My experience comes from a combination of having lived through the HIV epidemic in the 1990s as a college student and the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020s as a college professor. The most interesting contrast I suppose was an offhand comment that I made at the end of a class one day where I somewhat flippantly declared over Zoom that this epidemic was not nearly as fun to participate in as the previous one that I had mentioned. This of course created a sense of urgent trauma and some very disturbed, almost resentment and anger among some of the students who processed my comment as one that was inappropriate and seemed to belittle them in what they were experiencing.
While I had made it very clear that the only reason I was mentioning it was because at the beginning of the pandemic HIV was practically 100% fatal. There were very few people who got the virus and survived.Whereas from the very beginning COVID has been far less in terms of mortality rate and therefore in terms of fear, it would seem it would be a much smaller effect. Although from comparing my memory of the two events, the COVID pandemic seems to have taken on a much, much more severe and terrifying characteristic where HIV, though it was deadly, seems to be in my mind as well as the memory of others almost a quiet cohort that we learned to live with somehow and it was never conceived that something as radical as a quarantine or a lockdown would ever be used to cope with the virus.
So when later in the semester students began to have very, very deep and dark reactions to some of this stuff, it seems very strange to me, somewhat ironic that with such a less severe and deadly experience going on that students would take advantage of the opportunity to get extra time to do the papers or turn in homework or in general relate to a personal adventure that seemed to them at least to be far more terrifying and far more deadly than anything that had gone on in the 80s and 90s for those of us Gen Xers that were there and then passed on some of the experience to these students today. It seems to be quite an interesting contrast and one that I can’t help wonder if there isn’t a greater degree of sensitivity. It does certainly speak to the concept of the snowflake, I suppose, the student or the 20 something human today who was overly sensitive as compared to an earlier era and can be so easily stirred up and instigated towards something resembling panic or rage or complete shutdown because there is very little moderation when it comes to reactions from this generation. I think that’ll do it because I feel like I’m about to go into a very generalizing and somewhat siloing effort which doesn’t seem to be productive to me so let me know if this is what you were looking for. Thanks. Fun.
