March 13, 2020. The day that the United States declared Covid a National Emergency and life as we knew it would change forever. I remember the day clearly; I had gone down to Boston earlier that week to shut down my office for a few weeks because of what we were then just calling the coronavirus. The week before the national emergency declaration, I had contacted my board of directors and asked for permission to temporarily shut down office operations, because I had been following the trajectory of the disease and knew that outbreaks were occurring in Boston as well as in New York and I was starting to feel uneasy about my every-other-week stays in Boston.
When I arrived in Boston earlier that week things were normal. In fact, a colleague and I had dinner in East Boston one night and joked that it might be our last dinner for a minute. Turns out we would never again eat a meal together inside a restaurant and our next meal together would be over a year later, at a makeshift outside spot. There was a weird tension in the air that week, but by Friday, March 13, the first signs of the world turning upside down were in full effect.
I left my hotel room that morning to grab a coffee at Starbucks, only to be met with an eerily silent city and the condiment bar and seating section removed. When I asked the usual crew that I knew well—given that I spent at least 10 to 12 days a month at the same hotel—they told me that corporate had ordered all stores to remove the seats and the condiment bar. I said my goodbyes to the morning crew, never imagining that I would never see them again and that that location would eventually close.
I went back to my room, ate my cup of oats, and finished my coffee before heading off to South Station to board a bus back to Maine as my daughter had an early afternoon medical appointment. When I arrived in South Station, I was immediately struck by how quiet it was. Not even the Jehovah’s Witnesses were in their usual place offering salvation to the masses.
Eventually I boarded a mostly empty bus back to Maine and it was more of the same when I arrived back in Portland. I had to kill time before meeting my daughter and her father and stopped at the then-local coffee shop near the ferry terminal to grab a sandwich, only to be told they were closing early because of this corona stuff. I met up with the family and went to my daughter’s appointment, but it was clear: Change was coming.
Within a few more days, schools were closed and eventually moved to online spaces. Those of us with office jobs learned about this thing called Zoom and we would spend the first few months of the pandemic in our bubbles, frustrated, scared but also realizing that we had a greater capacity for care and concern than we realized.
The government decided it could be in the business of providing care and concern for its citizens and funds were released to assist in keeping people housed, fed, and businesses afloat. Make no mistake, it was a horrific time as the death toll mounted and in the early days, we grappled with the lack of having enough personal protective equipment. We grappled with the huge unknowns of not knowing what this virus could do to us, but we also knew it was bringing out our shared concern and empathy, Hell, it was even helping the environment as it was noted in the early days of the pandemic, there was noticeably less pollution and birds—my God, you could hear the birds and not just on small remote islands off the coast of Maine where I live. Even my father in Chicago mentioned hearing the birds.
As Arundhati Roy wrote, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
For a brief moment, it seemed as if this horrific virus might be the thing to get us to reclaim our collective humanity and put people and care before profits and bullshit. But eventually the virus was politicized and the safety measures that had been enacted became a dividing point and, well, the world would eventually reopen and people would learn to live with the virus.
The funny thing is that a novel virus is just that. It is new, and to assume you know all about a new virus after one to two years is the height of arrogance. So, we reopened the world and decided it was profits over people and because people were tired of being at home, the majority decided to accept the risk of Covid because as long as they weren’t the unfortunate bastards being killed by it, life goes on.
The thing is Covid has not changed. It is still deadly; it’s just that it often won’t kill you right away. It damages your immune system, and each bout weakens your system. It presents much like a cold or the flu in most instances, but it is a vascular disease and we have the data that clearly shows that since Covid arrived, life expectancy has decreased. More heart attacks, more strokes, more younger folks coming down with serious cancers. Kids caught in a constant loop of respiratory illness. More people walking around sounding like they have been smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds for 25 years and people generally not well. But it is accepted.
People en masse decided that if the impact was not immediate, they need to live life, even if living life was harming themselves and others. I am talking about people who generally care about others who have almost all decided that Covid safety precautions are so yesterday, like another Tik Tok fad that has passed. Meanwhile people aren’t well and if you think I am kidding have you been in a car lately? I mean Covid causes cognitive issues and there is nowhere where that is more apparent than in driving, where people are driving impaired due to Covid, possibly with a little medical marijuana in the system to deal with life and health, while on their phones.
So why am I bringing this up?
At this moment, those who are paying attention to the world politically and the terrifying actions of the man from South Africa and his demented, elderly sidekick and puppet wonder aloud, “How can people do anything as the U.S. dives deeper into fascism?” Because, in many ways Covid was our test run for our willingness to accept anything. We failed that test.
Turns out that most of us are quite comfortable playing Russian Roulette with our lives and even the lives of our children. We will accept a lot of things as long as it feels normal, even when it isn’t.
I mean, if you are willing to accept repeated exposure to a virus that could harm you and everyone around you, it isn’t that hard to get you to accept fascism if it doesn’t impact you directly. You shrug it off and blame politics and tap out because you have to deal with your life.
While the actions of this administration are causing widespread harm, there are still many more people who are not impacted, people not reliant on Social Security (yet) or government jobs, contracts, etc.
Even amongst those impacted, there is no consensus on what should happen. For many, they just want things to be back to normal but was our shared normal just or fair? For others, this is a moment to consider this global horror as a portal to creating something better—to dismantle the shackles of capitalism and free us all.
Right now, there are a ton of independent writers like me writing on current happenings and in some cases, predicting what will happen. I have many talents, but I can’t tell you what exactly is going to happen because I don’t know. I do know though that whatever happens will require us to find the same spirit of collective care that we had in the early days of the pandemic. That we survive as a collective only when we look out for one another, when we decide to share and care for others, and when we decide our capacity for risk involves thinking about how we can protect not just ourselves but others.
Surviving fascism and authoritarianism isn’t an individual task. It is a group project because you never know when you will need aid and assistance. As the fears grow of recession and economic downturn, many are cutting back but in your cutting back are you making room for mutual aid? Are you making room to help those on the front lines who are increasingly at risk of being targeted? None of us can save ourselves individually, but together we can resist and we can let this be the portal to change if we are willing to let go of the rugged individualism that is a defining hallmark of America’s so-called exceptionalism. Can we let go of our anger at those who were complicit in getting us to this moment by either voting for the old guy or not voting? Can we not let our fears and cynicism get the better of us? Can we find joy in the days we have despite the fears?
Those in power seek to dehumanize us—hell, they have already done so. The man from South Africa has referred to working Americans as parasites. It doesn’t get much lower than that. Can we not allow our anger at this situation turn us away from the tapestry of humanity that links us all together? Because oddly enough, we are all connected, even when we don’t recognize it.
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