The Forgetting Plague

We live in an age that demands post-mortems for everything. Give us a five-part true crime docuseries, a deep-dive podcast chock-a-block full of drama, or a memoir teeming with details. Yet when it comes to the two of the biggest biological interruptions of modern life - the polio panics of the mid-20th century and our own recent, sourdough-scented encounter with COVID-19 - there is a ringing silence. Sure, we got a brief flurry of pandemic-era lockdown comedies and Zoom-parody sketches that aged like warm milk left out in July. But true, enduring art? Great novels or music or sculpture or films that grapple with the existential dread of squinting across a restaurant table at your date’s nose? Epic cinematic treatments of iron lungs and corrugated cardboard home-schooling setups? They’re strangely sparse. It’s almost as if collective trauma comes with a built-in ‘select all + delete’ button. But why? And more importantly, what happens when we pretend the pandemic just didn’t happen at all? Well, as usual, the past might have some clues that will help us answer this question.

As it turns out, historically, we’re just following the script: humanity has treated massive plagues or disease outbreaks the way my cat sometimes treats me. If she closes her eyes real tight and turns her back on me, she can pretend that I’m not really there, making me easier to ignore when I’m calling her. That’s called object impermanence, a thing that cats and babies have in abundance - if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. Look back at the Black Death or the 1918 Influenza. The 1918 flu killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide, wiping out entire communities right as World War I was nearing its end, and yet it slipped into distant, fuzzy obscurity with terrifying speed. Historians sometimes even call it ‘The Forgotten Pandemic.’ Writers of the era were too busy writing about disillusioned expatriates drinking gin in Paris to talk about the millions of people who had just coughed so much blood into handkerchiefs that their lungs finally said, “all right, that’s enough of that.” But maybe that’s not quite fair - perhaps those writers weren’t writing about gin in Paris by accident: maybe that kind of jolly debauchery was just about all they - and their readers - could handle, after so much death: and I mean so much death. The Great War and the 1918 ‘flu combined killed somewhere between 65 million to 122 million deaths worldwide. Those numbers are too large for the brain to fully process, to even really comprehend. Perhaps it makes sense that people turned to lighter, easier subjects in their art and literature - it was, at the very least, the sort of thing their minds could wrap around and understand.

Polio in the 1950s followed a similar trajectory. Parents lived in a state of low-grade, hyper-ventilating terror every summer. Public swimming pools became ghost towns; movie theaters were viewed as incubators of doom; children were confined to rooms behind screened porches. And yet, once Jonas Salk’s vaccine arrived like a white-coated cavalry charge, society did a collective hair-flip, tossed the crutches and junked the iron lungs, and sprinted straight into the technicolor optimism of the 1960s. Polio, who? We don’t know her.

We don't make art about these events precisely because remembering how scared we were is deeply, aggressively uncomfortable. It’s embarrassing to recall how easily we turned on each other over swimming pools, or toilet paper, or hand sanitizer, or masks. It’s painful to look back at the friends and family we lost, or the months we spent staring at the popcorn ceiling of our bedrooms, wondering if the air itself was an enemy combatant. So we sweep it under the rug. We adopt a stiff upper lip and pretend we’ve always been normal, business as usual. But that kind of selective historical amnesia always sends an invoice later - and it always collects.

When we refuse to process a mass trauma, it doesn’t disappear; it just changes clothes and moves into the basement. The polio panic taught a generation a hyper-vigilant, medicalised anxiety about cleanliness and public spaces that simmered beneath the surface for decades. Similarly, our brush with COVID-19 left behind a fractured social fabric: a low-humming baseline of irritability, institutional distrust, and a strange, phantom loneliness that no amount of ‘return to office’ mandates can quite cure. If we don’t write books, paint murals, or make weird, messy art about what it felt like to be trapped inside our own neighborhoods and our own minds while our government played high-stakes Russian roulette with public health, we lose the language of resilience. We are left stranded in a perpetual present, doomed to act like every minor cold is the apocalypse, because we never properly cataloged the actual apocalypse we just survived. Plus, we’re left blaming ourselves for burnout and that bone-deep exhaustion that seems to plague (pun intended) so many people. '“What’s wrong with me? Why am I so tired?” we hear each other and ourselves ask openly, bewildered. Well, here’s an idea: maybe we’re feeling stretched so thin because we limped through a terrible, years-long pandemic of uncertainty and dread, and then we all collectively decided to pretend it didn’t happen and expect ourselves and everyone else to carry on, like running a marathon and then having to keep on running - forever. No wonder we’re collectively shattered.

So how do humans pick up the pieces after a plague? Well, I’m afraid to say that the answer is, mostly: not very well at all. We overcorrect. After polio, America built a suburban paradise centered around isolation, private automobiles, and air-conditioning, so that sealing ourselves away from the germy public became the ultimate luxury. And while a lot of polio survivors did wonders for disability advocacy in America, a lot of folks tended to read any visible disibility as contagious, something to avoid, to sequester. Yuck. After COVID, we tried to compensate with a manic frenzy of "revenge travel," packed airports, and forced social calendars, smiling so hard our jaws locked while secretly wanting nothing more than to go home and lie face down on the carpet. We may not fully understand the total impact of COVID for some time: we’re still in the middle of unpacking and unpicking the aftermath. It’s a messy process.

Maybe that’s where the art should live. Not in grand, sweeping epics about heroism and virology, but in the small, absurd, tragicomic truths of how we coped - or didn’t. Art doesn't need to make us noble; art needs to make us feel seen. Until we can laugh and cry at the sheer ridiculousness of sanitising our mail while ignoring our crumbling mental health, just as our grandparents likely laughed and cried over the surreal summer bans on public ice cream parlours in 1952, we’re just sleepwalking through history, waiting for the next bug to drop by.

Jennifer