Yesterday — by happenstance, it was St Patrick’s Day — marked one year since my office sent everyone home. Like “Ollie Ollie in-free!”, ready or not, run for Home. St Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, driver-out of snakes, would have been flummoxed. How shall I drive out a disease borne in the air? Invisible, but stealthy as a Biblical snake, Covid-19 slithered into our lives.
It changed how we could hang out with our parents — whether in a nursing home or just the spare bedroom. It changed how we greeted our neighbors, transforming mailbox handshakes into awkward 6-foot-distant bows. And for many of us, it transformed daily life — more accurately, upended it.
No extended discussions with the butcher or fishmonger about the merits of this or that cut. No picking over fruit or veg by touch, just gauging by eye and snatching a likely-ripe avocado or cantaloupe. Darting awkwardly past people you wished you could give six feet of distance to… But to stand in the aisle one more minute was too risky: they weren’t wearing a face mask. (Or if they were, it dangled at half-mast below their noses.)
I relished every positive moment (yoga class, cats in my lap while on a work conference call, commuting time turned into walking time). Yet for every one, there were a hundred moments of fear, sorrow and fury.
Is this the best we can do?
I can’t speak for the rest of Planet Earth’s citizens, when it comes to evaluating how well we’ve done as a species these last 12 months. I can’t even speak for ‘my fellow Americans,’ as President Biden must try to do. But for myself, I feel we’ve fallen far short of what we could and should do to help each other survive this pandemic and its fallout.
Our parsimonious, Puritan attitudes to work (it takes primacy over caring) have driven families into poverty and hunger. Rules governing unemployment and food support failed our people. Those who controlled the nation’s purse-strings apparently believed those fellow Americans who were sick or fearful of becoming sick were malingering scoundrels. Ideology drove those who control the levers of power to turn their backs on people who may even have voted for them. And why? Because government must never be perceived as good value for our tax dollars.
In my fevered imagination, late at night, I imagine Grover Norquist dancing across thousands of graves. His disciples, those who believe government must never be seen as useful or constructive, have won! But those we have lost — nurses and farmworkers, waitstaff at restaurants and cleaners of rich people’s homes — should never have been considered disposable. And the elected officials who shrugged all through 2020 should be held culpable.
Is the worst yet to come?
As far as the pandemic’s ability to kill and maim is concerned, perhaps the worst is over. Perhaps.
America’s vaccination program is slowly gearing up to full speed (not warp speed, I’m sorry to say). Many, many people have learned that wearing a face mask, offering a wave from six feet away, washing their hands constantly, won’t kill them. And they accept, if grudgingly, doing so might save someone else (even if they brag the coronavirus won’t get them).
But many of our compatriots have chosen — willfully, in my opinion — to go another, hyper-individualistic, path. Their braggadocio knows no bounds. And so innocent bystanders in their communities become ill, swamp the local hospital (if it still has beds), and — perhaps — die. I do not know how to cure ignorance and hubris.
The next illness to fear attacks our ability to vote
I fear another illness stalking our country these days, one which will kill differently, long after Covid-19 is under control. Seizing the opportunity allowed by gerrymandered election boundaries developed years ago, many of those entrusted with governing are choosing wrongly. They are choosing to eviscerate our citizens’ ability to vote freely and fairly, as surely as Covid eviscerates lungs and hearts. They choose to cast aside 2020’s success — record numbers of correct ballots cast — on a pretext of systemic flaws that do not exist.
If you want to see a human system choke, suffocate and die, you do not need to go to your local hospital’s intensive care unit. You have only to look at Republican-led state legislatures across our country, and watch them choke and suffocate their citizens’ ability to vote. The right to vote without let or hindrance, as the lawyers would say.
That murdered freedom, enshrined in America’s Constitution, is a stain that no one should watch happen from the sidelines. America did not endure 2020 to placidly watch our elections truly tainted in years to come. Call your legislators and tell them you disagree with voter suppression disguised as “voter integrity.”
Do it now, while the “lost year” is fresh in your mind. Before we lose a whole ‘nother part of America’s body politic.
Banner photo by Laura James from Pexels