John Wise

Wow has the conversation around me changed about COVID-19 as I am recognizing the vulnerability America, in particular, is facing. Without a fully accessible health care system and the lack of savings for an economic shock, we are especially vulnerable to bad decision-making when those who can ill afford to be off work and quarantined at home will say they have a cold or allergies instead of incurring the cost of viral tests and losing income. How we’ll deal with children younger than ten years old at home alone will present another hardship that could force a parent to skip work or, possibly worse, someone will use the opportunity to earn extra money by watching neighborhood children, thus potentially exposing even more people to infection.

The stock market lost 3,583 points this week, toilet paper in Hawaii is being rationed, Costco is sold out of emergency food supplies, and I learned that this morning, hand sanitizer is mostly sold out across America. In the last 15 minutes, I read that someone in Washington died from COVID-19, which will only startle the population even more.

It was only one week ago that 28 countries were reporting infections within their borders; three days ago, it was 48 countries, and today it is 60. To think that it was just 28 days ago, on February 1st when China was reporting its 259th death, and now we are over 2,900 fatalities globally. But that’s not enough perspective: it was only back on January 11th that the first death was reported, then on the 17th, the second death occurred, followed on the 20th with the third death. It was five weeks ago, on January 23, that the World Health Organization or WHO reassured the people of our planet that Coronavirus had not spread outside of China.

So in 35 days, the COVID-19 epidemic went from about 23 deaths to 2,942 and from 1 country to 60, and yet to listen to the president of the United States, the danger is a hoax being perpetuated for political gain. Hey, you big orange dolt, it was just 18 days ago that there were only 1,000 people dead from the virus and 42,638 people infected, while today there are 86,020 who have been infected and 2,942 DEATHS! China no longer plays any role in this equation as this has become a global issue outside a country that was able to halt all activity that could have made the situation worse while our leadership is more worried about the stock market.

There’s a certain amount of futility in posting any of this as the data is changing so fast that this will feel like ancient news, but I suppose for the continuity of my blog at this pivotal moment in human health and where much of the world’s attention is focused it doesn’t hurt to note where we are.

Since March 11, 2011, I’ve watched every Japanese tsunami video I could see and many I’ve watched more than once. Besides being awed by the sheer power of the waves as they swept in, clearing the land of nearly everything upon it, I scoured the corners of the footage, often seeing drivers in cars hoping for an escape or people who were about to be caught up in the rushing water.

A telltale voice accompanied almost every video with either a bell or siren sound that became indicative that a tsunami was about to happen. The calm warning voice would continue while the mayhem of a town being washed away played out to the people in disbelief who had perched themselves on surrounding hillsides. Some of the survivors, though, weren’t so fortunate to heed the early warning and instead scrambled to the top of heavy concrete buildings that weathered the beast rising out of the ocean. Then there were those who, in their cars, homes, on bikes, and walking, likely succumbed to a liquid grave.

What I took from watching countless hours of this stuff is that there are three types of people in an emergency that could have fatal consequences for at least one and maybe two of them. First are those who are quick to react and might be called alarmists; they heard that there might be a tsunami, and they ran for the hills without hesitation, and they lived. Next up were those people who were pretty sure nothing was going to happen but measured their situation and were able to respond before the rushing water overtook them; to an extent, they survived. Third were those certain that everyone else was overreacting, and so they dug in and scoffed at those running around; they died.

Survival was what was at stake, but the far away earthquake was something that occurred in another dimension, so to speak. If you’d never experienced a tsunami before, but you knew earthquakes, why should today be the dramatic shift in reality that warranted panic?

COVID-19 is the earthquake that happened in Wuhan, China and maybe Iran, Italy, Japan, and South Korea are the first signs that something is amiss. During the tsunami in Japan and the one in the Indian Ocean back in 2004, the tide going out was the first clue that a tsunami was on its way, but people didn’t know how to read that. Without an early warning system, those in harm’s way remained oblivious to the approaching freight train.

Irrational panic comes to my mind, too, when I think of reacting to a virus that, in all likelihood, doesn’t have my name on it. I don’t want to succumb to hysteria, yet I can’t help but think that complacency might put me on the beach admiring the amazing tide pools that had never been seen before as a wall of water 40 feet deep crashes over my existence.

I can’t know if COVID-19 will become a thing where I live, even though the 5th person in the United States diagnosed with what was then still called Coronavirus was right here in Arizona. I do know that I’m not the only person thinking long and deeply about it, as in learning which types of facemasks are most effective, I also quickly discovered that N95 respirators are nearly sold out everywhere.

Even as I write this, I’m reading chatter about a growing acceptance that COVID-19 will be a global phenomenon and that people are going to need to learn how to deal without resorting to extreme measures and fear. Meanwhile, thousands wait in line for surgical masks in South Korea, and grocery stores in a region of Italy are being shopped bare as people stock up for the worst.

I’m seeing some signs that people in Scottsdale are preparing for quarantine or a panic situation, as tonight at Whole Foods, there are particular bulk products sold out across their inventory, specifically those that can be sprouted, giving people a small amount of fresh greens in case they are unwilling or unable to venture out.

There’s an undiscussed situation here in America that could make a virus such as COVID-19 all the worse, and that is, what happens when people abstain from going to a doctor due to the exorbitant bills they’ll inevitably be faced with?

