A light at the end of the tunnel

"Don't you love being alive?" "Don't you love weather and the colors... and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?" asks one of the characters in Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," a story on surviving the 1918 flu pandemic.

We have not been through a war nor is this pandemic like that one. We did experience a very deep economic crisis that changed everything, though this was nothing compared to the two world wars and pandemics of yesteryear. Nevertheless, we have reached our limits and are in the darkest part of a major adventure. History is punishing us because as members of a "plastic" generation, we thought some things would never happen again. Ever impatient, we now want to fast-forward to the end of this particular horror film.