The Plague 11/6/20

    A plague is defined as a disastrous evil or affliction; calamity. Before starting this book, I didn't know what to expect. One can actually figure out what the this book is going to be about without even reading about it. The Plague is about a plague that sweeps through the city Oran. The Plague reminds me of what's going on the world with COVID-19. Although COVID-19 isn't nearly as deadly as the plague in the book and there are politics and controversy around it, both COVID-19 and the plague in the book both have similar ways of how both began.

    I remember when COVID-19 first began. I had actually heard about it in late 2019 and early 2020, but I didn't think that we were going to end up where we are today. In fact, I thought that COVID-19 was going to be like Ebola. I thought that it was going to be in the news for a little bit and then just die out. I did not think that COVID-19 was going to be a historical event where America would fall apart as two sides are having a power struggle all in the mist of deciding whether or not the government should send out lunch money to the citizens of the country. 

    So how is The Plague similar to our real lives? In the book The Plague, life was pretty average and similar to how we live our actual lives. On page 3 it says 'The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. The smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centers in other parts of the world.' I relate this to the city I live in (Champaign) because there's nothing really special about my city. The only thing that differentiates Champaign from other small towns is that we have a college that's better than average. In the book, it describes life before the plague as just people who focus on making money throughout there life and then finding time to live there life. This is supported by the text on page 4 when it says 'Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.' It also says 'But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible.' These two quotes show how the average person just works countless hours and then pray for the weekend to come. This is the exact same thing for most people in real life and yet, everyone is so eager to live average lives again. What's strikingly similar is when in the book, rats start to die all over the place and the number starts to rapidly increase. It reminds me to when I first started hearing the number of COVID-19 cases because I remember when it was just a few people in Europe who had it and now there are more cases than when this pandemic first began.

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