Then, before I can even post this, I learn that not only do we have quarantines in San Diego but in Oregon and Michigan too. Alabama turned down using one of its military bases as a quarantine site for people coming back from one of the cruises, but there is nothing to worry about as I’m sure we’ll handle it with the same efficiency we are seeing China deal with it, right?

Maybe this is a horrible admission, but I’m obviously not alone in this morbid curiosity that leads to today’s blog post: I watch some of the worst gore videos there are on the internet.

I hate to admit this publicly, as I’m certain that a majority of people would wonder out loud how in the world I can stomach some of the atrocities I’ve seen. The reason this is a topic is that it’s dawned on me how truly perverse these gore videos really are, and they are not made more so because I or anyone else looks at them. Morbid curiosity has always been a part of the human condition, though technology has brought the ability to witness it to extraordinarily convenient levels.

One could argue that by consuming the most atrocious gore content, those consumers are fueling the suppliers of the carnage, but that would be constructing a straw man fallacy. There’s something far more interesting going on in our world, and it’s not that some people are watching beheadings, dismemberments, people on fire, or accident victims gasping their last breaths.

Consider for a moment that all around our earth, when these events are happening, there are people at the ready, armed with cameras in their phones, recording this stuff. Not just one person typically, but multiple people have their phones out and are getting up close to capture the gruesome details. At least one of those capturing the ghastly scene obviously has an inkling of where to share this footage because it seems like nothing is held back.

What’s going on in their minds that when, upon finding themselves in a situation where one might think “normal people” would recoil at the horror, these spontaneous amateur journalists move in close to find intimacy in someone else’s pain or death? It’s not like YouTube is an avenue for this kind of footage; one must have some idea that the file now on their phone has some value on the internet.

One could argue that the most wretched people are moving about, lying in wait for this kind of thing to happen so they can run to the location of the slaughter and grab it for weirdos like me who are going to watch it on one of the sites that host it allowing the purveyors of this stuff to make a ton of money from their porno adverts. Regarding the porno advertisements, nobody should be surprised by this, as would anyone expect ads from Nike or Coke?

There is no way that those recording this stuff make a habit of chasing gore; they must be average people who just so happen to be in the “right” place at the right time. Just ask yourself how often you have been at an accident scene where exploded bowels were strewn halfway across the highway. Apparently, those first to arrive where fate snuffed out people’s lives are immediately struck with the idea that someone probably really needs to see the carnage.

Maybe there are simply too many complicit people in need of witnessing such tragic sights and just as many who are ready to whip out a phone and test their mettle so they can gross out some other people.

I checked out some of the most notorious websites that deal with the worst of the worst, and it turns out that many of them are quite popular, ranking in the top 15,000 global websites. Consider that there are 1.74 billion websites worldwide and that the most horrible gore and abusive porn rankings put them above the next 1,739,985,000 websites. Another way of seeing this is that one of the gore sites I would be loathe to share a link to is about as popular as Safeway.com, while one of the fringe porn sites that might make you cry is twice as popular as the Starbucks website.

Who, then, is making these sites so popular? It’s obviously not just me, nor is it that weirdo in some dank basement you might want to believe is visiting these places? I posit that it is a majority of those everyday people around you that you’d never suspect of wanting to see a man having his genitals eaten by a dog controlled by a drug cartel seeking revenge. Yeah, that exists.

As I was describing this to the person who triggered me to explain my interest today, it got me thinking about an aspect of our evolution that might have led to this. For how long were humans relegated to eating any animal they would stumble upon? Do we want to believe that meat has always been neatly packaged? How often, due to lack of tools and a fresh kill, have we had to compromise manners and risk of illness to gobble up whatever tragedy of rotting flesh our meal might happen to be?

Going down this line of thinking, it was quickly obvious that in our ancestral memory (if something like that exists) are generations after generations of those who, without proper knives or even sharpened stones, would use teeth and fingers to tear apart and gouge at the creature before them. Now, slow down and give this some thought: you are hungry, maybe even on the verge of starving; what is the thing you can eat the fastest on an animal? You might excavate the eyes, chew out its tongue, or use teeth and hands to tear at the soft parts of the belly, breasts, or genitalia. Yeah, I know this sounds gross to modern humans who’ve grown up in an age of sterilization and prepackaged everything, but that’s not how life has been for the majority of history.

Our reliance on factory slaughterhouses, refrigeration, and clear plastic wrap that removes the image of death from our meat has rapidly seduced us away from the brutal reality of what it is to prepare another creature’s body to meet our needs for food. In the not-too-distant past, it must have been relatively common to gather around a carcass for the communal process of dismembering it. Would any of us think this was not a bloody process?

Now I start to ask myself, how does this correlate to our current place in a culture where just about everyone is aware of the Starbucks brand and that an “obscure” gore site is more popular than that iconic coffee company? So, how could it possibly be considered obscure? It starts to appear that the truth is it might be relatively normal.

Morbid curiosity appears to satisfy a kind of inherent blood lust that would have been present when people are about to enjoy the bounty of finding satiety and preserving their kind. What kind of elation would have been present in this celebration of survival at the expense of the beast about to be disemboweled and dismembered? I posit that there is a reward factor going on and that in our civil, clean, and relatively peaceful society, our deeply buried lust for carnage is not met, and so we turn to horror movies, tales of mass murderers, violent video games, and most recently to internet sites that are publishing videos from around our globe by a citizens brigade who appear eager to have others witness the bloodletting.