The End Is Nigh

So, I guess it’s all over, right?

It’s done?

Covid-19 is just a memory we will talk about over hard seltzers on the beach as we gather in droves.

Phew, glad that’s over.

Except…it isn’t.

Not that that is easy to discern from recent developments but, hey, we’re all about fast forwarding past the boring bits to get to the good stuff.

This feels a lot like a certain ex-President declaring that a war was over knowing full well it wasn’t.

Or another ex-President declaring that this Covid thing was just a blip that would be over and gone in a matter of weeks.

Or, hey, let’s go back to our classic literature – doesn’t this all feel a bit like the tortoise and the hare?

We’re almost there, we have sacrificed, literally and figuratively, and (most of us) have done all we could to get us past this awful virus but just as it’s almost beaten we let up, stretch our arms above our head, and start planning the victory party all while the virus is gathering its strength for another attack.

But hey, it’s hot girl summer (or hunky boy summer if your a Psycho Goreman) and we need to YOLO.

We deserve it.

Our kids had to miss like, proms and dances and parties and sports and graduations and all that important junk.

And we had to miss LAST YEAR’S hot girl summer and the barbecues and the like.

We deserve this.

What the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans deserved is beside the point.

Pfft, too bad, so sad, right?

Sure.

Except, no.

This isn’t over.

This feels so much like we have just given up.

We have given in.

After a year of death, illness, unrest, anger, unemployment, poverty, hate, and listening to the screaming ignorant we just got tired and gave up.

We reached a milestone, one of MANY, and decided that hey, that’s close enough.

And it’s frustrating, and anger-inducing because it feels like we let the idiots bully us. We let them raise their voices, and fists, and guns and declare, over, and over, and over again that everything factual is fake while everything they feel is real. They who don’t believe in anything that doesn’t glorify themselves and those that think and act and look like them. Those that decided they are the lords of all because of arbitrary reasons of birth, skin color, sexuality, or faith, or belief. This stopped being about ALL of us when the President decided it was yet another political football he could play keep away with. He could point THERE while hiding HERE. And those that followed him fell in line, as they are wont to do because power equals wealth equals power equals wealth and that is the real god they serve.

It feels like we’ve failed all of those that have died because we weren’t, we AREN’T willing to push a little more, for a little longer. We aren’t willing to slowly open things, to keep pushing the vaccinations and distance, and to make sure we really do beat this virus into submission as we figure what to do next. Yes, there are issues with our economy, and with the mental health of all of us but what good does everything we have sacrificed do if we just shrug and walk away when it looks like we’ve ‘won’, whatever that means.

Yeah, maybe by being vaccinated I am ‘safe’.

But what if?

What if?

So what we’ll see in these coming months is more illnesses, and more deaths, and more viral morphing, and all of it will be pushed under the rug and forgotten. The obsessive virus updates will fade, the talk of the virus will fade, and all of us will go back to some sort of normal as those that lost the ones they loved, or have lost their own health, try to figure out what life looks like without the things and people they hold dear.

What do we say to them?

Hey, it had to end eventually, right?

We gotta get back to living, right?

YOLO!

And it just feels too fast, too mishandled, and too haphazard.

It feels like we let ourselves be bullied back to pretending that things are normal while knowing they aren’t. We’ll see stories of people who still decide to wear masks being bullied and fought because they want to wait a little longer. We’ll see declarations of FREEEEEEDOM from the selfish and stupid, who even if they caught Covid insisted it was ‘no big deal’ while what rumors were whispered by it to their bodies may not be told for decades.

YOLO.

Back to normal.

Back to school shootings, and angry armed white men, and ignoring our issues so we can hit the beach, of the ball game, or the movie, or the concert. Back to conventions and garage sales and car shows. Back to pretending that the only thing matters is that which matters to me.

IOLO! – I only live once!
WOO!

And the rest of us have to continue to mask up, to hope for the best, and to hope that they’re right, the braintrusts who have shrugged their way to the end of this because they simply got tired of arguing for our health. Trying to find our own new normal, our own way to try to get back to the world, i am dying for normalcy after the birth of our daughter, but slow and steady wins this race.

Careful and slow.

Because haven’t we learned anything from all of this?

Are we to take no knowledge forward?

No understanding that corporate culture is corrupt?

That the average worker is being asked to trust in a business that can close or fire them at a moment’s notice and without a thought.

That our front line workers put themselves and their families in peril so that we could live our lives.

That we can still connect if we are not together.

That mental health matters.

That education is more than just shuttling kids off for someone else to raise.

And on and on and on.

And for those that never vaxxed and may change their minds we can only hope they have that opportunity and it isn’t priced too high for them.

So back to the beach.

Back to the barbecue.

Back to the re-count.

Back to stopping the steal.

Back to our armed rallies, and back to living in fear.

YOLO.

…c…