"Mission Accomplished"
the insanity of thinking this is anywhere near over
[I had a nice little essay about mixtapes ready to go today but instead you get this rant because I needed to get it out of me]
Arrowhead Stadium looked to be about three quarters full yesterday. Gavin Newsom is expected to announce a lift of the California stay at home orders today. I drove past a chain restaurant this weekend and the parking lot was full; there was a crowd of people waiting outside in the cold for a table. People may look at all this stuff and think “nature is healing” but I see it and it’s just making me feel insane.
The whole country has a “mission accomplished” feel to it right now and it’s driving me crazy. 400,000 people are dead. We’ve surpassed twenty five million cases of covid. New strains of the virus are popping up everywhere. The number of infected are still rising in some places. Yet people are gathering, unmasked, without care for themselves or others. People are in bars and restaurants, at weddings and sweet sixteens and they’re all unwittingly spreading the virus around, keeping us from truly overcoming a pandemic.
I still wear a mask everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean practically nowhere, because I don’t go anywhere. I go to my office, where I am alone most of the day and rarely interact with other people. I go to the grocery at 7am on Saturday so I don’t run into that many people. Sometimes I’ll venture out to the bagel store, but I’ll do it a 5am when they open so I’m generally the only one there. That’s it. I don’t go out to eat. I don’t go to the mall or Target. I don’t have anyone over. I haven’t seen my best friends in months, since that one time we met at the park for a socially distanced lunch.
Yet here we are as a country deciding that everything is ok, and even if it’s not ok, we’re just going to pretend it is. Not just ordinary citizens, but our leaders as well. They are so bound to their lobbyists, so eager to get things back on track, so willing to make it appear that everything is good that they’re going to sacrifice the well being of their constituents for the sake of appearances.
The vaccine rollout is a joke. As of this moment, we’ve vaccinated one percent of the country. People are talking about a “return to normalcy” in the summer when in reality it’s probably going to be late fall or winter before we have a decent amount of the population vaccinated.
As I hunker down in my house as much as possible, as I eschew dining out or visiting with friends and family in exchange for the relative safety of my home, I have to ask myself, am I being too cautious? Am I overreacting? Am I going crazy?
But the answer always comes up as no. Every time I get a work email that another coworker has tested positive, every time I see a post on Facebook that someone has contracted the virus, every time I look at the death toll, I know it’s not me. I’m not the crazy one. I’m doing what I have to do to protect myself and the people around me.
It’s ludicrous to me that counties and states are trying to go back to the “normal” way of existing while we’re struggling to get people vaccinated. I understand the economy has taken a hit. I know that a lot of businesses are failing to thrive under lockdown rules. I know that kids and parents are having a hard time with school and I know that people who haven’t been to their office since March are going stir crazy at home to the point of depression. But we have to measure all that against lives lost and lives that will be lost. It’s not an easy choice to make but choosing the path where the least amount of people die seems to be the right choice.
A lot of this goes back to Trump and his outright denial of science, his waving off the virus as if it was something that would just disappear on its own in a matter of weeks. He’s responsible for those 400,000 deaths. He’s responsible for the situation we are in right now, and he’s responsible for all the people who are walking around without masks on, posting vacation pics, crowding into bars. He’s gone now, and unfortunately he can’t take the covid crisis with him. It’s left to us to pick up the pieces and sort out the mess and that’s hard to do when half the country acts as if the virus is just a minor inconvenience.
I looked at the stands in that football game yesterday and all I could see was the virus spreading. I panic now when I see a crowd of people gathered. I hold my breath when I come upon an unmasked person. I dream about forgetting my mask. Maybe I’m being paranoid, I don’t know. This whole thing is making me unsure of myself, in addition to making my depression and anxiety worse. I can’t imagine how many people feel the same way as me, and are thinking they are going insane because everyone around them is acting as if nothing is wrong when nothing is right.
I don’t want it to be this way. I don’t want to be locked down, locked up, holed up in my house, afraid of everyone and everything. I want to go to concerts again. I want to have barbecues this summer. I want to go to a restaurant. I want to see my friend, to have people over for my daughter’s birthday next month. But none of that is going to happen because we’ve decided as a nation that the pandemic is over just because we were bored with it and it’s making it worse.
I don’t know what to do with all this. We should still be in crisis mode and instead we get football stadiums full of people. I’m just worn out by the “mission accomplished” attitude of a good portion of the population, government included. I’ve been called a Debbie Downer, a chicken little, I’ve been called paranoid, I’ve had my feelings on this dismissed out of hand. Which is fine. You go your way, I’ll go mine. It’s just unfortunate that your way will end up killing people.
I’ll be in my house if you need me. See you sometime in 2022.