Before the bomb dropped.

Soon after September 11, 2001, I was in a supermarket checkout line. I was looking at the cheerful covers of the magazines on display near the register, magazines written and printed and distributed before the attack. I was thinking that they were each a window to a more innocent world we had just left behind forever. 

Here's something funny. 

I got a couple of books out of the library, doing fact-finding research. One of the books hadn't been checked out in some time, I guess, and it looks like the last person to take it out didn't throw away the checkout slip. Maybe the reader had been using it as a bookmark, but if so, he or she got less than halfway through the book. 

There's some hard-core irony at play here. 

Due date: February 21, 2020. Ten days earlier the World Health Organization named the Wu Flu COVID-19, a name that would swiftly become burned in our minds for the rest of our lives -- lives that would also be shortened, in a great many cases. 

A couple of weeks after that due date, Italy would be the first country to initiate a national quarantine. Two days later the WHO would declare COVID-19 a pandemic. By March 21, ten thousand would be dead and the total number of cases about 250,000. And you know the rest. 

"Stuck indoors because of the cold?" Lady, you don't know the half of it. 

This definitely has a little frisson of seeing, say, a "Visit Lovely Pearl Harbor" postcard mailed December 5, 1941, or an "I 💖 NY" postcard mailed September 10, 2001 -- or a poster for the Supernova music festival put up October 1 of this year. A little less so because COVID was a slow-growing catastrophe, but similar in that government intelligence was ineffective prior to the event. Also, in the case of the vicious surprise attacks, the evil was front-loaded. In COVID's case, while I believe the virus was man-made with American funding (using shenanigans to contravene US law about gain-of-function research), I think the release of the virus was accidental. In that case, the evil was back-loaded, with the purposeful wickedness coming later. 

All this leads to a lot of finger-pointing, because there are always people who could have prevented or prepared but were stupid or evil about it. But it also leads to "if only they had known" thinking -- If only you, innocent library patron, had known in February 2020 what was coming your way! And that leads to What's coming our way now that we don't know about? thinking. And that's the worst.