'Unprecedented' times? Nope

These are troubled times.

And uncertain times.

Also: frightening, extraordinary, trying, difficult, frustrating, lonely, sad, odd and unsettling times.

At least, that’s what the television would have you believe. Every new commercial plays the required soft piano music while the narrator details these (fill-in-the-blank) times atop scenes of mothers hugging their newborns, grandparents Zooming with their grandkids and people waving through windows of nursing homes.

These are unprecedented times!

Except seriously, they’re not. Not even close.

Let’s first consider that human beings have always had troubled/uncertain/frightening (a.k.a. TUF) times. In Neanderthal days, every day there was a chance you’d become a delicious snack for a freakishly oversized hyena. What’s more, Neanderthals were apparently cannibals, so even if you made it home to your main squeeze, they might try to eat you, too. At that point, you’d probably yell, “HELP!”— except Neanderthals had weak larynxes and may not have actually been able to speak. So now you’re screwed. I’d say those were TUF times, for sure.

Here they are clubbing one of their buddies.

Or how about those early humans who walked alllllllllll the way across the Bering land bridge from Siberia? I can practically hear the kids whining, “Are we there yet?” New evidence suggests that some of these travelers went by boat—there was an Ice Age going on, and some passageways had melted — and as any boat owner will tell you, boats are nothing but trouble. And, oh yeah, did I mention there was a freaking Ice Age going on? Ev-er-y-thing was frozen. This does not include margaritas, which surely would have helped the adults tolerate the annoying children as well as the boat captains who kept directing them to “turn starboard” when they hit Alaska instead of just saying “turn right.”

Not quite to scale.

That's more like it.

Anyway, luckily for the people who had boats, the Ice Age ended and all the glaciers melted. Unluckily for the people without boats, that forced the sea level to rise and caused every land mass to flood, change shape or separate. Imagine if today Maine just started to break off and float away. Now that would be a distressing time, especially if your favorite restaurant is Red Lobster. Or if a terrible storm inundated New Orleans and it disappeared under water, and you drove your Chevy to the levee, but the levee didn’t exist because there was no Army Corps of Engineers to build it.

Then there’s Pompeii, which was completely buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. This was no “Joe Versus the Volcano” kind of hilarity. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan did not get spit out of it and sail away happily on steamer trunks. Nope, this is the kind of volcano that melts everybody in sight, freezing a city in a moment’s time for eternity. Historians have gruesomely discovered people frozen in their tracks. I hope that, like true Italians, they were making hand gestures and telling Vesuvius to stick it where the sun don’t shine. (Which, unfortunately, was soon how you’d describe Pompeii.)

Run for your lives ...

... if you can.

And of course from there we have the Black Death, cholera, yellow fever, polio, Ebola, AIDS and Zika. And D-Day, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, the Great Depression, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Chernobyl, 9/11, and every war ever fought in the history of the world.

Did I leave anything out? YES. I left pretty much everything out. Which proves my point: What we are going through in 2020 is not even a blip on the radar compared to what has happened in the past. The hardship of being told to stay home hardly compares to the difficulties of our ancestors. Compared to them, we are whiny little sissies.

Isaac Newton’s third law of motion says that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. When you apply that to our daily lives, it means that every positive moment creates a negative one. For example, if you win the lottery, it means someone else didn’t. Positive for you; negative for them.

Along those lines, to know joy, you must at some point have known sadness. To know jealousy, you must have known fulfillment. To know rage, you must have waited on hold for an hour and then been hung up on.

Which brings me to my point. (I know, thank goodness.) If these are uncertain times, when were the certain times? If these are difficult times, when were the easy times? Somewhere in a parallel universe, is Paul Simon singing about a bridge over untroubled waters?

Humans have never experienced certainty. In your lifetime, no matter what the television is telling you, you will never experience a certain time. (Except maybe that “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”) The fact is, life is a crapshoot. Whether this brings you comfort or discomfort is up to you. According to Newton, though, it should do both.

I hate this pandemic like everyone else. I worry for my family, friends and myself. But it’s not unprecedented by any means. And something like this will happen again.

So stay home, wash your hands and wear a mask. While you’re at it, buy a boat. Because you never know.