​Epic Quest progress report: Today is day 21. Total word count: 8285 words.

It’s hard not to think about who’s to blame.

Especially right now, when so many of our lives have been thrown into such uncertainty, when the American death toll after two months is half again the toll of our ten years in Vietnam and the worldwide dead could fill a mid-sized city, when so many are enduring a disease we know so little about and we, their families, can’t be with them, when life feels like it’s on hold and the people we’ve elected to get us through this can’t seem to figure out which way to turn. Especially since we’ve spent two decades training ourselves to level blame for everything wrong in our lives on–well, somebody.

We’re afraid, afraid and angry. Afraid and angry and we don’t know what to do. And we’re stuck in close quarters with our families, and it’s not fair to take out our fear and anger on them. So we turn it out there, and we find targets we can expend our fear and anger on, and we rage away.

Of course, it doesn’t help. Not us, not our targets, not our audience on Twitter or Facebook or Reddit. It feels like it should. But we put it out there, and we don’t feel any better, and our targets feel justified in doubling down on whatever they were doing before, and our audience either already agreed with us and still does and is still angry, or didn’t agree before and still doesn’t and is still angry. And most importantly, the problem doesn’t get fixed.

So–impotent rage. What the hell else are we supposed to do? How do we cope with a global disaster that turns all our social instincts against us?

If it were some more normal kind of disaster, a fire or a storm or a plane crash or a neighbor collapsing on our sidewalk, we could do something. We could make sure our families were safe, then help clear debris, or help our neighbors salvage their valuables, or search for the missing, or perform first aid and call the first responders as necessary.

But now we’re supposed to keep our distance from our neighbors, and everybody who knows how to help is already doing everything they can, and the first responders are already slammed.

So we’ve got to find other ways to look out for each other. And as it happens, each of us has something like half the population of the world within the sound of our voice. It’s trivially easy to reach out with an encouraging word that might reach thousands. What if we did that, instead of lashing out with anger and blame?

Too cheesy? Maybe. But there are thousands of teachers trying to figure out how to engage students online, and thousands of employers trying to figure out how much of their work can be done remotely. What have you learned in the last two months that might help them?

Your church is trying to figure out how to keep the kids engaged. Does your webcam work? Can you lend a hand with Sunday school?

You’re stuck at home anyway. Can you spend an hour listening to somebody who needs to talk?

With everybody avoiding everybody else, the blood supply is falling dangerously low. Your local blood bank is staffed by health care professionals, and is probably safer than your local grocery. Can you spare a pint?

Maybe we can start thinking about what we can do for each other, rather than what pisses us off about each other.

And maybe, when we figure out what normal looks like going forward, we can make that a part of it.

Just throwing that out there.