Shit Happens

A few days ago I saw a post in response to a YouTube video, from a woman who swore that while COVID was real, it was a weaponized virus created in a lab in China to take out the western world.

I'm not sure which is worse, people like her or people who deny that it exists in the first place, and is just a huge worldwide hoax to make Donald Trump look bad.

Let me explain a few things.

I think that one of the big differences between now and 1918...the flu pandemic that killed 50 million people...was that people then had a "shit happens" attitude about life. They were used to death and pestilence. There were no antibiotics, and people regularly died from a simple infected cut.

Shit happened, and they didn't need to blame anyone for it. Shit happened, and they saw it every day. Shit happened, and they knew it. Shit happened, they saw it, and tried to deal with it as a community.

I was going to say that we moderns have lost that ability to understand that shit happens, but then I remembered the Salem Witch Trials. That shit happened when those people couldn’t understand that shit happened, or that there might be perfectly logical reasons that they didn’t understand behind the shit that was happening...and decided that there was a conspiracy of witches to blame for it. Ah...one of our first big conspiracy theories.

In any event, we moderns can’t seem to handle that shit happens. We need someone to blame. We need something to blame. We need there to be a conspiracy we can point to. We can’t accept that while the truth may be out there, it may be mundane and boring. We can’t accept that the “somebody” whose “fault” this was may just have been someone who carelessly handled an exotic animal, and then didn’t wash their hands properly. That’s a lot less exciting than someone creating a biological weapon in a lab that accidentally got lose. It doesn’t make as good a story.

And I know a thing or two about stories. As a librarian, I see a lot of books checked out that are thriller novels about some sort of conspiracy. A lot. And I believe that you’re shaped by what you read. Just ask me about the old girlfriend who read a steady diet of Harlequin romance novels.

If you read a lot of conspiracy thriller novels, you’re going to think that everything’s a conspiracy. But you’d also be wrong. The real world is much more complex and random than the fictional world is. In the real world a virus we’ve never seen before can be spread by something as random as one bad interaction with an animal. We’ve seen this before with AIDS. And no one’s “to blame” except for maybe the person who got messy with that animal.

But the world of fiction...in the world of conspiracy thriller fiction...is very tightly controlled...by the author. There’s not a thing in that book that they didn’t put there for a reason. Not a random item in there at all...except maybe to intentionally throw a curve ball at you. Everything in those novels was written that way because the author wanted it to be that way. It was written that way to give you an exciting story.

In a special episode of Mythbusters, James Cameron was shown all the ways that Jack could’ve been saved in Titanic, and at the end of the episode, he simply said that Jack had to die because it was his story, and he could do anything he wanted with it.

And don’t even get me started on all those crap conspiracy theory books about actual historical events.

We need to remember that shit happens, and spend more time trying to deal effectively with the shit we’re going through right now than trying to find someone to blame it on.