Do you still remember what we were experiencing roughly around this time three years ago? Back then, I was convinced that I would remember those gloomy winter days forever. All schools closed. Restrictions for citizens and businesses. Empty streets, deserted cities, inaccessible restaurants, venues, and shopping centers. Closed national borders. Rising numbers of infected, hospitals filling up, catastrophic scenarios. Predictions of the pandemic lasting for several more years. The surge of civic responsibility to limit the disease’s spread, still untainted by government mistakes or conspiracy theories.
Just as we said after the devastating floods of 2002 that we wouldn’t experience anything worse; we believed the same in March 2020. The following two years took a much harsher toll on us. It wasn’t just the disease itself that was destroying us. The contagion started to divide us in cities, at work, and within families. Similar to hockey or football, everyone gradually knew what the right measures were and could argue fiercely about them. It seemed that each subsequent step only deepened these divisions. Vaccination. Second dose. Third. Fourth. The fifth never came, and maybe it never will. Who, after everything that followed the end of the pandemic, still remembers a virus today? After a pandemic that was supposed to be the worst thing we’ve ever experienced, there was the war in Ukraine, and the virus was completely replaced in the media space and in our disputes. Inflation, an energy crisis, escalating activism attacking common sense, and finally, presidential elections.
Life plays with us as it pleases. The pandemic marked the end of a thirty-year period that, in today’s hindsight, may seem like an era of comfort and prosperity, except for those mentioned floods. Or is it just selective amnesia that always erases the bad and projects nostalgia into our memories?
Just for a reminder: around this time, in mid-March 2020, the first Covid lockdown began in the Czech Republic.
Ivana Tykač,
