Coronavirus Nerves: Whoa Horsey!

major societal changes in response to the coronavirus are both unnecessary and unwiseSomeday a future Monty Python comedy troupe will reprise the plague scene from the Holy Grail in which a character pushes a cart through a street shouting "Bring out your dead!" only to discover one who isn't dead yet.

What will be funny about our era? Perhaps it will have something to do with overreacting to the situation by reordering society, as some have suggested. Those suggestions include, but are not limited to, ending tradeshows, scrapping office cubicles, installing industrial strength HVAC systems to sterilize office air, and imposing untold additional torture on those who still agree to sit in airline seats. I am not so sure.
Humans have a habit of straight-line thinking, which is the tendency to think that one thing follows another like a military drill or an assembly line. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We project straight-line thinking because when we look back all we see are straight lines. Our parents produced us, their parents produced them, and on and on. It's a straight line, right?

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