What a New Car and COVID-19 Taught Me About Perspective

“Oh Lamar, Hail Mary and marijuana, times is hard.”

Kendrick Lamar. DAMN. Top Dawg Entertainment, 2017

So, 2020, weird start huh?

I started listening to gospel music; I’m not even religious.

Someone asked me what I gave up for lent this year. I said “Hope”.

It felt like a funny thing to say at the time, but that’s not necessarily true. Despite my dark bent, I’m an optimist at heart and now seems like the best time to exercise some optimism.

All news registers like early rumblings of the end times; more dead, more sick, more economic downturns. Even when we’re not reading about the adverse effects of our plague, it’s all around us in the form of concerns for our family, losing job security, and staying away from the people we are most fond of.

I guess what I’m saying is that in moments like this, when we’re surrounded by darkness, fear, and uncertainty; it serves the psyche some good to find silver linings. Lessons are usually learned after-the-fact, but since this situation will be developing for a while, I felt now would be as apt a time as any to talk about my new car.

This exercise is of course, not original – a quick Google search of “positives of COVID-19” will yield countless results – that’s just sound SEO marketing. However, like a lot of people right now, I’ve been lazy, depressed, and unmotivated, and if one more person tells me about how I should be taking advantage of my time indoors to improve myself, I will literally kill them. So, I’m subjecting the few of you to my attempt at self-therapy.

With that in mind, here’s what the coronavirus and a new car taught me about perspective:

In my junior year of high school, my parents helped me buy a 2009 Nissan Altima. As you can imagine, for a young man with zero sense of priorities, having my own car was quite exciting. I’m weary of lending emotional attributes to humanize inanimate objects, but I will say that this car was very good to me. It carried me through high school, and then endured many long drives from college to my home and then back again, it did so with little to no complications.

After I graduated, the car continued to take a beating for a few years. In fact, the only reason I moved on from that Altima was because an accident made it impractical to use anymore; I very much drove it to the ground. For ten years and nearly 200,000 miles I drove this car, and at the end of 2019 it was time for a change; it was time for a new car; the first car I would purchase on my own.

I bought my 2019 Toyota CHR on December 20th, 2019. Zero miles. Brand new.

On March 8th, 2020, someone hit my new car while it was parked outside of the gym and then drove away without leaving so much as a note. I had no recourse as there were no cameras pointed at the location in which the “accident” took place. So, I was left with the bill. I was livid. I don’t make a lot of money and having to pay a $500.00 deductible for damage which was not at all my fault was at the time, the most stressful thing going on in my life. All things considered, that sounds like a best case scenario for a whole lot of people. I would say I’m profoundly grateful that some asshole putting a dent on my car was my biggest problem.

The very next week, the world changed. Our collective attention shifted to the massive pandemic spreading around the globe at an unprecedented speed, leaving entire governments scrambling to figure out a response.

The U.S. economy has come to a grinding halt. No one is left unaffected; if its not infecting or killing you or a loved one, it’s threatening your job if you haven’t lost it already. At a base line, COVID-19 has disrupted what we’ve come to accept as normalcy, probably for a very long time.

I now walk past the dent and scratches on the front fender of my new car and don’t even notice it. It’s funny how quickly your priorities can change and make you realize how miniscule most of your concerns actually are.

We are all experiencing this re-alignment right now. It seems like ages ago that we were concerned with gender pronouns and micro-aggressions. Seeing online magazines publishing articles about those topics now would seem almost silly, wouldn’t it? I’m not saying that those things aren’t important anymore; it’s just that a society needs a certain level of comfort to make those concerns a priority. Worrying about that now would be like taking a spot on a life-boat for your pet bird as the Titanic was sinking – I’m sure Tango is like family to you, but we have bigger problems right now.

This is not the first time humanity has been tested, just the first time we’ve been tested at this scale since we could use cellphones to take dick pics. The truth is that we are tested every day, you just don’t feel it when you have enough money to pay someone else to take the test for you. But you can’t money your way out of this test.

All it took was a global pandemic to realize that our disconnect with the frailty of our mortality has been well past the point of arrogance for a long time now. At least, that’s my hope – that one of the silver linings that comes from this mess is realizing how little our imaginary lines in the sand actually matter, that the distances between what we know as familiar and describe as foreign aren’t really all that far, that the only difference between us is luck and circumstance.

I know its wishful thinking, but how many opportunities are we going to get like this one before we run out? This is obviously a horrific calamity but as far as pandemics go, this could have been much, much worse.

I guess what I’m saying is that this is our dent on the car moment. It could’ve been getting T-boned in the middle of an intersection or hydroplaning across a busy highway, but instead some asshole hit our car while parked and didn’t leave a note. Yeah it sucks, but we got our limbs and hopefully, a lesson to derive from this.

I for one won’t be parking close to other cars anymore as a precaution. I’m not sure what humanity’s version of that looks like at scale, but I hope we all start doing it soon.