What's next
I haven't published in a while. Here's what's been on my mind.
I haven’t been publishing as much as I wanted to for the last two weeks. I’ve been in a sort of haze, my brain refusing to fully kick into gear. I’ve got a draft of something half-written and a few more ideas kicking around. What I’m writing about today is why.
I’ve always been something of a homebody. It’s not that I don’t like going out or anything, but staying in never bothered me either. And that’s held true for most of our mind-numbingly dumb pandemic. I’m pretty content to be a bum and read and play video games when I’m not doing work. But there comes a certain point where you miss being out in the world, and I’ve blown past it. We’re now in the fifth month of CoronaWorld, all five of which our leaders have spent doing little to nothing about the fact that people are dying and/or in dire economic need.
Between that and the fact that I’ve seen my friends in person three times in the last five months, that it appears the job I was indefinitely furloughed from probably isn’t coming back, and that the school I attend seems to view a deadly pandemic as a branding opportunity, I’ve been a little down in the dumps. I’m looking down the line to see when things might make slightly more sense and I’m coming up empty.
This isn’t going to be another essay about the enraging stupidity of the pandemic (you can find that here), but more a rumination on what comes next. It stands to reason that at some point, things will get better. That might not be until next year (most agree that a second wave of infections will crash into us around Thanksgiving) or the year after. It will take longer in some places than others due to the fact that mask-wearing is now one of the foremost battles in the culture wars. It stands to reason that Florida is going to be a scary place for a lot longer than, say, Delaware.
It’s that in-between part between now and everything being hunky dory that has me thinking. There’s a number of reasons that California and much of the South are exploding with COVID-19 cases. Things reopened too quickly, if things ever truly closed at all. And even as the virus spreads, people are still flaunting safety and common sense in the name of some maddening sense of fuck-you individualism.
I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t know how to fix places that elect people like Ron DeSantis and make storming into Wal-Mart without a mask so that you can get extremely pissy with employees into a fad. I don’t know how you conduct a meaningful society when a sizable chunk of the country thinks all of that makes sense, and when 4.3 million people tune in to watch Tucker Carlson make overt references to the fourteen words every night.
Things are better in my neck of the woods, “better” being a relative term. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy only came around on the idea of enforcing social distancing today. In New York, Bill de Blasio is talking about having students in classrooms for up to three days per week, risking the creation of infection hubs. Numbers in the city are not nearly as dire as they once were, so hopefully things will be safer come September. But too much of the discussion surrounding school has focused on to what level parents will be able to contribute labor to revitalizing the economy, and not whether potentially getting your children’s teachers sick is an acceptable outcome.
I’ve been thinking about another half a year spent on Zoom, another half a year without enjoying myself at a bar, another half a year wondering about work and money. To be clear, if that’s what it takes to keep everyone safe, then so be it. I’m not advocating for going back to regular life just so everyone can feel better about themselves. It just sucks, a lot.
This is the awful cherry on the awful sundae that my generation was presented with at birth. We were given a world with an economy and government based on exploitation and inequality. We were given politics and pop culture driven by ego. We were given an environment that’s going to slowly suffocate and drown us, and nobody willing to do a damn thing about it. Things have gotten progressively shittier as we’ve gotten older, despite some gains made along the way.
And yet through all the despair weighing on me, I can’t help but feel a bit of hope.
The majority of people aren’t being total idiots about things. People are wearing masks, even if they’re doing so while on their way to cram into outdoor seating areas because they can’t bear to be without happy hour. The public has largely succeeded at doing its part to fight the pandemic. It’s our leaders who have failed us and spewed nonsense for the reactionary rubes among us to gobble up.
People are more and more willing to do the right thing, whether it be with curbing the spread of the virus, realizing that systemic racism needs to be dismantled, or supporting progressive causes. Jamaal Bowman’s victory over Elliot Engel would have been unthinkable four years ago, and he’s one of many bold new faces emerging across the country.
The willpower to make things better is there. You have to dig and sweat to find it, but it’s there. Maybe it’s that people are sick and tired of the hand they’ve been dealt, whether it be through inequality or the decisions made by their parents’ generation. The capacity to better the world is there.
I just don’t know how to square that with the rise of white supremacists and demagogues. I’m not going to turn this into a lament about “Oh, we’re so divided!” You’re damn right we are. I don’t want to find common ground with people who cling to Confederate monuments and deny the things happening before their very eyes. I’m saying that something’s gotta give.
This sucks. This really, really sucks. But I’m going to try to channel that energy into something positive.