COVID-19 is real horror, but we will survive – Main Street Clarksville

To the Editor:

Many people enjoy watching a good horror movie. Giving us a thrill, such movies are called thrillers. Being captivated for a couple of hours by a screenplay writer's imagination, such as Alfred Hitchcock, where your mind is spellbound, filled with temporary anxiety and surging with adrenaline, is fun.

I think what partly makes it fun is that our conscious mind knows it's just a movie and that it will soon be over. On the other hand, I don't know anyone who enjoys a "good nightmare." In fact, the oxymoron "good nightmare" is indicative of the fact that the only good thing about a nightmare is waking up.

Unlike a movie, when we are asleep, our conscious mind is unaware, and our subconscious mind does not have the ability to distinguish what is real and what is make-believe.

COVID-19 is not make-believe. Unfortunately, it's real. It's an actual nightmare playing on the big screen of life, except there is no waking up and no climatic ending to this real-life horror movie that says "the end."

A year ago, who would have ever thought the world would be enduring a pandemic? Many didn't even know what a pandemic was, much less to imagine we would experience its seemingly unyielding crippling effects on society. The coronavirus disease of 2019 or COVID-19, as dubbed by the World Health Organization, like a monster, inflicts instantaneous mental images of fear and dread in most people by just hearing its name. It is indeed a horrific pandemic, which, unlike just an epidemic, literally means a global or worldwide problem that's bigger than life.

As an invisible and unstoppable monster, COVID-19 continues to insidiously creep forward throughout the four corners of the world, indiscriminately suffocating innocent and unsuspecting people to death by literally snatching their breath away. As it moves and we watch this horror in real time, it simultaneously serves its evil but unknown progenitor as not only a grim reaper of precious human life but as a sophisticated and multiple "grief inflictor" that uncontrollably wreaks social havoc and economic ruin in its path.

As a result, many people are experiencing the five cyclical stages of grief, according to the late Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, which are denial, anger, bargaining or processing, depression and acceptance. COVID-19 is real, but we will survive it together through faith in Almighty God.

Gregory P. Stallworth

Clarksville

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COVID-19 is real horror, but we will survive - Main Street Clarksville