I couldn’t get over how Helen Rosner’s tweet completely articulated the state we are in. We are floating, tumbling, randomly sailing through time—-with only a few artificial tethers—from birthdays (2 of which we have just celebrated) to our Wednesday dinners, to the forgotten weekend. I am measuring my days based on food purchased, prepared and served, the 12 cups of granola made weekly and consumed, Lucy dog’s water dish filled, and the “now where are we?” in some episode of some costume drama or “reality” dating show.“ It’s recipes and leftovers, daytime and night time, inside or on the porch. It’s pick-up or delivery day. It’s restless sleep and unanimated days. A steady beat of moving forward in time but standing still.
The news is horrendous—and though we are “off peak”, I really do not know how close to 100,000 preventable deaths in less than 3 months is anything less than a tragedy of unknowable scale. There is a twitter thing that people are doing daily, starting with the current date and rolling it backwards ie:
March 20: 34,022 active cases in US. 488 Deaths
April 20: 684,358 active cases in US 42,949 Deaths
May 20: 1,176,280 active cases in US 92,847 Deaths
Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island, Thursday, April 9, 2020, in the Bronx. from NBC4/New York.
And the President has not acknowledged this loss and is rushing to open the country to rescue the economy at the risk of a severe upturn in death and illness. This pandemic has not slowed or stopped. This pandemic is vertical—and will continue unchecked regardless of weather, of time or exposure. We do not know this virus—what it can do, how it can morph, the after effects, the effects on children. We just see sickness and death—with crowds of people insisting on their “freedom” and not responsible to the collective community we all live in as humans regardless of money, age, religion, race, or gender.
Georgia’s Governor Kemp presented numbers around the infection/deaths in the state and manipulated the figures to present inaccurate data placing the May data before the April—again, somehow deciding to scam the populace into thinking all was right with the world. From the LA Times:
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“Nothing about the spread of the coronavirus or the nature of the disease suggests that it’s safe to get back to business as usual. And yet “reopen” is the word on almost every American’s lips, despite apocalyptic warnings from public health experts suggesting that, without an aggressive national public health strategy, the country could face its “darkest winter.”
In the absence of a coherent federal public health response, millions of Americans are trying to will the coronavirus away through the sheer force of their God-given exceptionalism.
Mass delusion seems a dubious strategy for ending the coronavirus crisis. And yet if you look at the data coming out of Georgia over the past month — which had one of the earliest and most aggressive efforts to reopen its economy — you might be convinced that there is little danger in a broad economic reopening.
According to state data models, which Gov. Brian Kemp used to justify Georgia’s aggressive reopening, the state’s infection curve has been rapidly heading in a direction that would be the envy of states like California, with its aggressive lockdown rules. The Wall Street Journal hailed the “Georgia Model” as evidence that aggressive lockdowns were needlessly harming the economy.”
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This deliberate scam is just one of the many being foisted on all of us to think that things are better….and they are not. Beaches are reopening. Las Vegas gambling is reopening. Its just crazy and is very discordant.
Growing up, we would watch the news on television seeing bodies in caskets unloaded from military planes—reinforcing that this distant war had a human toll. The shock of the banks of refrigerated trucks parked in parking lots, holding body bags, and the mass graves on Hart Island instills a wider sense of dystopian reality. The dead merit more respect than dumping them without family or funeral, without rites or recognition of the time they have had here—the families they were part of, the friends and life they had and valued. It is an endless stream of faceless people dying —and not all old and not all dying but many, many people and many lives scarred by this moment. This moment has no leadership, no kindness, no recognition, or connection of those things I hold dear as an American. This sears me to the quick…and there is no way to change things beyond a vote. There is something wrong.