Battle: Los Angeles, a sci-fi action flick released in 2011, depicted what would happen if the U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton had to respond to a sudden alien invasion. Though the film wasn’t terribly original, it was fun. (A diverse band of Marines and civilians, led by Aaron Eckhart and his perfect chin, fleeing and fighting their way through a hastily evacuated Los Angeles while dodging alien drones, could hardly not be fun.) And there was one sly bit of social commentary tucked in: On the news channels shown throughout the movie, the stock tickers kept running at the bottom of the screen, showing that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down roughly 4,847 points in response to the fact that aliens were taking over the world’s coastal cities. Bad news for humanity, and think of the toll on your 401(k)!
Like the Internet commentators who offer habitual gripes during an alien invasion in a Mitchell and Webb sketch, some people cannot change their mental habits, even in a severe crisis. And the global pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 is a bit like an alien invasion. Green spheres with little red spikes have landed, and they are floating around, invisible to the naked eye, trying to sneak into our lungs. They’re more threatening to some of us than to others, but no one is immune, besides (thankfully) most children and those who have already fought off an infection. Our best scientists are developing ways to mitigate the invasion’s damage, but we haven’t yet found an unstoppable superweapon or an impenetrable shield.
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