Daily Archives: February 8, 2021

So… it’s been a full year since the panic began and our lives changed in ways we never thought possible in the 21st century. It’s hard to say which challenges were born out of others – they all tangled up into one knotted mess and had us “choosing up sides to smell armpits,” as my mother used to say.

Armed with little but eternal hopefulness, I wonder how the world will tackle the weeks and months ahead, when our futures remain uncertain and the damages to date have not yet been assessed thoroughly, nor will the full fallout be known for decades, maybe.

It boggles the mind, really. What hasn’t been touched by the chaos? Relationships, economy, ecology, biology, geography, justice, equality, mental health, physical health… it goes on and on…

And we have our opinions, or so we believe. Judgements, they are, conceived by stressed-out minds bombarded with conflicting information and half-truths. What we don’t know for sure, we fill in the blanks with our thoughts, and that becomes our Truth.

The solitude of fighting a pandemic is so loud, it’s deafening.

In this war, the troops are undefined by uniforms, so we’re never sure if we’re in enemy territory or not. We listen for buzzwords or notice small actions that might give us an inclination about someone’s loyalties, and then we take appropriate action. Snubbery, shaming, silent-treatment, lauding, applauding, hero-worship…

We’re exhausted. Tired of fighting. Tired of yelling and not being heard. Tired of being “against” something and longing for the days of neighborhood BBQ’s that generated smiles and a sense of belonging to a diverse group of people who might have nothing more in common than a zip code.

We mourn the casualties. We send them off to their next assignments with a kiss and a prayer and an apology that we couldn’t protect them this time. We do the very best we can, and we keep waking up and checking off the calendar days.

Now what?