Health Alert: Inauguration Despair Virus is Surging

No one needs reminding that it’s been a tough month: fires, bombings, and an inauguration many of us never thought possible. It’s no wonder you might be feeling disheartened or even unwell. I’m here to tell you it’s not just you.

This week a terrible virus—the Inauguration Despair Virus (IDV)—began spreading across the country.

Diagnosing IDV

Because there are so many variants, no diagnostics have yet been identified.

However, if your 60-pound dog climbs into your lap and asks, “What’s wrong?” (see below) you have a pretty good indicator that your condition is serious.

Symptoms reported to date include:

• Lethargy
• Extreme fatigue or weariness (mine)
• Anxiety
• Inability to sleep after peeing at 2 a.m.
• Sudden anger outbreaks
• Lecturing the cat
• Brain fog
• Preternatural states of calm
• Excessive headline reading
• News avoidance syndrome (NAS)
• Obsessing about the possibility of life on a tropical island
• Canceling trips
• Boredom

Secondary symptoms include:

• A desire to be with people
• A desire to avoid people
• Continual spouting off on Facebook
• Canceling all social media
• An acute need to contribute to as many good causes as possible
• A desire to hoard money in preparation for the Apocalypse

You can see from the above why the disease is so hard to pin down.

Rapid Transmission

If you think you’re safe, beware.

The Surgeon General (if we still have one) has declared the disease to be highly transmissible. It can be spread orally—by talking with friends—or absorbed through the ears by listening to the radio.

Even benign sources, like this blog, can become super-spreaders.

The disease may set in slowly as a vague sense of unease or hit you over the head (“Sudden Onset IDV”) when you realize that the cap on your Medicare medications has just been lifted, and your drug costs will soon skyrocket.

Or perhaps your yoga-induced calm may fall apart when the brown-skinned boy in your classroom whispers, “I’m scared.”

We don’t know how long the disease can survive in the body, but if our experience with Long Covid is any indicator, it’s best to figure it’s here for a while.

No Cures to Date

The pharmaceutical industry, relieved of the burden of controlling costs, is rushing to produce a pill that will alleviate symptoms like acute concern for others’ suffering or the obsessive need to find one’s passport and make sure it’s up to date.

Lacking any scientifically backed remedies (or advice from RFK, Jr.), I’ve compiled my own list of remedies:

• Simple acts of kindness to others
• Dark chocolate
• Humming
• Walks in nature
• Calm and thoughtful actions (I recommend humming first in case “calm and thoughtful” sound like oxymorons).

Back to the Future

The acute phase of the last pandemic lasted three years. I suspect this new one will last at least two years, maybe four. Perhaps we will never entirely get over it.

Given that possibility, it’s time to strengthen your immune system with a steady diet of beauty, kindness, and truth-seeking. Let yourself be guided by those wisdom keepers who have shown they can look into the rubble and still find light.

One such wisdom keeper is Wendell Berry:

“The Peace of Wild Things”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

You can hear the farmer-poet Wendell Berry reading his words here.

Here’s to the grace of a world in which we can all choose to be free,