It’s funny to even pretend we’re counting, anymore. Most of us don’t. I can tell approximations because of my grey roots. Somehow, I don’t mind them as much, now. They seem trivial, at best.
It’s interesting how lessons are learned in life, isn’t it? One day, we’re going about our business and we hear echoes of something coming. We think it couldn’t be that bad. Doesn’t it seem like almost overnight, our normal played into some sort of weird, foggy dream? The kind you wake up from but it doesn’t seem that way because you seem to be vividly living it?
What’s been the biggest thing that’s shocked you? Are you shocked, anymore?
I began screenshooting the numbers in late March. I skipped a few days, then snapped every day, beginning the first full week in April. I’ve read far too many dystopian novels to not capture what was happening.
How are we all living in different realities? Or is this how it’s always been? My friends of color and my LGBTQ friends tell me it’s so. There have always been different worlds between us and them. Their treatment versus ours. The death makes it even more stark, now.
How do we have one reality-with nurses sharing their stories of six days straight and reusing their PPE, while they’re the only one holding someone’s hand as they die-a complete stranger?
How do we have another reality where people march in the streets saying,”you won’t tread on my liberties” and others proclaiming Bill Gates is trying to shoot them with a tracking vaccine?
How did we get to a place where Mother Earth was so mad that all it took for her to begin to heal was a month? A month of us just taking a time out, but looking at the photos-you can see her wounds and where she’s starting over, new. How did it only take a month?
How did we get to a place where a majority of our “essential workers” have never felt essential at all-most unable to afford to miss a day of work?
How do we have so many people who have worked their whole lives not able to save for a three month catastrophe?
How do we have our small businesses that create the heartbeat of a city, get turned down for help, while the man at the top who throws scraps, keep getting fed and fed and fed? They bleed dollars while leave us with none.
I only ask questions today, because I have no answers. I feel numb to it now. The death. The chaos-and the truth is-I’m not even in it. I’m fortunate enough to have my home and food and a job to go back to, but watching it all feels like the dystopian novel you read and think will never happen-but it did. It is.
I feel like we are at the brink of either deciding we’re in this thing, or we’re out. Our humanity. Our civility. Our ability to construct something from the broken. We’re broken right now and how do we make it out?
I’d love to know. Inside I feel myself being pulled between the anger and the decency.
I cry every time I see teachers do drive-bys with their students or people greeting nurses in song outside of hospitals. The ZOOM happy hours with friends you never see, the intimate conversations about deep love and reminders you find while cleaning out drawers of memories with your dad. I weep at the gratitude for these moments in the chaos that feel like light.
The daily briefings of blame and disbelief. The angry crowds of privileged people who’ve never really known what it’s like to be oppressed, at all. The selfishness. The dirty souls that will never get clean, no matter how much hand sanitizer they drink. The disconnect. The hardened hearts.
I want to scream,”go back home”, but I feel like if they liked their home or who they were inside, they wouldn’t really want to leave. They’d want to wrap up their frail grandmas or new babies and keep them safe, as long as they could stand it. They’d want more than anything to save them because that’s what love feels like to me.
When I finally turn off the filth at the end of the day and my eyes have seen enough-all I’m left with is the comfort of knowing that my heart always pulls me back to what I know is right and true.
The irony seems laughable when things are quiet and it seems so simple, now. I hate to assume the angry ones are the empty-hearted, but what else could explain it?
Buddha said,”you will not be punished FOR your anger, you will be punished BY your anger”.
Whatever the other side of this looks like, I hope this thing we cannot see, brings us to our knees. I think that’s the only way we’ll see the way up…