Pandemic #4-Beauty and the Beast
Notes from the continuing pandemic
Here we are almost 80 days into The Thing, and nothing seems really that much clearer. Not how we got here nor how we are going to get out of it.
The Thing, in all its terrible wonder, has slowed space and time to make us take notice. To make us look up from the screens that consume our lives and our attention.
There are moments of clarity. Of beauty. The universe and nature wait for no man and we become witness to things never seen. Spring has finally arrived in the burgeoning canopy of leaves that pop out of the end of dead-looking twigs. Among the branches, there appear endless songbirds and their voices can be heard in a cacophony of calls, even on a simple morning walk.
The natural world has returned to us in a small preview of what the Earth would begin to look like “after people”. Today, I saw a picture of deer munching on Japanese cherry blossoms, seated serenely among the petals. Just one vision of incredible natural world rarity that we are now able to witness.
As predicted, fear and politics and divisiveness have created a lethal brew — a clumsy dance of moving forward and moving backward at the same time. The States took it upon themselves to sort out the destruction on their own after the Federal Government, led by a sort of Orange Buffoon, abandoned any responsibility for aiding us (and the US). Some states got together as regions, making cooperative agreements and laying out plans for taking care of their own citizens. Many states ignored all the warnings, wailing about their “god-given” freedoms — to go where they want, to march into State Houses bristling with deadly weapons, to mix and mingle at will. Maskless. And they are now beginning to pay dearly for it.
The inhumanity of the current situation is probably best illustrated by the horrific reality at the slaughterhouses (or more politically correct, the meat processing plants). In a place that is an engine of so much karmic violence and brutality towards many of the sentient creatures we share the Earth with, line workers are contracting The Thing in numbers larger than we can imagine. Located in rural and disconnected places in the Midwest, these abattoirs are run by what can only be described as corporate monsters of inhumanity. After promising that all workers would be tested, these overlords are, instead, forcing workers back onto the butchering lines to keep the rivers of blood–and meat–flowing. Huge outbreaks of COVID-19 cases and ever-increasing deaths.
How did we come this far? How is all this inhumanity allowed to happen here? The Earth shudders with the violence being done to her and keeps trying to send us signs through fires, floods, plagues, and other such catastrophies.
But then again, how would we expect her to react?
Some states are “opening” up, or, basically letting their populations infect others and then re-infect themselves as they gather again in churches, bars, restaurants, and shops. The imperative to “shop” is powerful beyond imagining as it overwhelms entire populations who rush back in to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for cheap imports. A middle-aged woman told a news reporter how utterly ‘joyful and relieved’ she was to be shopping again–as if shopping were as important to her as the very air she breathes and the food she consumes.
I’m also guessing that for her, exercising her ‘right’ to shop is more important than possibly carrying the virus home to infect her entire family. A consumption-driven economy and the urge to socially erase their own poverty through that consumption, has trained so many to become ‘good’ consumers – and therefore ‘good’ Americans.
They have swallowed every flavor of the Kool-Aid and still beg for more.
Meanwhile, economies lurch and stumble, like drunken Giants descending from the Mountaintop of Unsustainable Growth. Millions not working, almost half the workforce of the nation. What they don’t tell you is that millions of these jobs will never actually return. It’s a sly way to cull the herd, even while that same herd recklessly develops a seemingly invincible (and unproven) immunity.
While the virus is bad enough, our President stumbles his ignorant way through one catastrophe after another, — all largely of his own making. His Republican co-conspirators remain silent in the face of these cascading failures. In their false hubris, they are as complicit as he.
And today, we learn that he himself is taking The Hydroxy. At least, he SAYS he’s taking it. (It sounded like just another lie to me.) Like something he just threw out there for the lions of the media to consume and gnash, over and over again through the next few news cycles.
News flash: He’s lying, as he’s been lying all along. And the whole sordid story turns, once again, back to himself.
The sly craft of the Narcissist.
The histories are already being written. Many will not be cast in a favorable light. Others will become our martyred Heroes. The changes will be radical and permanent. And the idea of our government making every effort to save us from cataclysmic harm is no longer assured. Distrust of our leaders and our neighbors has ripped a hole so big in the fabric of our society that we may never be able to fully mend it again.