melty Snickers bar FOREVER while the rest of the world watches.
At this point I only wonder if they laugh or cry.
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