COVID-19 Has Left Us Speechless

I feel like a story we've read this semester that connects to our current situation is "Speech Sounds" by Olivia Butler. In both cases, society is ravaged by an illness that affects individuals' ability to communicate with each other. One achieves directly and the other indirectly. Coronavirus has prevented us from truly speaking to anyone outside of our immediate families. Society has been halted, sports canceled, economy suffering, streets emptied, all indications of a collapsed community. While it hasn't reached the extremity described in "Speech Sounds" there are definitely parallels. 

While we see a lot of similarities between these diseases in terms of their effect, I think the biggest connection is how we distinguish the people who are afflicted and the people who aren't. The speechless are almost considered subhuman, shown by Rye's reaction to Obsidian's incoherence. "He made the same sound over and over the way some speechless people did, "Da, da, da!" (Butler). This separation between the people who can communicate and the 'speechless' is what's important. While not to the same extremity, we can separate the COVID positive and negative people as 'people who did the right thing' and 'people who haven't done the right thing'. The stigma that Asian people have coronavirus is also another separating factor.

What other connections did you guys spot between Speech Sounds and our current predicament? Are there other stories that are better suited for this comparison? Let me know in the comment section!

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